Age. Connected with aging. Nobody likes being old, so lets all be young! Yes, let's all pretend we're sixteen year old guys with super-powers and thirteen year old female teenyboppers aching for our first sexual encounter. 'kay? 'kay. Now quick, don't forget, if anyone's over 22 they can't be good at anything, right? Fucking wrong, dipshit. Apparently a good many morons missed the memo about "with age comes wisdom and experience." Don't worry, though, you've still got time to learn...I hope.
A wave of role-players, especially younger ones, influenced by both video games and anime, take on the role of some young, stubborn, know-it-all yipper snappa capable of wielding a sword the size of a mid-sized Volkswagen with power and skill not seen in their age bracket--there's a reason for that, you know. Then they have to audacity to call anyone over the age of twenty old and a has-been. A cliché that has somehow entered and doesn't look to be leaving any time soon.
Truth is, or at least you'd hope it would be the truth (and with some people you'll never really know), is that with age comes experience. You don't instantly start good at something, and even if you do, it still takes practice to get better. So it comes down to choosing an age for our character. We want to character to be experienced, to have seen things, done things, to know things; if you're trying to make a character like that, a fifteen year old just won't cut it, no matter how you stack their life up. Let’s face it, fifteen minutes of sword training won't make them an expert.
As I said in my last entry about the importance of a name for a character, choosing their age is also vital in and of itself. A good age to have some experience, but not too old to the point where they couldn't shake a cane at you without meds. While there are exceptions to the rule (strange species people concoct, or the clichéd demon, monster, angel, elf, humming-bird on crack, etc), you still must understand that the old adage is true--age equals experience.
I mean, it is understandable that a character would have some experience under their belt, even if they were twenty-two, but don't expect me to believe some up-and-coming eighteen year-old can beat a hardened warrior that's been duking it out with the riff-raff of the world for twenty-odd years. That's just plain stupid, and anyone who suggests it's even possible is basically an idiot. Now, I am aware of certain examples of this being possible, but it's so over-the-top and rare I don't want to see it unless you've got a damn good reason for doing it.
So, what do we take from all this? Age is equated to experience, skill, power and wisdom. If you're sixteen, I doubt you've seen the whole world or have the skill needed to back-up whatever powers you've got. I also doubt you've got enough experience under your belt to even make you smarter than a half-wit, let alone superbly wise. So next time you decide to come up with an age for a character, make it appropriate for what you're having this character do. Otherwise it's a strain on the mental facilities of the people forced to wade through your writing.
If you hadn't noticed, I seem to be on a binge of writing about traits for characters and their creation. Or if you even bothered to notice that funny little trait, I've now put it out explicitly so if you say hi to me you can blab about how you knew it all along. Sure ya did. Anyway, I'm doing a series on character creation, running through all the main points; name, age, gender, race, appearance, personality, history, etc. If you think what I've done so far could use some improvement, drop me a line. Hell, leave a comment or two to critique Corbs and my work and we'll make sure to improve ours so you can improve yours. Something like that, yeah.
- W. Visarett
2 comments:
Yep, quite true in many ways. Through, it's just amusing to go to the extreme ends of the spectrum and try to come up with a valid exucuse for that. =P When you've got an one-hundred-years old blind and one-armed man evading bullets by predicting the aims of the guns through the air pressures created by movements, is it because of his experience or overpowerness?
Or, what if some... characters simply doesn't age properly, or if some of them start late? Let's see... Suruma doesn't start fighting until she's in mid-twenties, so she shouldn't have much experience, correct?
Or, what about characters who've been doubtfully fighting since their childhood? Does that give them additional advantage in term of experiences because they're raised that way?
There are exceptions to the rule. You can go out of your way and find every exception to the rule in and of itself if you really wanted to, but then that's like measuring every can of Coke in the hopes of finding out the average is less than 355 ml, thus giving you an excuse to sue the company. Little point in finding all the exceptions, really.
But generally, characters used in dueling have powers that give them benefits over normal characters (normal being the average human being). But for the most part, it should be generalized that age is equivalent to experience.
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