Writing General: 'clothes make the character' edition.Welcome to /wg/, the thread for all /tg/ related writing. Whether you're plotting your campaign, trying to come up with a character backstory, or just trying to write some setting fluff, this is the place to post it. You don't even have a campaign, just an idea you want to develop? You're welcome here. While the rest of /tg/ is arguing over monstergirl mating and which way rivers are supposed to flow, we're here to help you turn your thoughts into an actual finished product.As the successor to the Storythreads, we're also open to /tg/ related fanfiction (D&D, Warhammer, Battletech, whatever). In fact, if you've written any vaguely /tg/-related short stories, you can try them out here. We also have flash-fiction challenges from time to time.There's a discord for writers herehttps://discord.gg/6AwKHGFThe previous thread can still be found in the archive here>>93154742And finally an archive of /tg/ fiction can be found here:http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Storythread (dead link, but may be resurrected one day)https://2d4chan.org/wiki/Storythreadhttps://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Storythread
Inspired by something posted in the last thread, I thought this thread we could talk about how clothes affect a character. I'd never really thought about it too much before but clothing can be an important part of a character description. How do you choose what outfits your characters wear? How do you describe them? Is it worth investing in a lot of detail, or do you just do broad strokes?
>>93230884Im glad my comment was inspiring. To me like I said, even though im fucking horrible at coming up with the proper names for clothes and being generally more varied and unique than shirts + pants, I enjoy giving my characters lots of different outfits depending on mood, location, current events etc. I "supplement" these outfits with lots of tiny accessories or little extra details (brooches, signets, patches, things like that).I generally choose outfits based on coolness factor and relevance to the character, though I think I overrely on Long Overcoats (Though in fairness, it rains a lot in my setting, its necessary okay?) I also do have a tendency to describe them really indepth. Like I said, i like providing ample detail, so I like to present those details to the reader.
>>93230884I honestly find fashion history very interesting, so I like to think about what textiles would be available to characters, how expensive their clothing generally is, and what sorts of decorations or extra adornments are common for their culture.
If your original story had anything resembling bleakness, or, at the very least, an important character dies, good luck writing a prequel. No one who's read the original will swallow the prequel having anything resembling a happy ending, let alone get invested at all, because they know the world will still go shit eventually
>>93230884Clothing is definitely one of my weak points when it comes to characters. I've pretty much drawn blanks on the main character's outfit. Then again, I guess I don't know how to describe her personality beyond the vaguest sense.Now her best friend, on the other hand, I've had more concrete ideas, at least as far as accessories go. Small black earrings and I've recently gotten married to the idea that she has large round glasses (and switches to a smaller rectangular kind as she gets older). She is rather eccentric, one of her main things is a fascination with physical mutations, which may or may not have come from her own polydactyl, which she keeps hidden under custom-made gloves. I've been wishy-washy on making her something of a goth-lite
>>93230986You don't necessarily need to nail the exact garments. A good number of adjectives can help with characterization. For instance, imagine a character who is dressed in clean fancy clothes that are in bright colors with lots of frills and jewelry. Probably a nobleman right? While someone in rough, dirty, old, and well-worn clothes is probably someone working class like a peasant. Or someone dressed in all black leather with a copious number of belts and a mask hiding their face is probably either an Assassin or a Gimp.
>>93233457>You don't necessarily need to nail the exact garments. A good number of adjectives can help with characterization.Right yes Im very well aware of that and its great advice, I just have a bad tendency to make at least SOME characters very "intensely" designed with lots of unique details or aspects that arent "normal" to a regular viewer. > either an Assassin or a Gimp.Knowing the demographic, there's a big overlap between the two
>>93230884I like using clothes to describe characters to convey the reader their role/intent/aura
>>93230884Okay, I’ll bite, I’m going to have elemental nations in my story, and I’ve got some serious writer’s block about them, especially their cultural outfits, every time I try to come up with something I default to what AtLA does and I want mine to be more than just a copy, having them be inspired by it one thing, but I want to avoid anything like plagiarism.
>>93240639You need to play off the enviroment these enviromental nations have and how it would impact their magic casting, for example earth mages would have lots of thin metals, crystals in their clothes, earthtly tones and so on. What elements do you have?Unrelated problem,How do I write character duo's better: currently it's warlock and his amazon waifu who are an old (almost) married couple and I've gotten criticism from gf and other readers that the woman feels like an afterthought, which might be true since it's written from warlock POV
>Have a race of lobstermen who are extremely racist towards humans due to a number of cultural reasons>Have a villain of this race who is especially racist towards humans, even members of his race thinks he goes too far with it>These cantankerous crustaceans also has a habit of renaming themselves every century or two, usually to something meaningful in their language (or 64, which is a holy number to them)>This villain makes the unusual decision to name himself "Superior", in the human tongue, so that any human who speaks of him would be reminded of their inferiorityCool or cringe?
>>93245176Do they name themselves individually different every century or rename their species?
>>93245223Individually.They also rename their species but that's closer to once a millennia.
>>93230884What is your opinion on including outfits based on Eastern cultures vs Western ones in your stories, and what do you need to remember when choosing those?
>>93240639Are you using any influences from real-world cultures like in Avatar? Personally I feel like the water-tribes could have had some polynesian influences, and the air-nomads some indian influences. >>93243386What are the amazon's thoughts and opinions on what's going on in the plot? I've been writing an ecchi story which naturally has a lot of female characters, and to try to challenge myself to make them feel like actual characters I keep asking myself 'what are the thinking in this current scene' and how that would be expressed through dialogue and such.
>>93245176Well I think racists are something impossible to satirize. I think them being weird lobstermen sounds like high-concept stuff for the sake of being high-concept. A pitfall I think genre writers fall into. It's okay to have alien societies, but they need to feel in some way grounded- like they exist even when the camera is off them.
>>93249272>I think them being weird lobstermen sounds like high-concept stuff for the sake of being high-conceptOh no, the race itself is a gag. I have put literal years worth of work into them (them changing the name of their species is a self-joke about how many times I've renamed them) but they exist purely because "what if there was a race where roughly 1/4 of them were psychotic young-master types" is peak comedy for me. They constantly talk about conquering the humans but are always getting kneecapped by non-stop rebellions because they CANNOT understand how to make a functional civilization. And somehow they're probably the most normal of my 4 Crustacean races.The villain is never treated like a gag though. I'm actually debating rewriting his introduction chapter because I think I went a little too far with showing how much he despises humans.
>>93249679Yeah, having a species as a gag is a wrong move. It's one of the reasons why people have noted there's no such thing as a 'comedy setting'. Settings need to be grounded in some way- so you believe that people can live in it, and therefore have stakes. Comedy requires stakes- if you don't care there's no punchline. At the very least that's what I find, and it's why I think shows where the comedy comes from the characters being constant assholes to each-other extremely unfunny. For the record I DO NOT get Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but then again people do like that show. Anyway I think two settings that are good contrasts would be Brutal Legend and Disco Elysium. Brutal Legends initial pitch is essentially a joke- what if the art in a metal album cover was it's own setting. Most things in the setting exist to be cool for no reason. But Tim Schafer is clear that people IN the setting have stakes that they care about, the games plot has a whole 'darkest hour' beat to it. The lore you find in the game is delivered in a very genuine and straightforward manner and is never played for laughs itself. Even one one of the bits of lore is 'why are there a bunch of emo zombies who love grunge walking around' and the answer is 'the world most beautiful goddess was used to kill the god of fire and metal, and now cries a sea of black tears forever more imprisoned underground, which in turn gives people superpowers at the cost of their soul'. Another would be Disco Elysium, where the setting is a satire of numerous ideologies (namely modern liberalism and communism, but not without pointing out how idiotic fascism is), and while there are multiple ridiculous characters and scenarios, the history of the world is played very straight because it is using the monumental failures in the backstory to make points about things like the failings of communism. Anyway that's my two cents.
it feels a bit weird to have a dark and dreary setting have a really out there and comedic chapter focused on the main gang having fun in various ways (occasionally perverse ways) at a festival, but I think its fine to break the tonal seriousness every now and then.
>>93230884How do you come up with outfits for religious officials without just copying Christian monks and nuns, or maybe Japanese mikos?
>>93253420Christian monks were meant to take vows of poverty. Both because that was jesus' deal, but also because people didn't want their priests living it up like kings. If you look at how fancy catholic robes, well you see why a lot of people criticize the catholics. Hence robes tend to be simple, and dark colors. So you can emphasize that religious clothing is like that if they are meant to have an aesthetic angle to them. Or if they aren't, emphasize how opulent or overly decorative they are. Egyptian priests always wore leopard pelts. So there's also that.
