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Characters you love so much but would/could never play...


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So I was just scrolling through tumblr and I saw this collage of images of Frodo Baggins and I just stopped for a second and realized that Frodo had been one of my favorite characters since I was in elementary school, but I never have (nor would I) play him on a site -- even though I do play fandom characters...

 

I thought it might be interesting to know if other people have characters they adore beyond pieces but for whatever reason (feel free to divulge), they never have (maybe never would) play them. -- or maybe even characters you tried, but just couldn't do.

 

I'll start us off:

Frodo Baggins (LotR)

Wolverine (Marvel)

Magnus Bane (The Mortal Instruments)

Dr. Strange (Marvel)

River Tam (Firefly)

Delenn (Babylon 5)

Natasha Romanoff (Marvel)

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Malik from Assassins Creed 

Altair from Assassins Creed

I LOVE Them both but I'd struggle to play them. They end up having too many connections to one of my other characters

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Pretty much any canon character. I don't believe I'd be able to do the character justice because I'm not able to get into their heads well enough to understand and convey the nuances that make the characters who they are. I much prefer taking less "round" and more of an NPC in their source  material so that I can explore and develop them without worrying if I'm portraying the character well enough.

 

Also, it would involve committing to a panfandom site since most canons I love are from fandoms that are too random to support their own site, and panfandoms don't really appeal to me.

 

If I had a choice, I'd love to play Harry or Heather Mason from Silent Hill.

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I'm with @Uaithne! I never feel like I'm doing a canon character justice when I try to write them, so I never do. That's why all my games are AU in that they take place in the same universe, but with all new characters '>.> I do have a small list of canons I have played (and all three of them are Sailor Moon characters), but they're very loose to begin with so I don't really worry about them!

 

Here are my top characters I would LOVE to play, but never will:

Emma Swan (Once Upon a Time)

Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly)

William Adama (Battlestar Galactica)

Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Bo (Lost Girl)

Nathan Drake (Uncharted)

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I'll be real. If I want to play the canon I'm damn well going to! I play a lot of canons and have played a lot of canons.

 

I'm even the type of person that will pick up a canon if someone simply wants me to. Even if I don't have a personal interest in them. That's how I picked up Xanatos on an old Gargoyles site. He was fun to play and I was told I played him well.

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I don't write in fandoms in general. But if the story needs a certain character type, I would bring it, no matter if it needs research and I feel uncomfortable at first because I had never tried that. The comfort zone is a nice place but nothing grows there - it needs to be expanded through research and actual writing...

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I would LOVE to take a crack at Londo Molari from Babylon 5, but I'll save that for when I finally get to make a cosplay of him. It's my dream to run around a sci-fi stopping all the Commanding Officers from other franchises frantically going, "Sheridan! Have you seen Commander Sheridan? How about Delenn, she'd know where he is. Oh, who's Deleen? The Minbari Ambassador of course! Where do you live, under a rock on Narn Prime?" 

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Until I started writing Tolkien fan fiction, I'd rarely (if ever) write a canon character. If I did, it would have to be one with a minor role, one which I could add backstory of my own without compromising the canon. For canons which are pretty much the centre piece of a story, I'd stay clear from, even if I liked them a lot. Part of it was because I felt like the official material pretty much did a good job, I was nervous about not being able to portray the character right and finally, if the background of a minor character intrigued me enough, I'd much rather tell their story than one which was well known. As a lot of my favourite characters had a lot of stories written about them, also finding something which hadn't been covered before and original, and keeping track of all the things that had happened to them in canon wasn't an easy thing to do. Another problem is getting the characters to be 'real' people and not just card board cutouts just to fill a role. I'd have that problem quite a bit with Star Trek characters and you can see how this plays out if you ever watch Enterprise - when you compare how the characters are portrayed in TNG, DS9 and Voyager, the characters have more depth, you immediately know and remember each character. When I watched Enterprise, I did not get that at all with about three quarters of the crew and they were flat and forgettable. I wouldn't want a canon portrayal (or the portrayal of any character for that matter that I write in fan fic or rp) to come off like that. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I tend to struggle a lot with canon characters. Especially major ones. I always worry I'm playing them too unfaithfully to the source material. Fic is easier, since I can always go back and edit--I can take my time with it, but posts are a little more time-sensitive. I do better with minor canon characters.

 

Some major canon characters I could probably never manage to play even though I do like them a lot; Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes (not the BBC one), Lyra from His Dark Materials. There are probably more but that's what I can remember off the top of my head.

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I truly have difficulty with any canons! If I try to pick one up it's going to be a very minor one that does not have much history or backstory. I have no problem coming up with original characters galore, but the canons are the challenge! Doubt I could do Frodo... struggling enough with Denethor as is! :D But thankfully he hasn't played a huge role in our site plot yet; it's more running on the originals which makes me happy.

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I don't consider characters off-limits if I want to play them and I'm somewhere where I have the option of playing them. If I get them wrong, that's fine, because eventually I won't get them wrong. Most people who worry that they don't know how to play canons end up playing them just fine. After all, no one knew how to play canons when they first started playing canons.

 

The closest thing I can approximate is wanting to play a character but being unable or unwilling based on the environment of a site. For example, there's certain Marvel characters I would never play on an MCU board even though they may be available simply because the board atmosphere wouldn't jive with my desire to do things closer to the source material than what everyone would expect, but i wouldn't write off a character entirely.

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Murderers.

 

Because pretty much no one is going to let you kill off their character, as I read on another thread by someone else a long time ago, the way to do it is to have many characters and let the murderer kill off your own characters.

 

I've tried it many times but I just can't do it, I ultimately end up overwhelmed because I'm not a many-characters type of person.

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Loki, Phil Coulson, Tony Stark, Severus Snape, Spock, Castiel - All of these are specifically because I don't have any desire to write out apps for them and it's completely unlikely to find a place to play them that wouldn't require an app.

 

Dorothy Zbornak - because, seriously, where would I ever play her?

 

Brienne of Tarth - because I have no interest in playing on a F&I/GoT site and she's not a character that I see really fitting into any of the panfandoms I've come across.

 

The Warlord: Travis Morgan,  Tyrion Lanister, Leonard Snart: Captain Cold, Odo - Voice reasons.

 

Obi-Wan Kenobi - I love him too much and am filled with anxiety over fucking him up.


There are definitely others, but these are just the "off the top of my head" list.

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On 10/29/2017 at 5:27 PM, Pancakes said:

Obi-Wan Kenobi - I love him too much and am filled with anxiety over fucking him up.

 

I just wanted to reply to this part and to you specifically as I can completely relate.

 

You know, one of the ways that I have seen characters messed up the most is to be played in an overly-safe way. It's just like re-reading something you've already read, it's predictable, it's boring, and it feels like you're just re-writing the movie/book all over again in your tone of voice (isn't this called a school assignment essay?). And while it's not wrong, it's just so blah~! that you end up wishing the player would give them up to someone else to be played better because there's no excitement.

 

The best things that I have ever seen done with characters, even ones that are known so very well, is to try to shed light on a different perspective to them. Even if the character did some things they normally wouldn't, just seeing that entirely novel branch of story telling, of reason and light, completely justifies whatever "mistake" it might look like because it is new, it is novel, and it's not boring. One of my favorite authors, Patrick Rothfus, recently wrote a fight match between his Kvothe of The KingKiller Chronicles and Aslan of Narnia series. He put the two very known characters in a new atmosphere and told a very different story, and whille I can think of some ways that Aslan doesn't quite line up with what I imagine in my head, I still throughly enjoyed reading the story - which means that the writing was good. Consider it this way  - there are a billion people who had cancer, had a loved one that had cancer, and can each tell a different tale about what cancer is, works, etc, but no one can disagree with your experience, with your rendition of it, and just because everyone else has a cancer story (heaven forbid!) does not mean that yours is wrong. There are a billion types of shoes, and just because you want to sell your own new brand of shoes does not make you wrong, nor a failure!

 

At the end of the day we are all here to have fun, and reading something that sounds like the author put themselves into an anxiety attack trying to be exactly perfect isn't fun to read, isn't fun to imagine, and probably isn't fun for the author. If we wanted to read perfect, we wouldn't be here roleplaying, we'd be re-reading the novels of our genres!

 

So don't be afraid! You do that new thing that is you, you do you! Your people are there to roleplay with you and what you can do, and that's what's fun about it.

Edited by xexes
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