Before my mother died in my backstory, she told me to ask you to do an episode on "body swapping" as it is her most requested episode. Please do not let my mother who only exists in a flashback whose only purpose is to die and drive my character arc in gear down, JP! Edit: Changed it from "animated movies" to "body swap" instead
That’s an entire medium not really a genre. Maybe family or kids oriented movies? Personally I’d prefer an episode on live action adaptations of animated movies/shows. That’s way too relevant these days and there’s a lot of case studies for “terrible” writing advice.
My entire bright-eyed idyllic family died tragically in MY backstory, and their dying request was that he do a terrible writing advice episode on unreliable narrator.
Just like Funny Toothbrush Moustache Man , his father discouraged his dreams and the art school he want to go to declined his approval, i'm sure everyone will forgive what he has done after those two facts, wait, you are telling me he is hated, according to this logic he cannot be hated, oh wait he is.
There are a lot of tragic villains that are well-written tbh But I agree that villains with tragic backstories and villain redemption arcs are mishandled more often than not
Oh. And also, Rocket's backstory also served as a sort-of backstory for the High Evolutionary (as in explaining why he's so obsessed with retrieving Rocket). Perhaps that's why some people might found the backstory more interesting than the main plot.
Might piss some people off, and I'm a turbo fan of JoJo too, but that one guy at the end of part 3. That felt like it should've been slowly explained or had a bonding episode where he shares the whole story since they've fought alongside each other for a good while by the time they got to Egypt
@@spacebassist feels like Kakyoin could have said having a natural stand made him an outsider and we would have gotten the gist. But his backstory was so short that I gave it a pass
@@kingsleycy3450 I never really thought about the natural stand thing for some reason, that could've been a good distinction to expand upon as he reveals it's been with him his whole life Also yeah, it didn't ruin anything or make me dislike kakyoin's character or the series going forward, it just felt a bit like "this is the part where the viewer is told when to cry" that I assume a lot of anime does
@@spacebassist I'm like a middling fan of _Jojo's_ when all is said and done, but I honestly think that Part 3 is *easily* the *weakest* and overall worst of the Parts that I've read or watched so far (only 1 through 5 still). It's not really that surprising when Araki was probably focused mostly on closing up the DIO business and introducing a completely new power system separate from Hamon. Outside of introducing Stands and closing out the DIO business when it came to the man himself physically, however, I can't think of anything especially interesting about part 3 as a whole aside from three or four encounters and powers. None of the new central characters in that part really stand out to me outside poor Polnareff and I guess Jotaro himself, who still has the least (flamboyant) personality of all the protagonists, even Jonathan. Avdol and Kakoyin felt flat as hell, and Iggy wasn't around long enough for me to get attached to even if I liked dogs, though at least felt something when Iggy died compared to the two cardboard cutouts. I accept that's possibly just me though. Shrug.
Frigging Same! There are different kinds of similarly sad backstories for both heroes and villains. In Mermaid Melody, Gakto and his fraternal twin brother Kaito were separated as babies by Aqua Regina, because she was trying to prevent a future war ahead, even though it costed them both their sanity and their would be bond.
For Spider-Man that's true, but even with the eventual misfortune or pearson gotting a little bit out of character, even with all of his brooding Batman nowadays built a family and has quite a bit of friends, so I would say that he as fine as a human that fights gods, aliens, monsters and super smart murdeous psychopaths on a daily basis could ever hope to be.
7:12 "You can trust me when it comes to advice on writing women. Why, I've even SEEN one once; when she she told me to move out of the basement before expressing disappointment in her son." I laughed so hard at this 🤣
It’s a tragedy JP didn’t mention the “let’s share this character’s backstory right before they die so that the audience will feel more bummed out!” strategy
@@msf2000 That doesn't work, Tanjiro isn't god tier and he does act with mercy towards those that clearly was forced against their will like Spider Demon
@@msf2000Yeah. I read the manga and it honestly got a bit silly how every single demon seemed to have some sad backstory. Akaza is the only one I remember and his was actually pretty damn cool.
Always remember kids, never develop your characters' backstories so as to keep them "Mysterious" and "Cool." Never mention them! Keep them vague And the one moment you do mention them, pull them out of your arse at the last minute and then proceed to make them an enormous 100 page long essay delivered to the audience in the most glorious of info dumps! Oh, and remember that characters should be entirely based around their edgy backstory!
@@ali32bit42 This annoys me for sure. Like, if you're going to reveal the backstory of an antagonist destined to die, *at least* make an effort to introduce it in some other manner that isn't a 10min long random flashback *right* when they're about to die. Like, what does it matter, then? Just trying to get some cheap feels out of the audience. Even revealing it after they're gone as an afterthought is far more tasteful, I'd say.
In relaton to the first point, JP once said "There's no difference between light character development and no character development." Apparently the same goes for backstories.
@@rxndomfxndom7405 Very amusing. I do think that when it gets to that point, it's just a matter of having some reasonable amounts of tact, so as to reveal all this information in a sensible and organic manner instead of just throwing everything at the audience like a giant wall of text at a completely uncalled for moment. A couple lines from a character can reveal far more than a gigantic, explanatory monologue.
Some bad advice would be to give some in-universe reason to justify delving into the backstory, integrating it into a natural way, such as in a sci-fi setting have technology that can record memory. Still, the mysterious character who doesn't want to reveal his backstory for some reason ends up having that memory bank stolen, and the heroes have to retrieve, or maybe yet, have the heroes rob those memory banks because of a lingering mistrust between them. (Seriously, please rate this idea im highly considering an arc where it's just seeing the pivotal moments of one of the setting's most essential characters.)
@@iLikeTheWordRetro What's more, he was raised being told that he was evil (see the Kinderloomper episode), so his decision to become a villain could be viewed as an attempt to live up to his mother's expectations. So he does have a backstory explaining his villainy, just not in the way he claims.
I mean, to be fair a character living a normal life before the events of the plot can be easily inferred without the need to delve into it because it’s normal and therefore easy for the audience to fill in
@@mariobroultimate1808 You will hate Mahou Shoujo site because every character backstories is just suffer porn and zero substances, thing just happen because.. to the point it feel like a comedy. The main character almost got r*pe and m*lested, almost committed unalive, got bully by everyone just because ,even the adult treat her like crap just because. All this happen in the first episode.
remember, you have to make your villians backstory as reasonable and sympathetic as possible so you can feel the most anger when the audience likes the villian more than the ill defined protagonists
Even better, make the "villain" clearly the good guy, trying to improve the life of an opressed underclass for example, then have them blow up a kindergarten for no reasons so that the protagonists can be the good guys in restoring the status quo.
Eh, it doesn't have to be that well constructed, honestly. Edgy kids that have lived a sheltered, pampered life will still think the villain is right. Life sucks, and only the strongest survive. I know that because Mom asked me to go to bead at 10PM instead of playing video games.
Also, your protagonist must cause massive, easily avoidable collateral damage along the way and (assuming anyone actually addresses that point rather than just sweeping it under the rug) must be completely immune to reason because they know they're doing the right thing! Plus, make sure to give the villain most of the positive character traits like intelligence and charisma, whereas the protagonist will be stuck with only bravery (read: being to stupid to know when to back down).
And it's the polar opposite with Jack Horner, his only ''trauma'' is being less popular than Pinocchio and yet he's the worst person in the Shrek universe. The traumatized villain trope was beaten to death and I was happy to see it being totally overturned.
The farm boy backstory may be overused, but it does go a long way in explaining why your chosen one/one true heir protagonist wasn't immediately discovered and killed by the evil dark lord. Also works really well for plots where a mentor or family member turns out to have been guarding a magical artifact that the protagonist suddenly has to destroy. It also helps that no matter how high magic the world is, the farming community is always pretty mundane, so the protagonist can learn about the magic system at the same time as the audience.
And while they have no adventure-relevant skills, they can at least be counted on to have decent physical aptitude and not be dead weight. I mean, nobility's felt pretty comfortable putting spears in their hands and conscripting them into wars, why can't the author?
I think it's used to tie into a common theme/trope that grand heroes come from humble origins. It also works double as a "hiding in plain sight" kind of deal where the elder sage knows the dark lord won't care about the country folk having the chosen one because they assume mcguffin artifact or chosen one is in some super secret vault atop the peaks of impossible to find. LotR did this pretty well and it was very heavily in it's themes.
Or, especially pre 1900s, almost everyone was farmers. And even today, depending on where you live, alot of people are still farmers or live near farms.
Honestly, I like Feist's version of the Farm Boy protagonist. Almost all of his hidden heirs and main characters (the ones that aren't either nobility or trained killers) are smiths
"What's your tragic backstory?" "My mom died when I was young. Yours?" "Some asshole killed half the galaxy including everyone I cared about because of his mommy issues."
Ahhh! You are going to destroy all backstories because they killed your brother?! I will join you on this quest, now that I have destroyed my own backstory. I have a MIB issued memory erasure and a flame thrower. Your brother will be avenged!
My character backstories range from "he's a cursed gunslinger rebuilt from wood, fueled by arcane blood, created in act of desperation and grief by the love of his life who made a deal with this world's equivalent of the Demiurge" to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail crusaders whose holy book is a tabloid magazine".
Bro your ideas sound cool, my cyborg soldier is just a Gilgamesh rip off with built in artificial brain cancer because having my cyborgs determination to get cured and live life without corporation chalenged by their brain constantly betraying them is "cool", like dude has halucinations of his dead cyber tomboy gf who liked to make neckleces out of human ears, also they both got sent to corpse planet which is literaly a giant space corpse as tax write off by corpo
I call the glamorized slums "Hobo Romanticism". You often see the hero live in a spacious castle built out of trash, with the most amazing view and incredibly cozy and comfortable facilities.
Yeah and apparently they are somehow well fed and have good hygiene, because we all know that even in poverty, you still can be a handsome bulk with perfect teeth 😂
The flashback gag kills me every time. A few years from now we'll have an hour-long video that's just flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks...
I had a super villain named Flashback and that was his power. Having people experience flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. Then he could escape while they did that. And yes, he was named after Naruto author.
Hearing "When do you REVEAL the backstory" I immediately was reminded of my D&D character, who has a crazy backstory that I was hoping to slowly drip-feed to the party over months... But I made the idiot mistake of "This character has not changed his name, face, or even clothes after escaping his traumatic past full of horrible powerful people" and thus, even being halfway across the world, his past caught up to him. I had to spill the entire backstory in session 6 after the party rescued him from a kidnapper. XD
I had a similar incident with one of my D&D characters, except that the thing that forced it into the open was less an active part of the plot and more a metagaming player who knew out of game that my character was keeping secrets and so ended up being constantly suspicious and looking keenly for any opportunity to drag it out into the light despite their character having no real reason to feel that way.
Honestly, I had the same happened to me. I had been trying to use my warlock feed the rest of the party clues about my noble descent for months, but had to leave the party due to what my patron forced me to do. I think I handled it pretty well by writing them a letter, disguised as my character asking our cleric to use sending a sending to put me in contact with my mom, but was actually my way of revealing this vital part of my backstory. Another favorite of mine: Having my bards sing a song!
The only actually working way to do backstories in RPGs is to not have them and just improvise details about the past on the spot depending on what is happening on screen right now
@@AliceLoverdrive The backstory was actually what got me INTO that D&D server to begin with. XD It's actually based on an actual terrible thing that my high school DM did to my first ever character. I'd shared it on r/RPGhorror stories, and also said "You know, I wouldn't mind reclaiming that character someday, and use that event as backstory fuel, it's got a lot of potential for interesting character growth!" And a commenter went "I have a spot open in the D&D server I run! Want in?" and what began as just "Nothing fancy, my arc will just be my character recovering from the trauma and not letting it define him" was swiftly taken by the DM and made an actual part of the world, and now I'm intimately tied to Deep Lore stuff, and have a personal nemesis AND I was able to give inside information about the country all of that horror took place in to another group of players in the server who were planning on raiding the place. XD
I had the exact opposite in a Cyberpunk Red game, where I spent about a month trying to hint at a crucial element of my character's story, and my friend didn't pick up on it. As far as he knew, I was just helping him for no reason, just risking my life for him for no reason. Eventually, I just got fed up with his obliviousness and told him
One day I'm going to make it a challenge to take all of his advice and still try to write an enjoyable story. Any bad trope or poor writing decision can be done well enough to be enjoyable, I'm sure of it.
So JP mentions a Necklace with magic power that only Royalty can wear, and then in the sponsorship section, the leader of the ancient conspiracy is wearing a necklace that looks a LOT like that same necklace...
And remember kids, when you're running out of stuff from the source material to adapt, or if you don't want the show to catch up to the source material, just make the flashback play like 48 times minimum. That will surely make the audience care about the character even more and not make them want to punch the screen every time they appear on screen.
You should do one on amnesia plots, whether it's a character regressing development for contrived conflict or introducing an amnesiac character where the amnesia is their only defining trait
A character gives themselves amnesia to forget all the embarrassing things in their past, but they keep coming back, in a humorous collage that explores their backstory in detail (specifically all the embarrassing things they wanted to forget)
@@feuerling Yes. Only the embarrassing moments. They cannot recall their mentor's tragic sacrifice but they for sure remember the time they dropped their pants in the middle of a fight and were hit so hard they farted... And thus survived the encounter. 😶
Is it just me, or would an episode on amnesia plots be a great way to soft reboot the TWA Expanded Universe? Like, “Oh no, I lost my memory! Which means I lost where I was with all the characters and have to start over.”
What about where the setting has caused every character to have some degree of amnesia and none of them know why, and it impacts the protagonists and antagonists alike as they try to one-up each other in the arms race of regaining and recording knowledge to protect themselves in a terrified, confused, and for reasons the characters can't quite understand for most of the story, hostile world.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so tired of people writing "female is badass because she was SAed. Just have her cut hair short, doing a training montage and she's better than ever!" One of the most common reasons for someone to have PTSD is due to SA. It can permanently mess people up. It's possible to write a character who has gone through it and come out stronger, but in reality it almost always comes across as a thinly veiled apology: "I'm sure she was fine afterward. Who ... um the character in my book, not my ex-girlfriend or that random chick in the bar last year. Honest."
It is unfortunate that it is so common. To touch on another thing you mentioned, I hate the training montage or group hug that makes years of PTSD go away. I wrote my main character as someone who has spent years to get over it, and it still heavily paints who he is as a person even if he isn't having panic attacks of violent outbursts anymore.
@@katie7748 Because it represents change in a visual way. Another reason could be turning against ideas of female beauty or because in a fight short hair is a liability.
I tend to write characters who've experienced it fairly often, but I'm also someone who has and I've dealt with pretty bad PTSD from it in the past, so I put more emphasis on the aftermath and healing because I think that's what really matters. Also, everyone reacts differently and that trauma can affect your personality in a lot of different ways. For me, it was becoming a hermit, for other people PTSD can manifest as aggression, hypersexuality, or all kinds of different characteristics. Some people wanna talk about it, some people you can't waterboard (figuratively) that information out of. I think what bothers me isn't necessarily that it's talked about in media, but that it's talked about so poorly with little regard for the messy reality victims face. But that's just my personal take.
@@ImTakingYouToFlavorTownhonestly, yeah I agree. As someone who has PTSD of being molested by a close friend, the incident made me gain and lost a lot of things in my life. And sometimes the unrealistic overly masculine changes of PTSD victims in female writing are just.... Yeah not right for me no matter how I read it. Like I have two OCs that I made as main characters in my books after I can overcome my fear of men years later. One was a SA victim that could function normally with slight insanity and madness. But her PTSD only comes up whenever someone else touches her and surprised her off guard. Other than that, she hides her emotions behind a smiling mask, still feminine and loving the hobbies she has. While the other OC, was a mean girl turned apathetic bitch. She took the path of revenge by selling her body to infiltrate and ruin the prostitution establishment that ruined her mother's life. Life sucks hard, but she took every advantage she could get in that hell hole for her own good. And in the end, she managed to overcome that nightmare and got revenge and destroyed everything, including herself. I made these two different OCs as a way to ponder how my fate could have gone to either path if my PTSD wasn't helped by therapy.
I am just now realizing that ASoUE is basically one long character backstory. Imagine if the author first wrote and published a series about Beatrice Baudelaire II, and the Baudelaire siblings are raising her as supporting characters, and once that series was wrapped up, the author wrote ASoUE as a prequel series showing the Baudelaire siblings' backstory. It would be chaotic. Then again, it feels like most of the characters in ASoUE have increasingly and ridiculously tragic backstories. I love it. Iconic.
Also, remember that the character's memories are always perfect. Even if they have long forgotten about some event, as soon as any small thing reminds them of it, they will immediately recall all the minute details of what happened.
The best type of backstory is the one that completely derails the plot at the end because god forbid we have context queues to add context to the climax
Just FYI: The most common emotional reaction to SA is not depression, but anger. The main problem with this trope is that readers’ expectations of what would be a “realistic reaction” to it are largely shaped by other fiction. So if you do describe a realistically more common reaction, ironically, a lot of readers might be disappointed, frustrated, and/or angry with you, the author, for “subverting their expectations” - even though that’s only because you’ve done your research, and most readers haven’t.
If you're a comic book superhero, your backstory can be rewritten so that the central, pivotal moment within can be changed to suit this single writer's point even when it undermines every other story told about the character and said character's emotional core. (I am looking at you every time someone feels the need to recontextualize the death of the waynes)
One of my demon-hunters' backstories: "grew up in one of the metropolises to loving family, has a love for trashy Tarzan-ripoff romance bodice-rippers, freshly graduated from their uni in tveterinary medicine and human medicine (she's a bit of a prodigy, that's her allotted specialness) and serves as a combat medic on her team for the other hunters and their warbeasts" She got the designated love interest plot coupon because my main protagonist was raised in the wild by harpies and acts like a magic beast more than a man and that slots perfectly with her guilty pleasure of wild-man romance tropes (and given that the harpies in her setting are the pretty feathery amazons variant the wild protag is very much a prettyboy who wears way too little, roosts and falls asleep sitting up, and won't eat cooked meat, so he's just slightly beastly and not animalistic enough to make her wonder about the ethics of thinking he's hot). I'm still proud that I can go "the backstory bit about her awful taste in romance novels is actually important to the romance subplot".
That is basically how Wheel of Time starts. Yes the protagonist has complex secret backstory, which is integral to the plot, but he only learns it well into the story. Aside Lan I think almost all central characters had relatively normal, mostly uninteresting life up to the beginning of the story. Of course the tv show had to change that up a lot... In 21st century you just have to ramp up the pointless drama I guess.
Ok but unironically though flashbacks could be a useful tool for characterizing people who don't appear in the present story. Like in one person's flashback someone who's already dead could be a giant jackass making you think they deserved it, but in someone else's flashback we could see a nicer side of them because they have a close relationship to the second person having a flashback.
They could also be actual flashbacks and not narrative devices so tormented and overused that people think they're what actual flashbacks are like. No not like having a more subjective and unreliable version of events to reflect the character's mental state, or told through emotional states entirely and without the use of "basically teleported to the past and not having a simultaneous mental breakdown", could be interesting. Ptsd doesn't actually originate in the brain, but the words of a thousand unoriginal backstories!
By which they always mean "I was a tomboy who liked fighting/sports". Like, first of all, being a tomboy does not necessarily mean you were competitive and/or aggressive. Second, could we please stop using ability and willingness to cause physical harm as the only indicator of strength. Third, gender-bending isn't inherently heroic and doesn't justify behaving like an ignorant asshole actually.
@@sophiejones3554 I feel like being a tomboy is sort of view as being toxic this day, I remember it is just aesthetic thing but people seem to call tomboy like being a lesbian and don't forget about the constant fetishization.
OH MY GOSH THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TALKING ABOUT THAT ISSUE WITH WOMEN/FEMALE BACKSTORIES. I was watching an anthology show recently and pretty much every “tough female character” had that in their backstory. One of them kind of made sense because the entire story carried themes of things like the mistreatment of women, so I’ll reluctantly give that one a pass, but the others… It could be anything. ANYTHING. I don’t understand what’s going through the writers’ heads. As a woman, it’s uncomfortable and kind of offensive. You are doing God’s work, good sir.
@@harrisonpeterson3733 In _Berserk_ it's actually justified (...for the majority of instances) though unfortunately since that world is just such a shithole, to the point that even Guts himself suffers sexual assault in his backstory as a kid and still understandably has trauma from it significantly affect him years later unlike so many other stories and characters where a) the sexual assault is mostly only ever inflicted on women and girls, b) generally only used to motivate other characters with no real follow-up for the survivor (if there is one), and c) has its aftermath glossed over otherwise. I'm not saying you have to be comfortable with how _Berserk_ uses it, mind you, especially given the absolutely horrible thing that happens to Casca. I'm just saying _Berserk_ actually uses such things for actuals purpose rather than just because stock motivations or melodrama inducers (...outside of that stupid fucking horse that I think Miura might have even said he regretted at some point).
@The Damned I really liked how Beserk really emphasised how horrible rape is, by Guts being a not so charming loner who is scared of intimacy and has a very pessimistic outlook on life. As well as Casca who become a catatonic slient traumatised girl that barely did anything because she was so shaken by her rape and the fact it was Griffith who did it.
@@MusicoftheDamned Yeah. Despite me being a woman, I don't mind if a character has SA as part of the backstory, it just depends on how it's handled. Trauma overall doesn't make a character "stronger". How they deal with it aside from changing into a hypercompetent fighter that the writer tries to paint as cool and justify whatever crimes they committed can be integral to the character's arc. Some people die before getting to recover from years of sexual abuse (think Angela from Silent Hill 2). Even stories of recovery has them reverting back to their shells after a period of improvement, like Guts. Others don't fully recover or are still in the middle of recovery and just learn how to live with trauma without it overwhelming them (also like Guts). I'm not into Berserk when it comes to large amounts of nudity, but at least Casca's arc has her relearning being a warrior while still being nurturing again, iirc.
2:40 For people who just REALLY like developing things even if you know they'll never come up (like me), having a private wiki to put everything is a really good idea. TiddlyWiki's my personal favorite tool for this because it works offline and can keep everything in one file, but there's plenty of options. Not only does a private wiki give you something to refer to, it also gives you a place to "bleed out the poison" of things you want to establish but aren't actually important.
Trying to write backstories always brings me a degree of stress. It feels like everything you can do has already been done and is a common troupe, so trying to even make a backstory feels useless when I could just spend that energy making their character more interesting in the present. I still struggle with writing backstories, so I am partially guilty of "no one knows, not even the writer..."
Don't worry about your work employing tropes, it's not a sin. Just think about what goes well with your story no matter if it's an overrated or underrated trope. Good luck
I discovered who JP is. The comic relief who through clumsiness started the great backstory war by summoning the dark lord. He died then and got resurrected, then his free supermodel died tragically, causing him to become a jaded mentor. Learning all story tropes so he can teach the new protagonist, the viewer, the storytelling tools they need to save the Terrible Writing Advice Expanded Universe.
@@ComicPower Funny thing is as I remember I wrote like...2 characters with SA-related backstories, one of which was not the victim herself. At the same time literally every trope mocked in this video about "bad female characters writing by guys" I have already seen in my female friend character's backstory. And from my experience it's really common for women to write about such things.
@@TheTowerOfGray yeah its a trope that needs to be retired.its been overdone too much. there are more motivations out there for female characters to overcome something.
@@ComicPower I think it's a matter of how well this theme is executed. If you really think about it every traumatic event can be described as "gathering pity points" when the writer is bad at his job or/and doesn't know subject well. For quick example just compare Casca from Berserk with...that sword lady from Goblin Slayer. Both were SA'd thought the latter has like one brief dialogue about it and was highly sexualised for fanservice (which in this context just looks gross).
@@TheTowerOfGray its definitely a strong motivation and can be powerful if handled by the right writer. I am just saying its been done so much now, its basically a cliche at this point and people need to have some different motivations or backstories for female characters for a while. I am Black and I remember when Hollywood was putting out way too many slave movies for me. I got sick of that. theres more stories to tell than that
Super easy, barely an inconvenience: *My greatest enemy, the (roll 1d20):* 1- Werewolf 2- Vampire 3- Goblins 4- Evil Wizard 5- Dragon 6- Drow 7- Cultists 8- Coven of hags 9- Thieves' guild 10- Lich 11- Barbarian 12- Evil sibling 13- Natural selection 14- Corrupt nobility 15- Squirrels 16- Bard 17- DM 18- Giant 19- Ogre 20- Orcs *Committed the heinous act of (1d10):* 1- Killing 2- Slaughtering 3- Brainwashing 4- Assassinating 5- Banishing 6- Blackmailing 7- Humilliating 8- Enslaving 9- Sacrificing 10- Seducing *My (1d20):* 1- Family 2- Hometown 3- Clan 4- Parents 5- Significant other 6- Aspirations 7- Mentor 8- Best friend 9- Previous party 10- Crew of pirates 11- Band of thieves 12- Book club 13- Confidence 14- Military unit 15- Favorite tavern 16- Sports team 17- Dreams 18- Pet 19- Little sibling 20- Imaginary friend *And that's why (1d12):* 1- Nothing changed 2- I'm a murderhobo 3- I seek vengeance 4- I trust no one 5- I have no desire to make friends 6- I must become stronger 7- I must live by their ideals 8- I am cursed 9- I must uncover the truth 10- I must fight evil 11- I'm an alcoholic 12- I'm Batman
My greatest enemy, the thieve’s guild, committed the heinous act of brainwashing my sport’s team and that’s why I must live by their ideals. So the ideals of the brainwashed team, or…
"We totally understand but we still have to beat you" "Because what I'm doing is wrong?" "No, of course not. Commenting on the morality of your actions would alienate the audience. We're fighting because...uh...that's just what we do"
5:10 - This is how I feel about Demon Slayer. The entire Entertainment District arc is a prolonged fight scene, but when the heroes finally slay the sadistic, evil demons, we have to spend half of the final episode learning the demons' tragic origins. Who cares??? You can't spend 10 episodes of an 11 episode arc establishing these guys as unrepentant monsters only to spend the first 15 minutes of the 11th trying to make me feel bad for them because they were poor street urchins when they were human. This is honestly the problem with a lot of anime. The writers treat massive exposition dumps as synonymous with character development.
I think many mainstream Shōnen and Shōjo anime shows have similar problems in common. Partly due to how senile Japan’s broadcasting channel laws are and partly due to how well or poorly received their source materials are.
Greed losing the election by being too greedy... and wanting everyone to profit rather than the top percent. Not sure if I should laugh or cry, or make it a new backstory for another character.
Remember, if you have to show a backstory in a videogame ,do it with absurds requierements and make sure that it doesn't have an impact in that moment of the main story or in any moment.
Did you know that giving villains a sad backstory can be used to make them less, not more, sympathetic? It could make their response look disproportionate and their motives petty. See Lotso for example.
Oh yes i can remember that. By the endo f the movie it became very clear how Lotso had turned out to be one of the biggest monsters in TOy Story and a very loathsome way
I honestly think lotso is one of the best villains in anything ever simply for that reason. Not once does the film justify his actions or try to redeem him, it is fully aware that he’s a monster who overreacted to what happened to him and I love that
I really loved Guzma's backstory in Pkmn Sun/Moon. Only a few mentions from characters, a little bit more context for NPCs at the end, and environmental storytelling. And considering he wasn't the actual big bad of the game, his actions felt tragically plausible.
Also, having a character flashback a new backstory EVERY SINGLE chapter/episode is a great way to reeeeally hammer in that deep deep characterization! Just look at Heinz Doofenshmirtz! Ps. This is obviously a joke, I love Doofenshmirtz.
Starlight Glimmer is the poster child for a character that skipped directly from minor childhood inconvenience to a threat to literally every living thing on the planet.
You left out the expansion pack backstory. In this backstory, the character has a large amount of unaccounted-for time when they were ostensibly not doing anything in particular, but in actuality they were doing everything, allowing them to have a history with everyone they ever meet. It's easiest with immortals or other long lived characters; in addition to vampires and highlanders, Wolverine is notable for having an expansion pack backstory.
Do you suppose you will ever upload a video on how to write women? I will admit, it's a subject that's always been difficult for me. I don't write very long stories, but women seldom feature very prominently in any of them. I think that women characters might be a useful topic to cover in a future video.
Most of my protagonists in my fiction works are female. I don't think they are any different or difficult to do than male protagonists Just write them in a somewhat gender-neutral manner (for lack of a better term) and not think about the gender too much
The secret to writing good female characters is to write all your characters as gender-neutrally as possible and then arbitrarily assign them genders on a whim, making a few tiny adjustments where necessary. I sound like I'm being facetious, but it usually works _surprisingly_ well.
Generally speaking, unless it's about very specialized topics like biological functions and/or cultural roles, just write female characters the same as male characters. And if you have problems with any little details, try asking help from any women in your life. Real life people not social media or youtube.
What other people have already said is definitely all good advice to follow. As such, the only things I have to add on this topic as a male from what I've noticed in real life and of female characters who are written well and *not* like dumpster fires include that you'll likely have to at least somewhat consider how the different boundaries and social norms that exist for females than males might affect the character(s) even if that's not the focal point of your story and doesn't make it into the actual text itself. For instances, women and girls are generally allowed to express emotions beyond anger more openly than men and boys in the exact same situations, but that also comes with the double-edged expectation that women and girls "should" be more emotional, especially in such situations. Meaning that even if they're the *exact same character* otherwise, both in-universe and out of universe there's a greater chance that people will (unfairly) be confused by and/or even react negatively to a woman or girl who is stoic than they would a man or boy, often regarding her as "cold" at least initially. It's just something to (unfortunately) consider in my opinion. Otherwise just make sure that you're not explicitly emphasizing a female character's being female unless you *really* need to (probably make another character look like an asshole) or it's genuinely an issue that only women or girls (in that environment) ever face. Just treating women and girls like people seems to work, both in real life and in fiction, and even the most "traditionally feminine" (for a given cultural) women and girls are going to differ in their opinions and actions in at least some small ways unless maybe they're clones. (And finally, for the love of Athena, if you ever have to describe their bodies with any significant detail in non-dialogue, then *please* don't use purple prose or [food] metaphors that come off as creepy as fuck.)
Don't forget to have the characters comfort someone after they reveal their tragic past, then ignore them for the rest of the story only until that one "story defining" moment where the tragic character overcomes their trauma off-screen! Bonus points if they also do something completely outside their level of skill or knowledge as their defining moment of overcoming trauma to prove how much they've "grown."
see, this is why you write immortal characters, its UNLIMITED backstory!! you get to stop every 5 minutes and info dump on the reason he can do anything. why does he speak French? he was one of Napoleon's soldiers, here, watch a 10-minute video about 1803. keep adding extra years and extra experiences, and obviously, he's amazing because he met every amazing person from every era in history and experienced every huge event, INFINITE BACKSTORY!
I have a couple of those types of immortals in one of my stories, each from all over the world, and god is it funny to write about their contrasting lives. One of them has lived through multiple major historical events and done great things, whereas another just hopped from village to village and the only thing they can remember about some of these major periods is the feud they had with their neighbor for 20 years. It's incredibly funny.
@@dangernoodledee111 Don't forget "Ah yes I was around back then but that also happened to be around that time that I was currently stuck in a cement wall, If you forgot that I told I was trapped in a cement wall for decades. Not to mention the time I was buried in a brick casket before that."
this reminds me of in puss in boots 2 where perrito had a super tramutizeing backstory of him being abused by his owners and trying to kill him by dropping down a waterfall and doing various other terrible things to him and yet he was the most moral character in that entire movie and probably the entire shrek/puss in boots franchise and how big jack horner had a 100percent perfect life with absolutely zero problems loving parent's during his childhood is extremely has loads of other shit runs a successful pie factory only issue was being upstaged by pinocchio like once when he was child yet he ended up being the most evil character in the entire shrek/puss in boots franchise with the movie even kind of mocking the very concept of sympathetic villains and villain reformations with the ethical bug trying to be his therapist and automatically assuming there is good in everyone until he meets jack and discovers that he's actually completely irredeemable subverting the modern trend in movie's of making villains more 'redeemable' even if they actually aren't
I love this channel because I enjoy writing, but I'm also autistic. These videos are a great way to learn how to write better, and also interpret sarcasm. 😂
TWA Honest Thoughts: If you are an amateur writer, do not write about SA. IT WILL NOT END WELL! 13 Reasons Why Writers: That sign won’t stop me because I can’t read!
@@Karak-_- It stands for "sexual assault", which I imagine I don't have to explain further. I'm unsure when the truncated term "SA" term started gaining traction though. Shrug.
@@Karak-_- Understandable given the show that was mentioned. I've never watched it, but I vaguely recall hearing that being sexually assaulted was why the main girl that kills herself does so in the first place. I may be wrong there though. "Knowing" that show, it probably handled dealing with that topic almost as terribly as it did with glorifying suicide, especially as effective revenge, in the first place. So I would honestly be surprised to learn it handled *anything* well by the end of its too long run.
@@MusicoftheDamned I think it's been gaining traction for a while now on RUclips and Tiktok because clearly saying those two words (or the r word) meant demonetization, like JP indicated in the video with the yellow sign, and so people kept using the term in the comments/interactions, especially now that there's a lot more blocked words when you comment under a video. Interesting that yours didn't get hidden though.
Remember, if you're hating a certain character for murdering a fan favorite, revealing their tragic backstory makes all that hate go away. Isn't that right, Abby? :P
*And* get away with murder too~ It doesn't matter if the adopted daughter of the person you killed out of revenge doesn't get to kill you because that means she's just as bad as she is! Forgiveness is *always* about letting people get away because Abby is **very** specially tragic in this cast of tragic characters. Plus, she has to take care of someone too, so she gets to be in a similar role to Joel, and if you kill her, you're just the same. So, she gets to live! They're just salty their favorite character's dead and they're just sexist and transphobic.
I want to destroy all life in the universe due to my tragic backstory: When I was 4 years old I went to the supermarket with my dad. I got distracted for a breef moment and when I looked around he was not there. Luckily I found him a few seconds afterwards but the trauma made me realize that supermarkets are evil, so I need to destroy all super marlets and all life in the universe in order to make sure that nobody will make a super market ever again.
I'm shocked that you made a video on dinosaurs before character backstories Edit: not just dinosaurs, mid series shake ups, shipping and lovemaking scenes first before doing backstories. So you could think of this video as the backstory that really should have been terribly advised far earlier
Obviously patching it in the middle of act 3 like all great writers. As we all know, the middle of pitched final battle is the prefect time to have an angsty flashback unrelated to the current opponent that doesn't effect combat.
Don’t forget to throw them in right before a character is killed off so the death can mean something and we can actually warrant the character existing
Even better when you go back and retcon other characters to be mean so the previous antagonist can now be the hero in their backstory! It turns out all the things they did that *seemed* terrible and unforgivable were really just misunderstood attempts to do the right thing in very bad circumstances caused by everyone else! Whew, we almost acknowledged that actual evil exists in the world and that people will really choose to do bad things for selfish reasons. That was close.
Three types of RPG backstories: -This is Uriah von Kostrok, the Trice-Cursed. He is a descendant of an ancient family of demigod kings that was deposed in a coup. His mother hid in the magical woods, where she raised him until her death. On her deathbed she gave him his ancestral cursed sword and told him to venture into the world and find his family's lost heirlooms that will allow him to regain the throne. -This is Tom, the axeman. He figured adventuring is as good a career path as any, so he bought an axe and a shield and he adventures now. -This is Cheesus Krust, the baker-prophet. He wants to find his god and learn how to make pizzas from him.
Can't wait for the lore building video in which JP adds the old man from an ancient civilization who tells the entire story of the dead kingdom rather than letting the protagonists to discover it themselves so we can reach a 5 levels flashbacks within flashbacks.
Perhaps it's because I'm rereading it as I buy hard copies, or just because it's my favorite work of fiction, but I really like how Dr. Stone handles backstory. It always does it in a good spot and always feels directly relevant when it is brought up. It also usually has an in-universe reason for being shown to the audience. Usually a character is thinking about the past for a present reason, or it's the time when things finally calm down and stories can be shared. It never takes too long to go through, but always contextualizes something in the story. It also usually involves Senku somehow, be it what would have happened if Tsukasa was Senku's friend in their childhood, what the astronauts did to set up the village for Senku, the relationship between Senku and his former mentor, etc, so it always feels relevant. I especially appreciate it more on rereads. I personally like a small chunk backstory approach in my writing too. One character attacked the main character and his younger sister, only for the attacker to lose and be stuck in critical condition, leading to the main character giving a cautious second chance at life to the attacker and also his sister never feeling comfortable around the guy that tried to hurt her, which in the present then leads to the guy's quest to build a better relationship with her. It doesn't last too long, just enough to get the idea across.
My favorite stock backstory is "retired monster". Someone who used to be a remorseless evil criminal and stopped either because they got too old or made enough money to retire. Whether they now show remorse about any of it is left up to the writer.
-Don't let the backstory be the defining trait of your character (ie, utilize their present day arc.) -Don't tell the majority of your story through flashbacks, only key important moments that are necessary for proceedings. -Don't always put hard facts to their past; it's sometimes better to let readers fill in the blanks for themselves :)
What's really helped me when writing a characters backstory into a work is by understanding who primarily benefits from hearing it. Is it done primarily or only to inform the reader? Is it done to inform other characters in the story? A little of both? Sometimes just cutting to a backstory is better than creating some convoluted set up for why a character is suddenly expositing to the supporting cast. If the other characters don't need to know or won't benefit from hearing a characters backstory then they don't need to hear it, just tell the audience and move on.
10:20 fun fact: this is exactly how "Frankenstein" is written. Some boat captain wrote a letter to his sister about the story this doctor (aka Frankenstein) told him about the monster that he created, and during the retelling the monster reappears and tells Frankenstein about his time alone in the world and this family's shed he was hiding in and whose family drama recounted
J.P., I recently finished my first ever book. It's not long, and it's probably not great, but your videos helped me immensely in its construction and creation. Having a road map of what not to do helped immeasurably when revising and editing. After alot of work, I finally have something I'm proud of and I have you to thank in large part. Thanks for your content. If you'd like to read it, let me know
@@iceyflowergamer4474 Thank you! If you're interested in reading it, I actually started a RUclips channel that will just be me reading story chapters and monster entries in a bestiary I made of custom monsters. It's a medieval fantasy genre type of story. First uploads will be next week, unless you'd like to read it digitally. If it's not your thing tho that's cool
Dude. You have incredible timing. I was just about to flesh out the backstories of my game's companion system. Now I can use this advice like a checklist!!
Also keep in mind that a characters entire fascination and skill set comes from their parents (or more specifically ONE parent and the other never gets mentioned). I am a great archeologist because my father was the greatest archeologist. My father was a great martial artist and he thought me everything he knew, so I am now a great martial artist. My mother didn't want me to become a victim, so she constantly trained me in the use of guns. My father and grandfather before me unsuccessfully tried to find the Lorestones, so now it falls upon me to finish what they started. Like, nobody is like "Oh, my father was a plumber and my mom was an accountant. I took to martial arts and archeology out of personal interest and it had nothing to do with them"
6:35 oh, don't get me started... I had a GM that would insist on having a prominent 'female character' in every game he made that would always have SA on her background, and that should totaly justify we siding with her when she decided to geno**** the group from where a couple jerks committed the act against her... and it got worse and worse every game, to the point that we stopped siding with such characters, and the GM got mad at us for that. Heck, one of the players even considered making a sexist character just so he could cut off such "plot hooks" on their roots in one game because he couldn't stand hearing about "muh said AS backstory... we should totally ****cide that metropolis over there because the current leader, who got to power through a badly explained coup, was the one who abused me, and let's ignore all the civilians currently opressed under him that will die just so I can have my revenge!"
I think it’s ok to do detailed backstories as long as you understand that it might not even be part of the narrative. It’s a tool for you to understand the character, leave the lore to lore channels.
Long before time had a name, the First Spinjitzu Master created Ninjago using four elemental weapons. But when he passed, a dark presence sought out to collect them all: Lord Garmadon. So I, Sensei Wu, his brother, sought out to find four ninja to collect them first. - Sensei Wu
12:17 About the "raised on a barn" backstory Let me explain the real reason why the trope gets used so much. the humble farmer is the perfect "average everyday man", as in he is commonly understood to be near the bottom of the social hiarchy, allowing for a clear "rags to riches" story, since it can almost always only go up. At the same time, the farmer is considered to be uneducated and not knowlegable about the wider world, which makes it super easy to throw world building exposition at them.
14:11 A yes, reminds me that one time Doofenshmirtz lost his train toy, in the alternative timeline and because of that he managed to become an actual threat that conquered the city
I appreciate you mentioning not glamorizing poverty, that tends to be a problem and it's tacky and tasteless. Also, I lol'd at the segment on parents. One of my WIPs has some of the characters' parents fighting right alongside the characters - it's just always frustrated me so much that the parents in stories can't be like, alive and well and interested in helping out the cause. xD Why not, right? Plus, especially for the fantasy genre I think, the demographics have changed over time to where a lot of readers/consumers of media are parent age or even grandparent age, and I think it's important to have representation for the readers to familiarize with. When I made the protags for that WIP I mentioned, they were older than me, and now I'm almost old enough to be their parents, so there's a weird feeling of detachment/defamiliarization there that kinda sucks if you don't have a variety of age in your best characters.
Everytime i see you post i get elated ,then i get saddened because i have to wait for the next one, i love your work i come back to your videos over and over because they have so much thought and care put into them thank you.
One of the many reasons I LOVED Monica towa as a villain, she has a horrible past, a rough childhood, But she's still the worst, and she never gets a redemption arc.
This actually makes me think of the time I was in an rp server on discord where there was this one player with a character that DEFINITELY wasn't just a stereotypical edgelord anime protagonist who had a laughably convoluted backstory, and it went a little something like this. He was born into a broken household and had an abusive father who he watched kill his mother before trying to sell him into slavery but that's when his powers activated and killed his dad...only to be revealed later on that was all just a lie! Nothing but fake memories he gained after being injected with some revival serum (that also somehow manifested a dollar store venom) and his parents are actually nice people who actually knew about all of this but for some reason didn't do anything about it (and this was revealed several sessions later mind you). He was also going to try and make him some kind of "chosen one" and have him make some heroic self sacrifice in the final arc but that thankfully didn't go anywhere.
One of my favorite shows with smart use of backstory is the show Leverage. They did a great job introducing elements of the cast backstories as needed, but kept the exposition dumps pretty to the point without killing the pace of the episodes. Usually thanks to very strong performances by the cast. Also since they introduced the cast as experts at the top of their fields, it made sense they'd have a lot of experiences under their belts.
Before my mother died in my backstory, she told me to ask you to do an episode on "body swapping" as it is her most requested episode. Please do not let my mother who only exists in a flashback whose only purpose is to die and drive my character arc in gear down, JP!
Edit: Changed it from "animated movies" to "body swap" instead
That’s an entire medium not really a genre. Maybe family or kids oriented movies?
Personally I’d prefer an episode on live action adaptations of animated movies/shows. That’s way too relevant these days and there’s a lot of case studies for “terrible” writing advice.
Sorry, changed it to body swapping as it is more specific and the thought didn't come to my head immediately when I first typed this, sorry.
My entire bright-eyed idyllic family died tragically in MY backstory, and their dying request was that he do a terrible writing advice episode on unreliable narrator.
@@vullord666 Yeah. *Looks to the house of the mouse*
@@FatherTime89 You have clearly suffered more...
Remember kids, the villains action are always justified if they had a bad life.
I mean that sociopath that causing chaos and suffer is total justified because they gave a good sob story.
@@starmaker75 Just like in real life.
Just like Funny Toothbrush Moustache Man , his father discouraged his dreams and the art school he want to go to declined his approval, i'm sure everyone will forgive what he has done after those two facts, wait, you are telling me he is hated, according to this logic he cannot be hated, oh wait he is.
There are a lot of tragic villains that are well-written tbh
But I agree that villains with tragic backstories and villain redemption arcs are mishandled more often than not
“It all began on the day of my actual birth. Both of my parents failed to show up”
Remember, it is always important that your character's backstory is way more interesting than anything that will happen in the plot going forward.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3?
At that point just make the story about the back story
@@ulaznar 💀 you got jokes. Rocket's backstory was interesting but by no means was it way more interesting than the entire plot
@@hersheysbar28 Yeah, the High Evolutionary did more interesting stuff in the main plot than in Rocket's backstory, for example
Oh. And also, Rocket's backstory also served as a sort-of backstory for the High Evolutionary (as in explaining why he's so obsessed with retrieving Rocket).
Perhaps that's why some people might found the backstory more interesting than the main plot.
Writers' favourite: dropping an important backstory right before a character's death. The audience for sure won't feel manipulated
Might piss some people off, and I'm a turbo fan of JoJo too, but that one guy at the end of part 3. That felt like it should've been slowly explained or had a bonding episode where he shares the whole story since they've fought alongside each other for a good while by the time they got to Egypt
@@spacebassist feels like Kakyoin could have said having a natural stand made him an outsider and we would have gotten the gist. But his backstory was so short that I gave it a pass
@@kingsleycy3450 I never really thought about the natural stand thing for some reason, that could've been a good distinction to expand upon as he reveals it's been with him his whole life
Also yeah, it didn't ruin anything or make me dislike kakyoin's character or the series going forward, it just felt a bit like "this is the part where the viewer is told when to cry" that I assume a lot of anime does
@@spacebassist I'm like a middling fan of _Jojo's_ when all is said and done, but I honestly think that Part 3 is *easily* the *weakest* and overall worst of the Parts that I've read or watched so far (only 1 through 5 still). It's not really that surprising when Araki was probably focused mostly on closing up the DIO business and introducing a completely new power system separate from Hamon.
Outside of introducing Stands and closing out the DIO business when it came to the man himself physically, however, I can't think of anything especially interesting about part 3 as a whole aside from three or four encounters and powers. None of the new central characters in that part really stand out to me outside poor Polnareff and I guess Jotaro himself, who still has the least (flamboyant) personality of all the protagonists, even Jonathan. Avdol and Kakoyin felt flat as hell, and Iggy wasn't around long enough for me to get attached to even if I liked dogs, though at least felt something when Iggy died compared to the two cardboard cutouts. I accept that's possibly just me though. Shrug.
Araki learned not to do that with Part 5
But then forgot that lesson when writing Bruno's backstory
"She has orphanitus and is fated to die tragically should she ever find true happiness again" I'm pretty sure that's actual canon for Batman
Frigging Same!
There are different kinds of similarly sad backstories for both heroes and villains. In Mermaid Melody, Gakto and his fraternal twin brother Kaito were separated as babies by Aqua Regina, because she was trying to prevent a future war ahead, even though it costed them both their sanity and their would be bond.
Or Spider-Man.
For Spider-Man that's true, but even with the eventual misfortune or pearson gotting a little bit out of character, even with all of his brooding Batman nowadays built a family and has quite a bit of friends, so I would say that he as fine as a human that fights gods, aliens, monsters and super smart murdeous psychopaths on a daily basis could ever hope to be.
Supernatural
Literally Castiel
7:12 "You can trust me when it comes to advice on writing women. Why, I've even SEEN one once; when she she told me to move out of the basement before expressing disappointment in her son."
I laughed so hard at this 🤣
Lmao 🤣
It’s a tragedy JP didn’t mention the “let’s share this character’s backstory right before they die so that the audience will feel more bummed out!” strategy
Demon Slayer
@@msf2000 That doesn't work, Tanjiro isn't god tier and he does act with mercy towards those that clearly was forced against their will like Spider Demon
@@msf2000 Demon Slayer is just following a trope as old as time itself, to be fair
@@msf2000Yeah. I read the manga and it honestly got a bit silly how every single demon seemed to have some sad backstory. Akaza is the only one I remember and his was actually pretty damn cool.
Metal Gear Solid
Always remember kids, never develop your characters' backstories so as to keep them "Mysterious" and "Cool." Never mention them! Keep them vague
And the one moment you do mention them, pull them out of your arse at the last minute and then proceed to make them an enormous 100 page long essay delivered to the audience in the most glorious of info dumps! Oh, and remember that characters should be entirely based around their edgy backstory!
demon slayer when the horrifying murderous demon is about to die :
@@ali32bit42 This annoys me for sure. Like, if you're going to reveal the backstory of an antagonist destined to die, *at least* make an effort to introduce it in some other manner that isn't a 10min long random flashback *right* when they're about to die. Like, what does it matter, then? Just trying to get some cheap feels out of the audience.
Even revealing it after they're gone as an afterthought is far more tasteful, I'd say.
In relaton to the first point, JP once said "There's no difference between light character development and no character development." Apparently the same goes for backstories.
@@rxndomfxndom7405 Very amusing. I do think that when it gets to that point, it's just a matter of having some reasonable amounts of tact, so as to reveal all this information in a sensible and organic manner instead of just throwing everything at the audience like a giant wall of text at a completely uncalled for moment.
A couple lines from a character can reveal far more than a gigantic, explanatory monologue.
Some bad advice would be to give some in-universe reason to justify delving into the backstory, integrating it into a natural way, such as in a sci-fi setting have technology that can record memory. Still, the mysterious character who doesn't want to reveal his backstory for some reason ends up having that memory bank stolen, and the heroes have to retrieve, or maybe yet, have the heroes rob those memory banks because of a lingering mistrust between them. (Seriously, please rate this idea im highly considering an arc where it's just seeing the pivotal moments of one of the setting's most essential characters.)
This video proves why Dr. Doofensmirts is the best writtn cartoon villain ever.
"What is Doofenshmirt's backstory?"
'The universe hates him but can't manage to break or kill him'
It's funny cuz he's like a good guy pretending to be bad
He has all the backstory
@@iLikeTheWordRetro What's more, he was raised being told that he was evil (see the Kinderloomper episode), so his decision to become a villain could be viewed as an attempt to live up to his mother's expectations. So he does have a backstory explaining his villainy, just not in the way he claims.
@@erickpoorbaugh6728 Doof was megamind the whole time?
Remember kids, a backstory must ALWAYS be tragic! Never can anyone just have a happy and normal life growing up.
I swear so many stories I've seen use a tragic backstory as a crutch to make us care about a character.
I mean, to be fair a character living a normal life before the events of the plot can be easily inferred without the need to delve into it because it’s normal and therefore easy for the audience to fill in
@@Serafin0707 It's not a bad thing if it's done right. But not every character NEEDS one.
Jean actually had a pretty normal childhood in Attack on Titan. And in a world where flesh-eating giant monsters exist, that’s saying something.
@@mariobroultimate1808 You will hate Mahou Shoujo site because every character backstories is just suffer porn and zero substances, thing just happen because.. to the point it feel like a comedy. The main character almost got r*pe and m*lested, almost committed unalive, got bully by everyone just because ,even the adult treat her like crap just because. All this happen in the first episode.
remember, you have to make your villians backstory as reasonable and sympathetic as possible so you can feel the most anger when the audience likes the villian more than the ill defined protagonists
Even better, make the "villain" clearly the good guy, trying to improve the life of an opressed underclass for example, then have them blow up a kindergarten for no reasons so that the protagonists can be the good guys in restoring the status quo.
Eh, it doesn't have to be that well constructed, honestly.
Edgy kids that have lived a sheltered, pampered life will still think the villain is right.
Life sucks, and only the strongest survive. I know that because Mom asked me to go to bead at 10PM instead of playing video games.
Also, your protagonist must cause massive, easily avoidable collateral damage along the way and (assuming anyone actually addresses that point rather than just sweeping it under the rug) must be completely immune to reason because they know they're doing the right thing!
Plus, make sure to give the villain most of the positive character traits like intelligence and charisma, whereas the protagonist will be stuck with only bravery (read: being to stupid to know when to back down).
@@yjlom *stares at RWBY*
@@yjlom Korra 😂
Remember, if you have a messed up backstory, you must be an edgelord who kills without a care!
What? Perrito? Who's that?
The Last Wish truly was a gem of a movie
>The Last Wish truly was a gem of a movie
@@Noobatron That wolf whistle is the most memorable part of the film
And it's the polar opposite with Jack Horner, his only ''trauma'' is being less popular than Pinocchio and yet he's the worst person in the Shrek universe. The traumatized villain trope was beaten to death and I was happy to see it being totally overturned.
@@sqrt2295 Love Jack Horner who completely and utterly owns that he is an entitled evil bastard with no redeeming quality and he is okay with that.
The farm boy backstory may be overused, but it does go a long way in explaining why your chosen one/one true heir protagonist wasn't immediately discovered and killed by the evil dark lord. Also works really well for plots where a mentor or family member turns out to have been guarding a magical artifact that the protagonist suddenly has to destroy. It also helps that no matter how high magic the world is, the farming community is always pretty mundane, so the protagonist can learn about the magic system at the same time as the audience.
And while they have no adventure-relevant skills, they can at least be counted on to have decent physical aptitude and not be dead weight.
I mean, nobility's felt pretty comfortable putting spears in their hands and conscripting them into wars, why can't the author?
I think it's used to tie into a common theme/trope that grand heroes come from humble origins. It also works double as a "hiding in plain sight" kind of deal where the elder sage knows the dark lord won't care about the country folk having the chosen one because they assume mcguffin artifact or chosen one is in some super secret vault atop the peaks of impossible to find. LotR did this pretty well and it was very heavily in it's themes.
Or, especially pre 1900s, almost everyone was farmers. And even today, depending on where you live, alot of people are still farmers or live near farms.
Honestly, I like Feist's version of the Farm Boy protagonist. Almost all of his hidden heirs and main characters (the ones that aren't either nobility or trained killers) are smiths
A protagonist from a simple background allows you to seamlessly explain the world to the reader through them, also.
"What's your tragic backstory?"
"My mom died when I was young. Yours?"
"Some asshole killed half the galaxy including everyone I cared about because of his mommy issues."
That's oddly specific, where is it from?
@@eeveeofalltrades4780I think It was from Thanos? I'm not sure cuz i felt like i heard that before.
@@fa11endawn16 yeah, sounds like it could describe Thanos from the comics
@@eeveeofalltrades4780 Ah i think the mommy issues would be Mrs.Death... Bro killed everyone just to get an impression from her 💀
"that's rough buddy"
My brother got killed in my backstory and now I am on a mission to destroy all of them. Thank you for your service to my cause.
Your brother dying instead of your picturesque family dying already made you a more compelling action hero than 99% of them
Destroy backstories or brothers?
Ahhh! You are going to destroy all backstories because they killed your brother?!
I will join you on this quest, now that I have destroyed my own backstory. I have a MIB issued memory erasure and a flame thrower. Your brother will be avenged!
@@Phantom86d No, they're going to destroy all brothers.
By technicallity you are a former brother too.
My character backstories range from "he's a cursed gunslinger rebuilt from wood, fueled by arcane blood, created in act of desperation and grief by the love of his life who made a deal with this world's equivalent of the Demiurge" to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail crusaders whose holy book is a tabloid magazine".
I want to read about those characters
Sounds amazing
Your characters sound awesome
Bro your ideas sound cool, my cyborg soldier is just a Gilgamesh rip off with built in artificial brain cancer because having my cyborgs determination to get cured and live life without corporation chalenged by their brain constantly betraying them is "cool", like dude has halucinations of his dead cyber tomboy gf who liked to make neckleces out of human ears, also they both got sent to corpse planet which is literaly a giant space corpse as tax write off by corpo
Third type: "He's just some guy with a sword who figured adventuring is a good way to make some money"
JP has officially gone from "funny love-triangle man" to "funny flashback man."
'This reminds me of that time that I was in a Love Triangle!'
He needs to do a love-triangle within a love-triangle.
. JP
/ \
/ \
Love triangle ---- Flash back
I call the glamorized slums "Hobo Romanticism".
You often see the hero live in a spacious castle built out of trash, with the most amazing view and incredibly cozy and comfortable facilities.
Yeah and apparently they are somehow well fed and have good hygiene, because we all know that even in poverty, you still can be a handsome bulk with perfect teeth 😂
Hobo hierarchy
The flashback gag kills me every time. A few years from now we'll have an hour-long video that's just flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks...
It'll never be as large as his ego though
Flashback^4 is Cleary the best way to tell a backstory of character
That would be hilarious
Woah, *foreshadowing* the flashbacks? What a novel concept!
I had a super villain named Flashback and that was his power. Having people experience flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. Then he could escape while they did that.
And yes, he was named after Naruto author.
Hearing "When do you REVEAL the backstory" I immediately was reminded of my D&D character, who has a crazy backstory that I was hoping to slowly drip-feed to the party over months...
But I made the idiot mistake of "This character has not changed his name, face, or even clothes after escaping his traumatic past full of horrible powerful people" and thus, even being halfway across the world, his past caught up to him. I had to spill the entire backstory in session 6 after the party rescued him from a kidnapper. XD
I had a similar incident with one of my D&D characters, except that the thing that forced it into the open was less an active part of the plot and more a metagaming player who knew out of game that my character was keeping secrets and so ended up being constantly suspicious and looking keenly for any opportunity to drag it out into the light despite their character having no real reason to feel that way.
Honestly, I had the same happened to me. I had been trying to use my warlock feed the rest of the party clues about my noble descent for months, but had to leave the party due to what my patron forced me to do.
I think I handled it pretty well by writing them a letter, disguised as my character asking our cleric to use sending a sending to put me in contact with my mom, but was actually my way of revealing this vital part of my backstory.
Another favorite of mine: Having my bards sing a song!
The only actually working way to do backstories in RPGs is to not have them and just improvise details about the past on the spot depending on what is happening on screen right now
@@AliceLoverdrive The backstory was actually what got me INTO that D&D server to begin with. XD It's actually based on an actual terrible thing that my high school DM did to my first ever character. I'd shared it on r/RPGhorror stories, and also said "You know, I wouldn't mind reclaiming that character someday, and use that event as backstory fuel, it's got a lot of potential for interesting character growth!"
And a commenter went "I have a spot open in the D&D server I run! Want in?" and what began as just "Nothing fancy, my arc will just be my character recovering from the trauma and not letting it define him" was swiftly taken by the DM and made an actual part of the world, and now I'm intimately tied to Deep Lore stuff, and have a personal nemesis AND I was able to give inside information about the country all of that horror took place in to another group of players in the server who were planning on raiding the place. XD
I had the exact opposite in a Cyberpunk Red game, where I spent about a month trying to hint at a crucial element of my character's story, and my friend didn't pick up on it. As far as he knew, I was just helping him for no reason, just risking my life for him for no reason. Eventually, I just got fed up with his obliviousness and told him
make sure to follow all of TWA's advice religiously, this channel is not satire all advice is genuine and followed by all good writers
Unfortunately, the longest piece of English literature currently seems to take its advice and then adds its own methods to that.
Which one?
@@the_representative The Loud House: Revamped.
One day I'm going to make it a challenge to take all of his advice and still try to write an enjoyable story.
Any bad trope or poor writing decision can be done well enough to be enjoyable, I'm sure of it.
@@Jane-oz7pp If its a comedy it could work, especially if you do a bit of lampshading and self aware humor.
So JP mentions a Necklace with magic power that only Royalty can wear, and then in the sponsorship section, the leader of the ancient conspiracy is wearing a necklace that looks a LOT like that same necklace...
I saw that too!
°O°
And remember kids, when you're running out of stuff from the source material to adapt, or if you don't want the show to catch up to the source material, just make the flashback play like 48 times minimum. That will surely make the audience care about the character even more and not make them want to punch the screen every time they appear on screen.
*cough*One Piece*cough*
It's OK. You can say Naruto.
It got so bad at times I legit forgot what was happening.
One Piece in a nutshell.
Persona 5
Useless?
One Piece 😂
You should do one on amnesia plots, whether it's a character regressing development for contrived conflict or introducing an amnesiac character where the amnesia is their only defining trait
A character gives themselves amnesia to forget all the embarrassing things in their past, but they keep coming back, in a humorous collage that explores their backstory in detail (specifically all the embarrassing things they wanted to forget)
"Character regressing development for contrived conflict"
😂 Shadow the Hedgehog
@@feuerling Yes. Only the embarrassing moments. They cannot recall their mentor's tragic sacrifice but they for sure remember the time they dropped their pants in the middle of a fight and were hit so hard they farted... And thus survived the encounter. 😶
Is it just me, or would an episode on amnesia plots be a great way to soft reboot the TWA Expanded Universe? Like, “Oh no, I lost my memory! Which means I lost where I was with all the characters and have to start over.”
What about where the setting has caused every character to have some degree of amnesia and none of them know why, and it impacts the protagonists and antagonists alike as they try to one-up each other in the arms race of regaining and recording knowledge to protect themselves in a terrified, confused, and for reasons the characters can't quite understand for most of the story, hostile world.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so tired of people writing "female is badass because she was SAed. Just have her cut hair short, doing a training montage and she's better than ever!" One of the most common reasons for someone to have PTSD is due to SA. It can permanently mess people up. It's possible to write a character who has gone through it and come out stronger, but in reality it almost always comes across as a thinly veiled apology: "I'm sure she was fine afterward. Who ... um the character in my book, not my ex-girlfriend or that random chick in the bar last year. Honest."
It is unfortunate that it is so common. To touch on another thing you mentioned, I hate the training montage or group hug that makes years of PTSD go away. I wrote my main character as someone who has spent years to get over it, and it still heavily paints who he is as a person even if he isn't having panic attacks of violent outbursts anymore.
And why tf do they need to cut their hair????? I spent the first 12 years of my life enduring that and my hair is LONG.
@@katie7748 Because it represents change in a visual way. Another reason could be turning against ideas of female beauty or because in a fight short hair is a liability.
I tend to write characters who've experienced it fairly often, but I'm also someone who has and I've dealt with pretty bad PTSD from it in the past, so I put more emphasis on the aftermath and healing because I think that's what really matters. Also, everyone reacts differently and that trauma can affect your personality in a lot of different ways. For me, it was becoming a hermit, for other people PTSD can manifest as aggression, hypersexuality, or all kinds of different characteristics. Some people wanna talk about it, some people you can't waterboard (figuratively) that information out of. I think what bothers me isn't necessarily that it's talked about in media, but that it's talked about so poorly with little regard for the messy reality victims face. But that's just my personal take.
@@ImTakingYouToFlavorTownhonestly, yeah I agree. As someone who has PTSD of being molested by a close friend, the incident made me gain and lost a lot of things in my life. And sometimes the unrealistic overly masculine changes of PTSD victims in female writing are just.... Yeah not right for me no matter how I read it.
Like I have two OCs that I made as main characters in my books after I can overcome my fear of men years later.
One was a SA victim that could function normally with slight insanity and madness. But her PTSD only comes up whenever someone else touches her and surprised her off guard. Other than that, she hides her emotions behind a smiling mask, still feminine and loving the hobbies she has.
While the other OC, was a mean girl turned apathetic bitch. She took the path of revenge by selling her body to infiltrate and ruin the prostitution establishment that ruined her mother's life. Life sucks hard, but she took every advantage she could get in that hell hole for her own good. And in the end, she managed to overcome that nightmare and got revenge and destroyed everything, including herself.
I made these two different OCs as a way to ponder how my fate could have gone to either path if my PTSD wasn't helped by therapy.
I love the part where, where describing the horrible backstory of Mary Sue, JP just summarized the plot of A Series of Unfortunate Events
I am just now realizing that ASoUE is basically one long character backstory. Imagine if the author first wrote and published a series about Beatrice Baudelaire II, and the Baudelaire siblings are raising her as supporting characters, and once that series was wrapped up, the author wrote ASoUE as a prequel series showing the Baudelaire siblings' backstory. It would be chaotic.
Then again, it feels like most of the characters in ASoUE have increasingly and ridiculously tragic backstories. I love it. Iconic.
@@dangernoodledee111 True, when reading it I was always half suspecting it was one big leg pull by the author.
Also, remember that the character's memories are always perfect. Even if they have long forgotten about some event, as soon as any small thing reminds them of it, they will immediately recall all the minute details of what happened.
To be fair this can be justified if the trauma was that major or it has a strong emotional connection with the character
@@eeg-rh7jvdoes Amnesia count? Like in a way the trauma block their memories due a tragic incident happened to them?
@@fa11endawn16 Not sure
The best type of backstory is the one that completely derails the plot at the end because god forbid we have context queues to add context to the climax
You mean "context clues"? Or "cue" not spelled like the British word for a line of people (or the French slang term for male genitals).
@@canaisyoung3601 o shit ur right I had a seismic brain fart lol
Just in time after finishing my 8 page long dnd character backstory!
8 pages? You're practically a murderhobo. I write a minimum of 80 pages.
Just FYI: The most common emotional reaction to SA is not depression, but anger. The main problem with this trope is that readers’ expectations of what would be a “realistic reaction” to it are largely shaped by other fiction. So if you do describe a realistically more common reaction, ironically, a lot of readers might be disappointed, frustrated, and/or angry with you, the author, for “subverting their expectations” - even though that’s only because you’ve done your research, and most readers haven’t.
It is? Interesting.
If you're a comic book superhero, your backstory can be rewritten so that the central, pivotal moment within can be changed to suit this single writer's point even when it undermines every other story told about the character and said character's emotional core.
(I am looking at you every time someone feels the need to recontextualize the death of the waynes)
That also works if you're one of the Simpsons, actually
I know this is a villain backstory but the same thing applies to New 52 Mr Freeze, ugh
Ah, I see someone has also been reading Sean Murphy's hot takes on Batman.
brainiac
I find it a fun challenge to give all my fantasy characters stable, relatively normal lives as backstories.
One of my demon-hunters' backstories: "grew up in one of the metropolises to loving family, has a love for trashy Tarzan-ripoff romance bodice-rippers, freshly graduated from their uni in tveterinary medicine and human medicine (she's a bit of a prodigy, that's her allotted specialness) and serves as a combat medic on her team for the other hunters and their warbeasts"
She got the designated love interest plot coupon because my main protagonist was raised in the wild by harpies and acts like a magic beast more than a man and that slots perfectly with her guilty pleasure of wild-man romance tropes (and given that the harpies in her setting are the pretty feathery amazons variant the wild protag is very much a prettyboy who wears way too little, roosts and falls asleep sitting up, and won't eat cooked meat, so he's just slightly beastly and not animalistic enough to make her wonder about the ethics of thinking he's hot).
I'm still proud that I can go "the backstory bit about her awful taste in romance novels is actually important to the romance subplot".
Mudane backstories are the best
That is basically how Wheel of Time starts.
Yes the protagonist has complex secret backstory, which is integral to the plot, but he only learns it well into the story.
Aside Lan I think almost all central characters had relatively normal, mostly uninteresting life up to the beginning of the story.
Of course the tv show had to change that up a lot... In 21st century you just have to ramp up the pointless drama I guess.
Ok but unironically though flashbacks could be a useful tool for characterizing people who don't appear in the present story. Like in one person's flashback someone who's already dead could be a giant jackass making you think they deserved it, but in someone else's flashback we could see a nicer side of them because they have a close relationship to the second person having a flashback.
They could also be actual flashbacks and not narrative devices so tormented and overused that people think they're what actual flashbacks are like.
No not like having a more subjective and unreliable version of events to reflect the character's mental state, or told through emotional states entirely and without the use of "basically teleported to the past and not having a simultaneous mental breakdown", could be interesting.
Ptsd doesn't actually originate in the brain, but the words of a thousand unoriginal backstories!
Reader: "What is your backstory?"
Female protagonist: "I am a strong independent female character."
*GASP*
OH GOLLY
This is extra funny to me because I have a side character who basically says that, and everyone looks at her funny, like 'you what?'
By which they always mean "I was a tomboy who liked fighting/sports". Like, first of all, being a tomboy does not necessarily mean you were competitive and/or aggressive. Second, could we please stop using ability and willingness to cause physical harm as the only indicator of strength. Third, gender-bending isn't inherently heroic and doesn't justify behaving like an ignorant asshole actually.
@@sophiejones3554 I feel like being a tomboy is sort of view as being toxic this day, I remember it is just aesthetic thing but people seem to call tomboy like being a lesbian and don't forget about the constant fetishization.
OH MY GOSH THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TALKING ABOUT THAT ISSUE WITH WOMEN/FEMALE BACKSTORIES. I was watching an anthology show recently and pretty much every “tough female character” had that in their backstory. One of them kind of made sense because the entire story carried themes of things like the mistreatment of women, so I’ll reluctantly give that one a pass, but the others… It could be anything. ANYTHING. I don’t understand what’s going through the writers’ heads. As a woman, it’s uncomfortable and kind of offensive. You are doing God’s work, good sir.
Reminds me of Berserk.
@@harrisonpeterson3733 In _Berserk_ it's actually justified (...for the majority of instances) though unfortunately since that world is just such a shithole, to the point that even Guts himself suffers sexual assault in his backstory as a kid and still understandably has trauma from it significantly affect him years later unlike so many other stories and characters where a) the sexual assault is mostly only ever inflicted on women and girls, b) generally only used to motivate other characters with no real follow-up for the survivor (if there is one), and c) has its aftermath glossed over otherwise.
I'm not saying you have to be comfortable with how _Berserk_ uses it, mind you, especially given the absolutely horrible thing that happens to Casca. I'm just saying _Berserk_ actually uses such things for actuals purpose rather than just because stock motivations or melodrama inducers (...outside of that stupid fucking horse that I think Miura might have even said he regretted at some point).
May I ask what was the name of this anthology so that others could be spared from the same fate?
@The Damned I really liked how Beserk really emphasised how horrible rape is, by Guts being a not so charming loner who is scared of intimacy and has a very pessimistic outlook on life. As well as Casca who become a catatonic slient traumatised girl that barely did anything because she was so shaken by her rape and the fact it was Griffith who did it.
@@MusicoftheDamned Yeah. Despite me being a woman, I don't mind if a character has SA as part of the backstory, it just depends on how it's handled. Trauma overall doesn't make a character "stronger". How they deal with it aside from changing into a hypercompetent fighter that the writer tries to paint as cool and justify whatever crimes they committed can be integral to the character's arc. Some people die before getting to recover from years of sexual abuse (think Angela from Silent Hill 2). Even stories of recovery has them reverting back to their shells after a period of improvement, like Guts. Others don't fully recover or are still in the middle of recovery and just learn how to live with trauma without it overwhelming them (also like Guts). I'm not into Berserk when it comes to large amounts of nudity, but at least Casca's arc has her relearning being a warrior while still being nurturing again, iirc.
Abusive Parents Backstory:
A picture of a cupboard under the stairs.
That was slick.
2:40 For people who just REALLY like developing things even if you know they'll never come up (like me), having a private wiki to put everything is a really good idea. TiddlyWiki's my personal favorite tool for this because it works offline and can keep everything in one file, but there's plenty of options.
Not only does a private wiki give you something to refer to, it also gives you a place to "bleed out the poison" of things you want to establish but aren't actually important.
Trying to write backstories always brings me a degree of stress. It feels like everything you can do has already been done and is a common troupe, so trying to even make a backstory feels useless when I could just spend that energy making their character more interesting in the present.
I still struggle with writing backstories, so I am partially guilty of "no one knows, not even the writer..."
Don't worry about your work employing tropes, it's not a sin. Just think about what goes well with your story no matter if it's an overrated or underrated trope.
Good luck
I discovered who JP is. The comic relief who through clumsiness started the great backstory war by summoning the dark lord. He died then and got resurrected, then his free supermodel died tragically, causing him to become a jaded mentor. Learning all story tropes so he can teach the new protagonist, the viewer, the storytelling tools they need to save the Terrible Writing Advice Expanded Universe.
I love how he portrayed training for a character backstory video by showing he has 1,000 hours on Skyrim.
The best channel for terrible writing advice, thank you for your service
That thing about writing “females” was cathartic to hear
The backstory must be SA.
@@ComicPower
Funny thing is as I remember I wrote like...2 characters with SA-related backstories, one of which was not the victim herself. At the same time literally every trope mocked in this video about "bad female characters writing by guys" I have already seen in my female friend character's backstory. And from my experience it's really common for women to write about such things.
@@TheTowerOfGray yeah its a trope that needs to be retired.its been overdone too much. there are more motivations out there for female characters to overcome something.
@@ComicPower
I think it's a matter of how well this theme is executed. If you really think about it every traumatic event can be described as "gathering pity points" when the writer is bad at his job or/and doesn't know subject well.
For quick example just compare Casca from Berserk with...that sword lady from Goblin Slayer. Both were SA'd thought the latter has like one brief dialogue about it and was highly sexualised for fanservice (which in this context just looks gross).
@@TheTowerOfGray its definitely a strong motivation and can be powerful if handled by the right writer. I am just saying its been done so much now, its basically a cliche at this point and people need to have some different motivations or backstories for female characters for a while. I am Black and I remember when Hollywood was putting out way too many slave movies for me. I got sick of that. theres more stories to tell than that
I find the lack of love triangles in this backstory disturbing.
Unfortunately, both the love triangle options were shoved into the fridge during the backstory.
“Where is the love triangle? Is she safe? Is she alright?”
@@magicoddball1452 It seems, in your anger, you… killed off the hypotenuse.
@@pRahvi0 "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
Super easy, barely an inconvenience:
*My greatest enemy, the (roll 1d20):*
1- Werewolf
2- Vampire
3- Goblins
4- Evil Wizard
5- Dragon
6- Drow
7- Cultists
8- Coven of hags
9- Thieves' guild
10- Lich
11- Barbarian
12- Evil sibling
13- Natural selection
14- Corrupt nobility
15- Squirrels
16- Bard
17- DM
18- Giant
19- Ogre
20- Orcs
*Committed the heinous act of (1d10):*
1- Killing
2- Slaughtering
3- Brainwashing
4- Assassinating
5- Banishing
6- Blackmailing
7- Humilliating
8- Enslaving
9- Sacrificing
10- Seducing
*My (1d20):*
1- Family
2- Hometown
3- Clan
4- Parents
5- Significant other
6- Aspirations
7- Mentor
8- Best friend
9- Previous party
10- Crew of pirates
11- Band of thieves
12- Book club
13- Confidence
14- Military unit
15- Favorite tavern
16- Sports team
17- Dreams
18- Pet
19- Little sibling
20- Imaginary friend
*And that's why (1d12):*
1- Nothing changed
2- I'm a murderhobo
3- I seek vengeance
4- I trust no one
5- I have no desire to make friends
6- I must become stronger
7- I must live by their ideals
8- I am cursed
9- I must uncover the truth
10- I must fight evil
11- I'm an alcoholic
12- I'm Batman
My greatest enemy, the dragon, committed the heinous act of sacrificing my parents and that's why I seek vengeance.
My greatest enemy, the evil wizard, committed the heinous act of enslaving my family, and that’s why I’m an alcoholic.
My greatest enemy the ogre, commited the heinous act of humiliating my aspirations and that's why I seek vengeance
My greatest enemy, the thieves' guild, committed the heinous act of seducing my mentor, and that's why I trust no one.
My greatest enemy, the thieve’s guild, committed the heinous act of brainwashing my sport’s team and that’s why I must live by their ideals.
So the ideals of the brainwashed team, or…
"We totally understand but we still have to beat you"
"Because what I'm doing is wrong?"
"No, of course not. Commenting on the morality of your actions would alienate the audience. We're fighting because...uh...that's just what we do"
5:10 - This is how I feel about Demon Slayer. The entire Entertainment District arc is a prolonged fight scene, but when the heroes finally slay the sadistic, evil demons, we have to spend half of the final episode learning the demons' tragic origins. Who cares??? You can't spend 10 episodes of an 11 episode arc establishing these guys as unrepentant monsters only to spend the first 15 minutes of the 11th trying to make me feel bad for them because they were poor street urchins when they were human.
This is honestly the problem with a lot of anime. The writers treat massive exposition dumps as synonymous with character development.
I think many mainstream Shōnen and Shōjo anime shows have similar problems in common. Partly due to how senile Japan’s broadcasting channel laws are and partly due to how well or poorly received their source materials are.
oh yeah, that was the most annoying, irrelevant ass-pull.
The "Abusive Parents Backstory" image is an amazing critique of Harry Potter that I hadn't noticed, and it was hilariously delivered, bravo!
Got your book, JP. I'm loving it so far.
What's his book's name?
@Jostein Henrique Aeon Legion: Labyrinth. It's in his end cards.
Greed losing the election by being too greedy... and wanting everyone to profit rather than the top percent.
Not sure if I should laugh or cry, or make it a new backstory for another character.
Remember, if you have to show a backstory in a videogame ,do it with absurds requierements and make sure that it doesn't have an impact in that moment of the main story or in any moment.
Did you know that giving villains a sad backstory can be used to make them less, not more, sympathetic? It could make their response look disproportionate and their motives petty. See Lotso for example.
Oh yes i can remember that. By the endo f the movie it became very clear how Lotso had turned out to be one of the biggest monsters in TOy Story and a very loathsome way
I honestly think lotso is one of the best villains in anything ever simply for that reason. Not once does the film justify his actions or try to redeem him, it is fully aware that he’s a monster who overreacted to what happened to him and I love that
I really loved Guzma's backstory in Pkmn Sun/Moon. Only a few mentions from characters, a little bit more context for NPCs at the end, and environmental storytelling. And considering he wasn't the actual big bad of the game, his actions felt tragically plausible.
"The great backstory war" sounds like a fun premise for a short story.
World war Z was like that wasn't it? I think it is a good book
Metal Gear Solid 3
I actually went back to re-watch all the flashbacks. It is now my favorite recurring gag in this series.
Also, having a character flashback a new backstory EVERY SINGLE chapter/episode is a great way to reeeeally hammer in that deep deep characterization! Just look at Heinz Doofenshmirtz!
Ps. This is obviously a joke, I love Doofenshmirtz.
Doofenshmirtz is wonderful
"It all started on the day of my actual birth. Both of my parents failed to show up."
We need to go even deeper with the flashbacks bit. Eat your heart out Nolan.
It'll never be as large as his ego though
In my opinion, the best villains are the ones who love a lesser good too much and sacrifice greater goods in its pursuit.
Every time I start a book with a woman in the main cast I'm always uneasily waiting dor the part where she gets demonetized.
Do an episode on writing child characters.
Starlight Glimmer is the poster child for a character that skipped directly from minor childhood inconvenience to a threat to literally every living thing on the planet.
You left out the expansion pack backstory. In this backstory, the character has a large amount of unaccounted-for time when they were ostensibly not doing anything in particular, but in actuality they were doing everything, allowing them to have a history with everyone they ever meet. It's easiest with immortals or other long lived characters; in addition to vampires and highlanders, Wolverine is notable for having an expansion pack backstory.
Do you suppose you will ever upload a video on how to write women? I will admit, it's a subject that's always been difficult for me. I don't write very long stories, but women seldom feature very prominently in any of them. I think that women characters might be a useful topic to cover in a future video.
Most of my protagonists in my fiction works are female. I don't think they are any different or difficult to do than male protagonists
Just write them in a somewhat gender-neutral manner (for lack of a better term) and not think about the gender too much
The secret to writing good female characters is to write all your characters as gender-neutrally as possible and then arbitrarily assign them genders on a whim, making a few tiny adjustments where necessary.
I sound like I'm being facetious, but it usually works _surprisingly_ well.
Generally speaking, unless it's about very specialized topics like biological functions and/or cultural roles, just write female characters the same as male characters.
And if you have problems with any little details, try asking help from any women in your life. Real life people not social media or youtube.
What other people have already said is definitely all good advice to follow. As such, the only things I have to add on this topic as a male from what I've noticed in real life and of female characters who are written well and *not* like dumpster fires include that you'll likely have to at least somewhat consider how the different boundaries and social norms that exist for females than males might affect the character(s) even if that's not the focal point of your story and doesn't make it into the actual text itself. For instances, women and girls are generally allowed to express emotions beyond anger more openly than men and boys in the exact same situations, but that also comes with the double-edged expectation that women and girls "should" be more emotional, especially in such situations. Meaning that even if they're the *exact same character* otherwise, both in-universe and out of universe there's a greater chance that people will (unfairly) be confused by and/or even react negatively to a woman or girl who is stoic than they would a man or boy, often regarding her as "cold" at least initially. It's just something to (unfortunately) consider in my opinion.
Otherwise just make sure that you're not explicitly emphasizing a female character's being female unless you *really* need to (probably make another character look like an asshole) or it's genuinely an issue that only women or girls (in that environment) ever face. Just treating women and girls like people seems to work, both in real life and in fiction, and even the most "traditionally feminine" (for a given cultural) women and girls are going to differ in their opinions and actions in at least some small ways unless maybe they're clones. (And finally, for the love of Athena, if you ever have to describe their bodies with any significant detail in non-dialogue, then *please* don't use purple prose or [food] metaphors that come off as creepy as fuck.)
They're called females, duh
These videos are literally the light of my life
Don't forget to have the characters comfort someone after they reveal their tragic past, then ignore them for the rest of the story only until that one "story defining" moment where the tragic character overcomes their trauma off-screen! Bonus points if they also do something completely outside their level of skill or knowledge as their defining moment of overcoming trauma to prove how much they've "grown."
see, this is why you write immortal characters, its UNLIMITED backstory!! you get to stop every 5 minutes and info dump on the reason he can do anything. why does he speak French? he was one of Napoleon's soldiers, here, watch a 10-minute video about 1803. keep adding extra years and extra experiences, and obviously, he's amazing because he met every amazing person from every era in history and experienced every huge event, INFINITE BACKSTORY!
Also, depending on the type of immortal, he could also have died in every single well-known tragedy/war/other violent event in history.
You have given me an idea
I have a couple of those types of immortals in one of my stories, each from all over the world, and god is it funny to write about their contrasting lives. One of them has lived through multiple major historical events and done great things, whereas another just hopped from village to village and the only thing they can remember about some of these major periods is the feud they had with their neighbor for 20 years.
It's incredibly funny.
@@dangernoodledee111 Don't forget "Ah yes I was around back then but that also happened to be around that time that I was currently stuck in a cement wall, If you forgot that I told I was trapped in a cement wall for decades. Not to mention the time I was buried in a brick casket before that."
Any immortal character in urban fantasy be like:
this reminds me of in puss in boots 2 where perrito had a super tramutizeing backstory of him being abused by his owners and trying to kill him by dropping down a waterfall and doing various other terrible things to him and yet he was the most moral character in that entire movie and probably the entire shrek/puss in boots franchise and how big jack horner had a 100percent perfect life with absolutely zero problems loving parent's during his childhood is extremely has loads of other shit runs a successful pie factory only issue was being upstaged by pinocchio like once when he was child yet he ended up being the most evil character in the entire shrek/puss in boots franchise with the movie even kind of mocking the very concept of sympathetic villains and villain reformations with the ethical bug trying to be his therapist and automatically assuming there is good in everyone until he meets jack and discovers that he's actually completely irredeemable subverting the modern trend in movie's of making villains more 'redeemable' even if they actually aren't
I love this channel because I enjoy writing, but I'm also autistic. These videos are a great way to learn how to write better, and also interpret sarcasm. 😂
Mary Sue's backstory is the best thing ever. "She was bullied and set on fire every day."
TWA Honest Thoughts: If you are an amateur writer, do not write about SA. IT WILL NOT END WELL!
13 Reasons Why Writers: That sign won’t stop me because I can’t read!
What's SA?
@@Karak-_- It stands for "sexual assault", which I imagine I don't have to explain further. I'm unsure when the truncated term "SA" term started gaining traction though. Shrug.
@@MusicoftheDamned I thought it some euphemism for suicide.
@@Karak-_- Understandable given the show that was mentioned. I've never watched it, but I vaguely recall hearing that being sexually assaulted was why the main girl that kills herself does so in the first place. I may be wrong there though.
"Knowing" that show, it probably handled dealing with that topic almost as terribly as it did with glorifying suicide, especially as effective revenge, in the first place. So I would honestly be surprised to learn it handled *anything* well by the end of its too long run.
@@MusicoftheDamned I think it's been gaining traction for a while now on RUclips and Tiktok because clearly saying those two words (or the r word) meant demonetization, like JP indicated in the video with the yellow sign, and so people kept using the term in the comments/interactions, especially now that there's a lot more blocked words when you comment under a video. Interesting that yours didn't get hidden though.
Remember, if you're hating a certain character for murdering a fan favorite, revealing their tragic backstory makes all that hate go away. Isn't that right, Abby? :P
*And* get away with murder too~ It doesn't matter if the adopted daughter of the person you killed out of revenge doesn't get to kill you because that means she's just as bad as she is! Forgiveness is *always* about letting people get away because Abby is **very** specially tragic in this cast of tragic characters. Plus, she has to take care of someone too, so she gets to be in a similar role to Joel, and if you kill her, you're just the same. So, she gets to live! They're just salty their favorite character's dead and they're just sexist and transphobic.
I want to destroy all life in the universe due to my tragic backstory:
When I was 4 years old I went to the supermarket with my dad.
I got distracted for a breef moment and when I looked around he was not there.
Luckily I found him a few seconds afterwards but the trauma made me realize that supermarkets are evil, so I need to destroy all super marlets and all life in the universe in order to make sure that nobody will make a super market ever again.
Then I shall fill the world with a nuclear fire, for the minuscule amount of time I was left in the cold food section alone.
I'm shocked that you made a video on dinosaurs before character backstories
Edit: not just dinosaurs, mid series shake ups, shipping and lovemaking scenes first before doing backstories. So you could think of this video as the backstory that really should have been terribly advised far earlier
Obviously patching it in the middle of act 3 like all great writers. As we all know, the middle of pitched final battle is the prefect time to have an angsty flashback unrelated to the current opponent that doesn't effect combat.
Shipping and lovemaking are not as important as they are urgent
Don’t forget to throw them in right before a character is killed off so the death can mean something and we can actually warrant the character existing
Even better when you go back and retcon other characters to be mean so the previous antagonist can now be the hero in their backstory! It turns out all the things they did that *seemed* terrible and unforgivable were really just misunderstood attempts to do the right thing in very bad circumstances caused by everyone else! Whew, we almost acknowledged that actual evil exists in the world and that people will really choose to do bad things for selfish reasons. That was close.
Three types of RPG backstories:
-This is Uriah von Kostrok, the Trice-Cursed. He is a descendant of an ancient family of demigod kings that was deposed in a coup. His mother hid in the magical woods, where she raised him until her death. On her deathbed she gave him his ancestral cursed sword and told him to venture into the world and find his family's lost heirlooms that will allow him to regain the throne.
-This is Tom, the axeman. He figured adventuring is as good a career path as any, so he bought an axe and a shield and he adventures now.
-This is Cheesus Krust, the baker-prophet. He wants to find his god and learn how to make pizzas from him.
Can't wait for the lore building video in which JP adds the old man from an ancient civilization who tells the entire story of the dead kingdom rather than letting the protagonists to discover it themselves so we can reach a 5 levels flashbacks within flashbacks.
Perhaps it's because I'm rereading it as I buy hard copies, or just because it's my favorite work of fiction, but I really like how Dr. Stone handles backstory. It always does it in a good spot and always feels directly relevant when it is brought up. It also usually has an in-universe reason for being shown to the audience. Usually a character is thinking about the past for a present reason, or it's the time when things finally calm down and stories can be shared. It never takes too long to go through, but always contextualizes something in the story. It also usually involves Senku somehow, be it what would have happened if Tsukasa was Senku's friend in their childhood, what the astronauts did to set up the village for Senku, the relationship between Senku and his former mentor, etc, so it always feels relevant. I especially appreciate it more on rereads.
I personally like a small chunk backstory approach in my writing too. One character attacked the main character and his younger sister, only for the attacker to lose and be stuck in critical condition, leading to the main character giving a cautious second chance at life to the attacker and also his sister never feeling comfortable around the guy that tried to hurt her, which in the present then leads to the guy's quest to build a better relationship with her. It doesn't last too long, just enough to get the idea across.
My favorite stock backstory is "retired monster". Someone who used to be a remorseless evil criminal and stopped either because they got too old or made enough money to retire. Whether they now show remorse about any of it is left up to the writer.
-Don't let the backstory be the defining trait of your character (ie, utilize their present day arc.)
-Don't tell the majority of your story through flashbacks, only key important moments that are necessary for proceedings.
-Don't always put hard facts to their past; it's sometimes better to let readers fill in the blanks for themselves :)
What's really helped me when writing a characters backstory into a work is by understanding who primarily benefits from hearing it. Is it done primarily or only to inform the reader? Is it done to inform other characters in the story? A little of both?
Sometimes just cutting to a backstory is better than creating some convoluted set up for why a character is suddenly expositing to the supporting cast. If the other characters don't need to know or won't benefit from hearing a characters backstory then they don't need to hear it, just tell the audience and move on.
10:20 fun fact: this is exactly how "Frankenstein" is written. Some boat captain wrote a letter to his sister about the story this doctor (aka Frankenstein) told him about the monster that he created, and during the retelling the monster reappears and tells Frankenstein about his time alone in the world and this family's shed he was hiding in and whose family drama recounted
J.P., I recently finished my first ever book. It's not long, and it's probably not great, but your videos helped me immensely in its construction and creation. Having a road map of what not to do helped immeasurably when revising and editing. After alot of work, I finally have something I'm proud of and I have you to thank in large part. Thanks for your content. If you'd like to read it, let me know
Good luck on your writer’s journey, dude!
@@iceyflowergamer4474 Thank you! If you're interested in reading it, I actually started a RUclips channel that will just be me reading story chapters and monster entries in a bestiary I made of custom monsters. It's a medieval fantasy genre type of story. First uploads will be next week, unless you'd like to read it digitally. If it's not your thing tho that's cool
Dude. You have incredible timing. I was just about to flesh out the backstories of my game's companion system. Now I can use this advice like a checklist!!
Also keep in mind that a characters entire fascination and skill set comes from their parents (or more specifically ONE parent and the other never gets mentioned).
I am a great archeologist because my father was the greatest archeologist.
My father was a great martial artist and he thought me everything he knew, so I am now a great martial artist.
My mother didn't want me to become a victim, so she constantly trained me in the use of guns.
My father and grandfather before me unsuccessfully tried to find the Lorestones, so now it falls upon me to finish what they started.
Like, nobody is like "Oh, my father was a plumber and my mom was an accountant. I took to martial arts and archeology out of personal interest and it had nothing to do with them"
Flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks are great for running gags!
6:35 oh, don't get me started... I had a GM that would insist on having a prominent 'female character' in every game he made that would always have SA on her background, and that should totaly justify we siding with her when she decided to geno**** the group from where a couple jerks committed the act against her... and it got worse and worse every game, to the point that we stopped siding with such characters, and the GM got mad at us for that. Heck, one of the players even considered making a sexist character just so he could cut off such "plot hooks" on their roots in one game because he couldn't stand hearing about "muh said AS backstory... we should totally ****cide that metropolis over there because the current leader, who got to power through a badly explained coup, was the one who abused me, and let's ignore all the civilians currently opressed under him that will die just so I can have my revenge!"
Love the running gag about flashbacks being used to go back to other flashbacks of flashbacks of flashbacks. It reminds me of the time...
I think it’s ok to do detailed backstories as long as you understand that it might not even be part of the narrative. It’s a tool for you to understand the character, leave the lore to lore channels.
"Ninja! There is something I forgot to tell you!"
~ Sensei Wu.
Long before time had a name, the First Spinjitzu Master created Ninjago using four elemental weapons. But when he passed, a dark presence sought out to collect them all: Lord Garmadon. So I, Sensei Wu, his brother, sought out to find four ninja to collect them first. - Sensei Wu
12:17
About the "raised on a barn" backstory
Let me explain the real reason why the trope gets used so much.
the humble farmer is the perfect "average everyday man", as in he is commonly understood to be near the bottom of the social hiarchy, allowing for a clear "rags to riches" story, since it can almost always only go up.
At the same time, the farmer is considered to be uneducated and not knowlegable about the wider world, which makes it super easy to throw world building exposition at them.
14:11 A yes, reminds me that one time Doofenshmirtz lost his train toy, in the alternative timeline and because of that he managed to become an actual threat that conquered the city
Dont forget how character can only have one backstory and that defines all aspects of their personality, just like regular people.
This video reminds me of some people who think Trauma=Automatically good character
I appreciate you mentioning not glamorizing poverty, that tends to be a problem and it's tacky and tasteless.
Also, I lol'd at the segment on parents. One of my WIPs has some of the characters' parents fighting right alongside the characters - it's just always frustrated me so much that the parents in stories can't be like, alive and well and interested in helping out the cause. xD Why not, right? Plus, especially for the fantasy genre I think, the demographics have changed over time to where a lot of readers/consumers of media are parent age or even grandparent age, and I think it's important to have representation for the readers to familiarize with. When I made the protags for that WIP I mentioned, they were older than me, and now I'm almost old enough to be their parents, so there's a weird feeling of detachment/defamiliarization there that kinda sucks if you don't have a variety of age in your best characters.
Everytime i see you post i get elated ,then i get saddened because i have to wait for the next one, i love your work i come back to your videos over and over because they have so much thought and care put into them thank you.
One of the many reasons I LOVED Monica towa as a villain, she has a horrible past, a rough childhood, But she's still the worst, and she never gets a redemption arc.
These videos make me want to create a plethora of new characters at any occasion.
This actually makes me think of the time I was in an rp server on discord where there was this one player with a character that DEFINITELY wasn't just a stereotypical edgelord anime protagonist who had a laughably convoluted backstory, and it went a little something like this. He was born into a broken household and had an abusive father who he watched kill his mother before trying to sell him into slavery but that's when his powers activated and killed his dad...only to be revealed later on that was all just a lie! Nothing but fake memories he gained after being injected with some revival serum (that also somehow manifested a dollar store venom) and his parents are actually nice people who actually knew about all of this but for some reason didn't do anything about it (and this was revealed several sessions later mind you). He was also going to try and make him some kind of "chosen one" and have him make some heroic self sacrifice in the final arc but that thankfully didn't go anywhere.
Thank you yet again, mind reader; I was legit thinking about character backstory so much lately just TRYING my damned-est to nail it down.
One of my favorite shows with smart use of backstory is the show Leverage. They did a great job introducing elements of the cast backstories as needed, but kept the exposition dumps pretty to the point without killing the pace of the episodes. Usually thanks to very strong performances by the cast. Also since they introduced the cast as experts at the top of their fields, it made sense they'd have a lot of experiences under their belts.