[Misc] A Word Aside 1 -- QP Characters

Hey there. It’s that time of month again – the last seven days, where I pick a project and try to do it either in addition to, or instead of, my usual stories. This time, the project is a series of actual blog posts – the heresy! I’ll be talking about a bunch of things, including plans for the blog, stories I’d like to do, and hobby stuff.

You might notice, browsing around, that I keep opinion pieces very, very infrequent. In fact, I believe the only one thus far is a sheepish introduction to the blog itself. That’s on purpose. Fundamentally, I don’t believe my opinions are interesting; when they are interesting, it tends to be because they’re ludicrous. There’s no value to them to anybody except myself. I don’t write reviews, because judging a work is not what I go in for; if I were to write any opinion piece on something, it would be a play by play of my thoughts as I experience it, which is rather more work than I’m entirely comfortable with.

Characters, though, I have several opinions and ideas about, and those opinions are relevant, if only because it informs my decisions in the work – how they act now, how I want to develop them, that kind of thing. That’s what I’ll be talking about today and tomorrow.

First, we’ll take a look at the QP-verse characters – QP, Aru, Syura, Krila, Yuki, Sweet Breaker, Kyosuke, and several other more minor characters like Arthur and such.

First up is, of course, QP. QP is a character who hasn’t quite crystalised yet. Mostly I just have her do whatever would be funny at the time, since the QP series is much more given to light-heartedness and comedy than the Sugiverse, but that’s not really what I consider to be an acceptable endgame. My main avenue to getting to know QP, I think, is to take her down a more serious route, likely the one I started exploring in The Space Between – a scary and lonely transition from a mortal lover of pudding into a fully-formed god. There’s also something about QP that’d I’d like to capture; the easiest way to describe it would be ‘purity’ or ‘simplicity’, the idea that her strength comes from rising above complicated thoughts and devoting herself to the things she loves without reservation. I’m not sure how I’ll do that, yet. The other thing I want to incorporate is QP’s sense of energy – a look at the card art for Hyper Mode!! and various QP Dangerous poses will give you a sense of that.

Next up is Aru. Aru has been the viewpoint character for the vast majority of my QPverse stories, because she’s a little older, a little wiser, and often pretty frank with what she says and does. That said, I feel like my Aru is freewheeling a little, and is too aggressive for the Aru I want her to be; that’s largely because Syura exists and is a problem, but it still makes her come off like she’s somewhat off-key. I want to regain some of Aru’s timidity here. I feel like she only attacks folks in X-mas Shooting because she’s panicking, and that motivates a lot of her aggression. I feel like if I can draw QP and Syura back into what I want them to be, that will naturally establish a good position for Aru.

Syura… Oh, Syura. I feel like I’m flying blind with her, and as a result, she acts as a capricious agent of chaos. The quiet Syura that was in The Space Between is a small advancement on what I feel can be brought out of her. In my mind’s eye, I see Syura as somewhat of an ojou: big house, lots of expensive games systems, nobody to really play them with. I feel like she’s lonely, which is why she keeps so many chickens, why she tries so hard to share the thing she truly loves with QP, and why she reacts so badly when it fails. Ultimately, I feel like Syura is reaching out, in every way she can – as a friend, as a foe, as something in between. That can be played for comedy, when she reaches too far and makes it uncomfortable, but it’s also fundamentally not a healthy attitude, because other people aren’t reaching back. Maybe one day I’ll capture that version of Syura.

Krila is a great comic relief character, but it’s difficult to find ‘deeper’ things that can be done with her. She has her puppets, her chuuni obsession, her lack of food which implies poverty; she’s an outsider in a group of friends, somebody nobody really understands yet. But there’s also a problem with motivation there. Krila doesn’t seem like the type to go out; other people have to come to her. She doesn’t move, but is moved. Right now, I feel like that erratic element that forces her out of her comfort zone is Syura, somebody who, if not sharing exactly the same interests, knows at least enough to understand them. In other words, I think Syura/Krila centric pieces may be a thing.

Yuki hasn’t really appeared yet in anything major, but I do have somewhat of an idea of her. I liked the portrayal of her as a rival who quietly cheers on QP provided she isn’t in the way, and goes against her full force if she is. I like the idea of her as somebody who teases people and fights them in an effort to get closer and understand them, but goes overboard to see if they have the strength to stop her. I like the idea of her as somebody who appreciates the thrill of the game, and who both resents and appreciates being beaten. We’ll see how she develops when I eventually put her into something, I guess.

Sweet Breaker is an odd case of a character who honestly has the best intentions, but because of her own screw ups or because she’s not asked other people what to do, she makes things worse or doesn’t contribute to a good solution at all. The situations that get better seem to get better in spite of her input, or because somebody else fixes the mistake, but there’s also a cost to that in terms of self-esteem. Because of that, I feel like Sweet Breaker is somebody who really dislikes intervening in things, but does so anyway because she feels it’s her duty.

But, of course, there’s also the opposite way of looking at it: her failures prompt somebody else to clean up the problem, and I feel she has enough intelligence to figure that out. She might make a move just to force somebody else to do something – to set that into a canon context, she might have taken such a zero-tolerance policy to pudding (rather than trying to administrate it herself) in hopes of provoking somebody to come and take responsibility for it. Either way the problem would be solved, but she gets another Sweet God out of the deal.

Kyosuke is more or less comic relief through and through, although he could be played for drama in a star-crossed lovers kind of way. I don’t think I will, though, since originally he was designed as a joke character for a joke game.

Other minor characters will happen pretty much as they happen; I’ll think about it when the time comes. There’s such a lot of them that haven’t even crossed my mind, or that were only featured in the first QP Shooting or Christmas Shooting and I haven’t had a chance to infer much about them. That means there’s a lot of potential, but it’s also a lot of juggling to do… Oh well.

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about the various Sugiverse characters, including Sora storyline characters.