#This was half a worldbuilding exercise but also I've wanted to flesh out some specific events for Thane's history so here we are

[astorythatwritesitself]

Broken Faith

Rating: Teen

Fandom: Mass Effect

Character: Thane Krios

Summary: In which we follow a young assassin on one of his assignments.

Warnings: Contains themes of religious/cultural suppression, though not gone to in-depth.

Read on AO3

The rain never stops- but that doesn't mean the sun never shines. Blade-thin rays pierced the clouds, leaving the domed city awash with glittering light. 

The wind filtering through was light and cool, but each breath still felt heavy in Thane’s chest as he hauled himself up some scaffolding. It seemed everywhere was under construction nowadays. The hanar had long been an insular people, but the last few decades had seen an influx of trade and tourism, even immigration - salarians, mostly, but here and there were the bulky forms of krogan, ocean-hued asari, even the strange faces of humanity, bare of any sort of scale or shell. And, he supposed, newcomers aside- there were always repairs, the incessant storms were always damaging the drell cities and homes. Always a struggle to keep the sea at bay - many simply gave up trying, in the end.

Another breath, shallow and unfulfilling.

'You must focus.’ Even in the sunlight, even only as memory, his handler's reprimand flashed bright enough in Thane’s eyes to give him pause. Memory or not, it was right- he was wasting time. Thoughts on Kajhe’s visitors didn’t matter, nor its work, nor any residents save one drell. He closed his eyes, recalling the face, where to go. 

“Lord of Hunters, be with me. Grant me your sight, so my quarry may not slip by.” His prayers were still clumsy, uneasy things- but it did the trick. His thoughts slowed, sank back into the dark as only the task remained. His movements grew fluid, automatically darting through construction zones abandoned for the evening and over the close-crowded rooftops, through to the heart of the city. 

Drell tended to cluster close, every building crowding up against the other- indeed, most were linked, small throughways and doors allowing access between a school to a shop to an arcade; much like those said to have been cut into Rakhana’s cliff-

“You must not have heard me the first time.” The ethereal voice at odds with the lightning-bright flares that burn his eyes, the searing, tight pressure around his wrist-

Useless information.

Such was the nature of memory that refused to let even the smallest scrap go. He pushed the rest aside as best as possible as he scanned the buildings before him, rubbing his aching wrist until- there. The graceful sea-glass studded walls of the temple, where all paths met.

His target wasn’t difficult to find, even at the distance he kept. She was broad and glowing bronze in the faint late-evening sun, the delicate skin of her hood gleaming like gold. It was rare that Thane’s handler set a target personally, but this priest had drawn ire from the Primacy for some time now. To not recognize the Enkindlers was one thing- unfortunate, but understandable. To reject them, to say they had no place at all- well, that was another matter. It risked societal instability, and every polite inquiry had been met with venom. Some even raised concerns she was intentionally stirring hostility, now. Best to put an end to it now, before it could bring harm to many. 

Thane blinked, reaching for the packet of thorns tucked in his jacket. A frequent tool for jobs on Kahje, long spines from a common plant coated in a toxin that mimicked a frequent- often fatal- illness. No prolonged suffering, no trauma to unsuspecting civilians like a shot through the head, no messy inquiries. He opened the pack, focusing his biotics so one sliver hovered over his hands - his handler assured him time and again, it was only a risk upon entering the bloodstream, but he had no desire to test that. Besides that: it was best to do this kind of hit at a distance. He was no longer a solid-hued child, close enough to dozens others that there could be any hesitation to his identity; any mistake- any glimpse, any witness could identify his emerging patterns in a heartbeat, now.

‘Grant that my hand be steady, my aim be true.’ A silent prayer accompanying by a flick of the fingers, propelling the thorn ahead faster than a bullet as the priest passed by a clump of greenery. A pause, a cry of pain affirming he'd struck true. No reason to linger.

Thane turned away.

A few hours and she would feel uneasy, a few days...

She will be wrapped in sea fronds, hanar singing like the tiny bells sounding in this temple as the hour changed, beseeching the flame of her life, meager as it was, be kindled anew. But she is a priest, a rallying point among the community, no doubt there will be many drell.   

They will linger after the hanar leave, jewel and sand and stone clustered together by the seashore. There are no speeches- no chants or long invokations for the deceased, those are things to be shared in the home, memory to be afixed and passed to those who could not be here. 

No words like the hanar give, but oh, how they sing. Delicate trills and chirrups weaving melody through the steady keening of others, and a few who sing words he still has yet to find the meaning of. He thinks they sing of the sea, the one thread of belief they and their saviors have in common - that all life, eventually, returns to the waves.

He shakes the thoughts away, before memory of his handler can. He retreats… somewhere, slinking into an alleyway to collect his thoughts. Perhaps to thank Amonkira for a successful hunt, to breathe-

He doubles over, feeling something like knife between his lungs as he breathes in, all thought gone as he struggles for even a shallow sip of air. It passes, and with it, any thoughts but returning home. The gods have no place here. Best not to get distracted.

[philologer-mosaic]

Hey! Fellow writer here! I was curious as to how you learn to write characters and /keep/ them in character without it being overly stereotypical or stiff? I've read your work and I'd love to learn from you ;^;

Hi! Glad to meet you, and wow, I am so flattered to be asked this. Happy to help out a fellow writer, and I’m always down for rambling about writing-related stuff! I’m not sure how helpful some of this will turn out to be, but here goes.

I’m not sure if you’re asking about characterisation in general including crafting OCs or specifically about writing canon characters, and a lot of this advice will be relevant to both, but I will say this straight off: I’ve seen a fair amount of quibbling about how fanfiction won’t teach you how to worldbuild and maybe that’s true, but there is nothing like writing fanfiction for teaching yourself how to craft character voices. Especially when your source material is a movie/ TV show/ whatever definition RWBY falls under. So: rewatch! Pay attention to all the little details. What turns of phrase do they use? How do they stand, how do they move? What’s their usual emotional range? Pick a line they speak, think about what descriptors you’d use to get across their tone of voice or their emotional state if you were writing the scene in a fic. When you’re writing new dialogue for them, try to hear it in the actor’s voice (if that’s a way your imagination works; some people don’t have great auditory imaginations. Mine can be kind of hit and miss!).

Rest of this advice is going under a cut, because this got looong!

With canon characters: start from what you know, then extrapolate. Especially with characters we don’t see all that much of, boil them down to a handful of personality traits/ ways-they-present-themself first, then consider what might underly them. And in reverse: take the things we know about their status and backstory, consider what that implies about them as a person.

So, Clover: I think I boiled him down to ‘confident, friendly, professional’, and what’s underlying ‘confidence’ is really obviously his semblance: he’s never had to hesitate about anything, he always knows he can rely on himself. So in his internal monologue, he’s not going to second-guess his decisions. He calls Qrow out on deflecting compliments, so he’s good at reading people and also wants to help them; I assume that applies more broadly than just to Qrow. He’s leader of Ironwood’s flagship team of Specialists, and semblance or not I made the assumption he didn’t get there without working for it [that is an assumption, though! People less inclined to think well of Clover will make a different assumption, in-universe as well as out, and how he responds to that is also something to consider], so he’s got to be smart, dedicated, a good tactician, a good leader. And building from that: he’s smart and perceptive but we know he’s also loyal to the bitter end (very bitter); what sort of personality can we project that reconciles those two, what sort of person would respond like that? What I went with is that he trusts the system because he understands enough pieces of how/why it works that he trusts the bits he doesn’t understand are also created with the best interests of the people at heart. (Even when that’s really not true.) So then that’s a consistent philosophy-like thing that underlies a lot of how I write him: he understands the reasons for a lot of why things are how they are and then assumes the best of all the rest.

– This looks like a lot, now I’ve written it out. I thought all this out while working on the early chapters but I never put it some of it into words really. In coming up with the plot or story idea you’ll have made plenty of these assumptions and extrapolations already. Take a second look at them; take them further, find places to link them together or pit them against each other.

And remember, these are your interpretations. There’s not a right or wrong way to flesh these out. Work with semi-canon stuff like the mangas or discard it as you wish; follow fanon or argue with it or throw it out entirely. I interpreted Yang as ‘normal outgoing teenage girl in a non-homophobic world’ and wrote her as having dated people from Signal before she got to Beacon; the other day I came across a tumblr post interpreting her as “a rural lesbian”, by which standard she definitely didn’t have any romantic experience before canon; they’re both entirely plausible takes! Where we don’t know stuff for sure, slot in whatever your story needs, or whatever you think seems interesting. I settled on Clover’s backstory for Soldier, Spy mostly by going ‘ok, what’s an interesting way to contrast him with Qrow?’ And in some of my other fic ideas, he’s different.

Limited third person perspective (or first person, if you can pull if off) is the best for dropping in characterisation smoothly. Though I’m probably biased because I love it so much. Omniscient third person POV is when the narration’s impartial and uninvolved, and skips between person A’s thoughts and person B’s thoughts and pure description of what’s happening, objectively speaking; limited third person is – when the camera’s always over one person’s shoulder in a given scene. It’s less close in than first person, but we get the POV character’s thoughts and no others, we only see/notice what they notice and pay attention to, descriptions are coloured by the way the POV character thinks about the world. I don’t want to be setting you homework, but, a neat writing exercise, if you want it: pick an object, place or person, and consider how two different characters would see it differently. Write those two descriptions. For fun, pick something that at least one of the characters is going to really look down on or dislike parts of! (Qrow’s snark is so much fun.)

This is cynical, but: people lie to themselves a lot. When you put yourself into a character’s head, they’re going to be telling themself a narrative in which what they’re doing is the best thing to do and makes them a good person. (With a few exceptions, the big ones being depression- and anxiety-brain, which instead do their best to convince you you’re the worst.) Get your characters to justify themselves to you.

Goals, motivations, priorities. It feels like a massive oversight to write about how to characters and leave that one out, but honestly I can’t think of anything I can say here that hasn’t been covered better by tons of other writing advice. [Incidentally: https://www.writersdigest.com/ . Subscribe to their email newsletter, it’s free, they will try to get you to buy their how-to courses but there’s no need to, the website has all kinds of articles about the craft and details of writing and the newsletter will send you all the new ones plus curated picks of what’s already there. And also: https://springhole.net/writing/index.html . There’s some stuff specific to fanfic in there, and also general writing advice.] Just: keep it in mind.

Related to that, but a separate thing and one that I haven’t seen other writing advice talk about so much: how does the character try to achieve their goals? What are their skills and resources? And more than that, what’s their preferred approach? In the simplest terms. It’s a matter of mindset, and what options they see as available to them. So the things I would keep in mind for this are: Who’s got social skills/ is good at thinking in social terms, and who isn’t/doesn’t? (Not just interpersonally speaking. James “not really concerned about my reputation” Ironwood is a good example of a character who always thinks in terms of hard power over soft power; even when public opinion is an important strategic consideration he only thinks about it in the broadest and most simplified strokes.) Who would rather work within the system, and who prefers to do an end-run around it? (That doesn’t have to correlate with who’s actually got power, though obviously there are trends. I’m writing Clover as tending to take charge even when he officially shouldn’t because he’s more concerned with solving the problem than with rank, and that’s a case of circumventing the system, it’s one of the things he’s got in common with Qrow.) Who’s more analytical about their approach and what they’re trying to do (which means their failure mode is overthinking and decision paralysis) and who reacts with their gut instinct (which means their failure mode is getting in over their head)?

… I could talk about this one at length. There’s a whole framework I use to categorise characters in this way (I came across it in, of all things, the flavourtext of a supplement to an RPG no one’s ever heard of and it just stuck with me, and I’ve made it my own in the years since) and I could go into all sorts of detail about how it works/ what it means. But I think this is enough to be getting on with, on that topic. If you want to know more, send me another ask? But no one else talks about this thing in writing advice, it might be completely orthogonal to the writing process of anyone but me.

So! Related to the topic of characters’ skillsets, a really great tip I can’t remember where I picked up: how do you write someone who’s smarter/wittier/better at tactics than you? Spend minutes or hours turning something over in your head that the character is going to come up with in seconds. The great advantage of writing: it’s so much easier to be eloquent when you’ve got time to think. [If you had asked me this question in person you would have got ‘i don’t know?’ and then half an hour later I would have thought of half of this stuff and kicked myself. A week and change later, you’re getting the other half too :p ]

And lastly: you said you were worried about your writing getting “overly stereotypical”. And my immediate response to that was stereotypes bad, yes, but archetypes great. The difference being: stereotypes are lazy and offensive writing that let ‘membership of a social category’ stand in for ‘actual characterisation’ and if you’re asking for advice on characterisation you’re obviously too thoughtful to commit them; archetypes are pre-made sketched-out personalities that you can take as your own and flesh out into your own thing. Tropes are tools. No one ever said ‘They were roommates? Ugh, how unoriginal’. By the same token, ‘lone wolf who pretends he’s fine and doesn’t dare trust anyone no matter how much he secretly wants to’ is a fantastic trope that exists for good reason, the CRWBY used it for good reason, and when we found out Qrow’s semblance I went yes please I will have some of all that angst and then laughed at myself because when it comes to fictional characters I have A Type. I’m pretty sure I’ve never written the exact scenario ‘pushes themself way too hard and passes out, wakes up in unexpected safety and immediately condemns themself for not sticking it out longer’ before the opening of Soldier, Spy, but I know I’ve come up with plenty of things that were like it, and if they’d made it to a state of publication you’d be able to see that.

It’s like artists using references. Just because they looked up how to draw that hand and that pose doesn’t mean the final product’s not their own. There’s no reason not to start with your ideas of the character (no matter how ‘stereotypical’ they feel) or a collection of traits you’ve grabbed from other characters that seem like they’d fit – or, for OCs, an MBTI type or a roleplaying class/background combo or one of these or some other personality type you feel like you can find your way around the basics of – and just take it from there. When you start writing/outlining/daydreaming-about-ideas you’ll run into scenarios/setups you can’t copy across from but you can see what responses might come up, and that’s how the template becomes your own unique iteration of it.

… Because really all writing advice does come down to: just write. In your head or on the page, try things out, see what works, see how it goes. I’ve been doing this a long time; most of it never made it to words on a page, let alone to the internet at large. Read across genres, read things people write about themselves and how they live and think and feel, and just – go for it.

I hope this helps! Once again, I was really glad to be asked; feel free to ask me to elaborate on any of this, or about anything else you want advice about. I wish you all the best in your future writing!