Developing a couple drafts for a creative project that's been simmering in the back of my mind for years and it's very much a pretty standard genre fare in military sci-fi with characters that are in a specops fireteam doing wetwork operator shit fightin' evil aliens that want to wipe out humanity

posad astronaut-1

The more I flesh out the plot and characters in my head, the more I feel like I'm relying on trope-y plots and character types, and was wondering if anyone has advice on how to write characters that fulfill the role of a stock character type in that kind of story that still have some depth and personality that isn't just "the no nonsense leader," "wiseass with a heart of gold" "gentle giant" "stoic man of few words with a tragic past" "bad bitch that's got something to prove" "antsy pessimist that's worried the Intel's off and the op's gonna go sideways" etc

I'm working on names and personalities and character designs and they're starting to feel like they're starting to come together and I have a sense of their interpersonal dynamics, but I keep feeling like it's starting to get too derivative or predictable and feel like the beats for bringing out some characterization naturally with incidental dialogue as the plot unfolds or little character details or moments seem too shoehorned and was wondering if any writers have some tips for how to add some of that color to a script that feels natural to the genre and momentum of a story without being like "and NOW I'll add some depth to character x before we move on"

Thanks in advance

  • buckykat [none/use name]
    ·
    16 days ago

    Special interest dumping is cool to do.

    I read a site which calls itself "halopedia" a little bit and found some more tension points. It claims the Spartan program up through S-II was originally started to fight against human insurrectionists rather than the Covenant, and also that the S-III Spartans were intended to be cheap disposable shock troops sent on suicide missions. Also, this is my own speculation but it seems likely that the planets the Covenant attacked first, and therefore the planets the S-III Spartans would be drawn from, would be the same ones which had been hotbeds of the insurrectionists, both probably tending to be the furthest out colonies. So maybe some of the ones who had been orphaned when they were older would remember their parents' broad black brimmers so to speak.

    • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
      ·
      16 days ago

      There are also human space comrades (Koslovics) comrades and human space fash (Frieden) pigmask-off who fought a major war with each other prior to Earth getting a unified (lib? socdem? never really expanded on) government prior to humans gaining FTL tech and colonizing near-Earth exoplanets (and the moon and Mars)

      Idk if the Koslovics and Frieden made it to far off colonies (they and their conflict are incredibly tertiary background lore) but that's also a potential angle for some plot points with the UNSC and United Rebel Front (human separatists who want the colony worlds to be independent of Earth and the UNSC, even after the Covenant discovered and starting wiping out humanity. No united human front even when there's genocidal aliens I guess.)

      The URF briefly come up in Halo: Reach when your player character (Noble 6) and Jun (Noble 4, the team's sniper/spotter/designated marksman) run into rebels with a stash of stolen UNSC weapons and team up to protect their homes and fight the Covenant together (temporarily)

      (Rebel) "We've got caches of weapons and supplies all throughout this valley"

      (Jun) "You know this stuff is stolen, right?"

      (Rebel) "What, you're gonna arrest me?"

      (Jun) "No... I'm gonna steal it back. >:) "

      michael-laugh

        • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
          ·
          16 days ago

          Like I said, it's space-NATO lmao

          ONI were probably doing Years of Lead shit arming the Frieden too but that's speculation

            • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
              ·
              16 days ago

              Oh shit I just got a great idea to incorporate a canon character that's only mentioned indirectly by the main canon stuff in a really cool way that nerds that know who it is will be like leo-point

              This is coming together well, I gotta get a design doc together and make a first pass spec script

              It's weird, I love Halo but think most of it is disappointing for more than a decade and I could do better as a major nerdy fan, and who knows, maybe I will! sicko-lea