Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2014 14:13:56 GMT -5
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The most important part of playing a character that falls under the category of “trickster” is to figure out a more specific character concept. I’ve seen maybe five different categories of trickster in movies, books, roleplays, etc., so here’s a quick rundown:
The most important part of playing a character that falls under the category of “trickster” is to figure out a more specific character concept. I’ve seen maybe five different categories of trickster in movies, books, roleplays, etc., so here’s a quick rundown:
The Class Clown
The simplest kind of prankster is the class clown. Usually portrayed as a teenage boy, the class clown likes to play jokes on people for a good laugh. He can be offensive and mean without intending to be, and he’s often not the brightest (though there are plenty of exceptions). His pranks tend to be pretty rudimentary - think something like leaving a life-size cardboard cutout of Dracula in the bathroom to make his roommate scream at 2 a.m.
Fictional Examples: Max from “Across the Universe,” the Marauders from the Harry Potter series
The Chaotic Neutral
The chaotic neutral trickster doesn’t care about good and evil. As the name suggests, he only cares about chaos. Maybe he’s bored and needs to make a mess to cheer himself up. Maybe he enjoys watching other people freak out over nothing. These can be really fun (and challenging) to play, because they don’t restrict themselves at all. They love overturning social norms just for the fun of it. They’re smarter than everyone around them, and they often come complete with witty banter. But no matter what, they never ever get caught.
Fictional Examples: Bugs Bunny, Loki (mythology, not comic book), the Trickster from Supernatural, Moriarty from the BBC’s Sherlock
The Social Commentator
Time to dig a little deeper. The next three categories are for pranksters who don’t just prank for fun - they do it because they want something. The social commentator pranks you because they want you to think about what you’ve done wrong. They’re trying to teach you a moral lesson, or comment on an existing social structure, through their pranks. They can get poetic and self-righteous at times, and they take what they do seriously.
Fictional Examples: Frankie Landau-Banks, Prometheus (mythology, not comic book), Alaska Young (Looking for Alaska)
The Con Man
The con man is just what he sounds like - a villain (or anti-hero) who wants to steal your money, your significant other, and possibly your house, too. He’s out for himself, pure and simple. Except that unlike a regular criminal, the con man is smart and sophisticated. Instead of just screwing you over in a completely illegal way, he’ll talk you into screwing yourself, and then he’ll sell you your own shirt for good measure.
Fictional Examples: Rumpelstiltskin from OUAT, The Brothers Bloom, Neil Caffrey
The Guile Hero
The guile hero is the flipside of the con man. They often operate in the same way, but their intentions are for good, not bad. A guile hero might steal from the rich to give to the poor, or simply find a way to defeat the villain using trickery. A guile hero often evolves out of one of the other archetypes listed above - they might have started out as a class clown or a chaotic neutral, but once they had something to fight for they became a guile hero. If a con man reforms and decides to play good guy for a while, expect him to become a guile hero.
Fictional Examples: Robin Hood, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Lyra Silvertongue, the Doctor, Merlin (BBC version)
Pick your pranking style.
This depends a lot on who your character is outside of pranks. Think about this for a second - are they fundamentally a mean person, or a nice person? Someone who’s generally disposed to like others will perform pranks that make others laugh rather than hurt them; a nastier person will intentionally hurt or belittle others with their tricks. Then ask yourself: How smart is this character? A smarter character will tend toward more sophisticated, complicated pranks, and is less likely to get caught.
If you’re hard up for ideas …
First of all, don’t force it. You don’t have to construct the most complex prank ever executed. Your character doesn’t have to prank people all the time. Or at least, we don’t have to see him prank people all the time. The last trickster character I played (in an hp rp) would refer very vaguely to his pranking incidents - “It involved a bundle of flaming sage and a live goose, and I still say it wasn’t my fault.” This lets him keep an air of mystery and gives the audience’s something to do with their imagination - and it means that you don’t have to come up with a brilliant new idea every day.
Second, you can steal ideas from the media and adapt them to your character’s personality. Chances are, your character also got his first few ideas from watching someone else prank. So check out the following list to get the juices flowing:
TV Shows: Robin Hood, Bugs Bunny, Merlin (BBC)
Movies: Peter Pan, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Brothers Bloom, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Books: Looking for Alaska, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Have fun with it.
Trickster characters are automatically fun to play. They’re unpredictable, usually pretty quick-witted, and they get themselves into fast-paced scrapes all the time. Here’s a couple of tips to make sure your trickster’s as fun as they can be:
Don’t box yourself in.
Tricksters often don’t fall into routines and patterns as easily as other people do. They think outside the box - that’s what allows them to constantly surprise others. So if you feel like your trickster’s stagnating and doing the same thing all the time, switch it up. Give them something else to work on for a while.
Tricksters often don’t fall into routines and patterns as easily as other people do. They think outside the box - that’s what allows them to constantly surprise others. So if you feel like your trickster’s stagnating and doing the same thing all the time, switch it up. Give them something else to work on for a while.
Give your character other interests. A prankster doesn’t just prank. He has a whole life - a family, a group of friends, a love interest, classes to attend, work to do, model airplanes to collect. He’s going to need people to prank, so don’t neglect your character’s relationships. And he’s going to get bored with pranking once in a while, so make sure he has something else to read or do so you don’t make him seem like someone whose whole job is pranking, or you’ll end up with a one-sided character.
Be light-hearted. Even the grimmest of guile heroes or the nastiest of con men knows how to make a joke. When you’re conversing with other characters, don’t be too serious. Sarcasm and snark are your friends if you’re playing a con man or social commentator; if you’re playing a class clown or chaotic neutral, you probably want to give your character a more playful nature. And a guile hero can be anywhere between the two. Either way, someone who likes to play jokes on others isn’t going to be terribly serious in their everyday conversations.