CHARACTER BACKSTORIES - Terrible Writing Advice

I was NOT prepared for the neckbeard bit. That was hilarious!

Ranking of kings s1 last few episodes

Demon Slayer be like :

D&D Honor Among Thieves actually does this really well

The vaguely defined protagonist is for the readers to project onto. The well-fleshed out is for the author to project onto (as they brutally kill off all the stand ins for real life people who ever wronged them).

I really love your comedy😆😆💗

You know what I do? All characters get trauma!!

Villain was locked in their castle for god knows how long? BAM! The protag has amnesia while having no fighting skills, brought to the underworld by force!
Second Protag was exiled from the villain's castle? BAM! The villain's love interest (Not the protag) nearly bled to death while trying to see the villain again!
The three siblings (Villain, Second protag and side character) were exiled from the overworld? BAM! Most of the Overworld councilors were assasinated!
The Underworlders have been trapped for Aeons underground? BAM! The overworlders now are on the brink of war!
The whole world is about to collapse? BAM! The Goddess of time has a lot of trouble looking after it all!

It is my coping mechanism because i cant write proper, fluffy stories instead of pure angst.

Apollo Justice: the episode

"Nor should a writer just not bother with a sob backstory at all'
Aizen in the corner , smiles deviously

Batman. Most tragic backstory ever.

Your section about backstories for female characters...oh gods, I could go into a long rant (and have done so in the past). Suffice to say, for some reason abuse (sexual or otherwise) has to be part of a female character's backstory. Men can have a wide variety of explanations for who they are and why they do what they do, but women...it's all about the abuse, baby! For some reason, it's the go-to crutch for the hack writer. Wanna explain why your female character is strong? Have it turn out that she was abused and embarked on her training so she'd never be a victim again. What do you mean, I can just have my female character be a kind person who likes helping people or someone who just enjoys martial arts or whatever? The audience will never buy this! What's this world coming to, when women have motivations apart from aiding or serving the male characters?

bro the sponsor part suprised the hell out of me i wasnt prepared for it 💀💀

this reminds me of in puss in boots 2 where perrito had a super tramutizeing backstory of him being abused by his owners and trying to kill him by dropping down a waterfall and doing various other terrible things to him and yet he was the most moral character in that entire movie and probably the entire shrek/puss in boots franchise and how big jack horner had a 100percent perfect life with absolutely zero problems loving parent's during his childhood is extremely has loads of other shit runs a successful pie factory only issue was being upstaged by pinocchio like once when he was child yet he ended up being the most evil character in the entire shrek/puss in boots franchise with the movie even kind of mocking the very concept of sympathetic villains and villain reformations with the ethical bug trying to be his therapist and automatically assuming there is good in everyone until he meets jack and discovers that he's actually completely irredeemable subverting the modern trend in movie's of making villains more 'redeemable' even if they actually aren't

As a character-focused writer who gets bored when planning a plot, I find the flat character discussion really funny and bizarre. To me, characters come naturally and the setting serves whatever they do or the development they get. I have gotten the feeling that most writers are plot-focused ones. Is this true? That sounds so alien to me, how do people come up with ideas if there are no good characters? I find this so fascinating.

Oden flashback was the best part of wano

Okay, I just had an argument about this with another idiot, but here goes again: Farmers -- particularly pre-industrial farmers -- are more skilled than people give them credit for. They were taught to hunt, fish, forage, count, rudimentary construction, and -- if they were clever enough -- haggle, among other things.

favorite one:
my childhood love went away and I haven't seen him since, oh shit it was actually you, I haven't seen you in twenty years, today we make sex

The "we used to be bad, but now we're good" backstory

Basically a character used to be extremely bad or unhinged or insanely sadistic before a random insignificant accident happened, like they found some affection (because making characters just plain insecure of themselves is easier) or randomly hit a rock on their head.

Common for: any character (usually not the protagonist, that would mean he wasn't always good and that definitely can't happen)

Great because: it's cool to see a bad guy becoming an ally. I also don't have to think of what the applications of this are, they're just good now and they completely changed their own character because hey, they lost their memory.

Don't worry about: memories of them surfacing, I cannot be bothered by them, because that would mean making them more complex and create pesky internal conflict.

Wait, I'm confused. Am I suppose to take everything he says in face value, or do I the opposite of what he's telling me????

Also do make sure that character monologues their entire backstory to play the victim card when they turn away from the two minute friendships they have made with other characters

You know you are a decent writter when you don't feel attacked by these videos

It's the correcting women to females for me 😭

My main characters back stories are always vague and edgy.

This vídeo called out my writing more than any other.

Weimar a'clock
Oh no, but lol.

Originally my villian was just a guy who wants murder but now thanks to this video the protagonist pummeld him to hell and back before he wabted murder

This feels like a how to create Naruto episode

A book written taking all these at face value would be amazing

The "Abusive Parents Backstory" image is an amazing critique of Harry Potter that I hadn't noticed, and it was hilariously delivered, bravo!

Honestly, just have an entire novel dedicated to flashbacks to explain the backstory. That way everything feels important without solving anything.

Based.

"when writing women, oh excuse me again, when writing 𝘧𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴" lmaooo thank you for that some people are allergic to referring to us as anything but our gender

Funny enough, my (very much unfinished) story originally had the MC/leader/my stand-in as a someone with a pretty normal and happy childhood. It gave him imposter syndrome when he compared himself with some of his friends who had more of the standard "tragic backstory". At some point this kind of wove itself into my writing, and I was tempted to give him some unnecessary trauma in his past that would get revealed as the story progressed. But given he's very much a stand-in for myself (or he was when I started writing him at 10), it felt kind of slimy giving him(/myself) that kind of experience given I haven't lived one myself. It also seemed kind of disrespectful to characters with actual trauma who audience members with a shared experience could relate to.

I stumbled on a good way of having a backstory by not really having one. In our long-long-time running AD&D 2E game, I had been playing the same mage for just about ever, and early on he was reincarnated into a Nymph female, after heroically sacrificing himself to save the other members of the party. Because there was no body for the rest of the party to recover, they decided to pay a priest to cast Reincarnation, and hilarity ensued. She's been around for centuries in the game world, and her memory isn't so great because she's so old, and she dresses in such a way as to conceal every bit of skin, because in the game just looking at a tiny bit of skin could be enough of a distraction, and she wears a magical porcelain mask to both be able to talk using a different voice, because her voice is enough of a distraction, and to have some facial movement, but even so she talks very rarely. This sort of forced me, as the player, to not focus on my character to hog the spotlight so much, and focus on being a supporting character. Everyone else had a solid backstory, but my Nymph mage was already "known," thanks to legend and folklore, and she never really spoke about it. So, in a sense, she has no backstory, but one made up over the years and embellished by other players.

I'm writing a series of comedic short stories about our adventures, and I've made her backstory so ambiguous that the reader doesn't really know who, or even what, she is. She's powerful, but odd, mysterious, and maybe a bit insane, in that she can stare at a flower for hours and not be aware of the passage of time, or talk to a bird and lose arguments. She's really more of a metaphor for nature itself, how wonderful and gentle it can be, all the while ferocious and terrifying at the same time.

😂 I needed this. In the middle of a YA novel and using flashbacks to add context as I go...now I'm terrified.

Plumbers? Really?

My biggest wish is for ppl to drop the tragic back story for villains and just not write one at all! There's no reason to relate sympathize or get to know this character better by giving them flashbacks, it's just better to show not tell or just tell, an amazing villain isn't abt their backstory, it's abt hating them as a person and finding them charming or alluring or mysterious as a character, "justifying" their actions with tragic backstories undermine their victims' suffering too. An excellent example was made in abyss, it was very refreshing to see a villain who's interesting exactly because you know nothing Abt them, and the cruelty of the situation is in fact in the victim' flashbacks

Marvel in a nutshell:

The biggest challenge fictional characters face is having 2 alive parents.

Female ☕

What is the "SA" that JP doesn't want to say? From the delivery it seems like it should be something obvious but it isn't and I can't Google something that vague.

My villain backstory was quite simple.
I accidentally stepped on a kitten’s tail and didn’t feel bad.

Ive said it before and I'll say it again bc it ticks me the hell off:

Please for the love of FUCK, when you write a character, write a PERSON, not a meatpuppet. Backstory and identity are the character's context for who they are, and establish where they're at in a character arc before the actual story.

Altho I will say that my current DnD character is a poster child for the abusive parents backstory. However you've gotta use that with similar care and tact to that of any other trauma. How does their trauma and their abused past inform their outlook on life, sure, but who are they apart from their trauma? Trauma is a wound, not a mindset. It can inform (and doesn't even have to be resolved or healed by the end of) the story, but trauma should NEVER be all a character is, just as real traumatized people aren't defined by their trauma.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

One of the DnD games I'm in miraculously only has one character who doesn't have a loving, totally alive family!
Don't worry, we all independently decided to be haunted by an ancient evil entity or incomprehensible eldritch horror

The inclusion of reset era on the mary sue's wiki page cracked me up 😂