RaD Characters

Rumour has it that Kibin will be accepting paid commissions in the very near future, which is really cool! Check it out at: https://kibin.com/index.php

Additionally, school is back in, so I'm busy. First essay is due tomorrow, and covers The Taming of the Shrew, which is the most blatantly sexist piece of literature that I've read in a very long time, though that's not what my essay says at all.

So in keeping with a Shakespearean theme, I'd like to talk about Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern characters.

For those of you who aren't quite sure what I'm talking about, or who haven't read Hamlet, which is where the characters I am referencing are from, I will make it very simple: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two characters that are so inseparable, and so similar that they are for all intents and purposes, a single character in your narrative. The same can be said of Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, and the fat pirate, and the pirate with the wooden eye in Pirates of the Caribbean.

There are a few reasons to use a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern (RaD) character. The first, and one I just discovered, is that it makes for an interesting acronym. The second, and on a more serious note, is that characters like this generate dialogue. Characters, and there are exceptions such as Alice in Lewis Carroll's works, do not normally speak to themselves as if they are two people, and thus if suspension of belief is to be maintained, then a character can be split into two physical components, without actually creating a new character.

RaD characters generate dialogue through the sheer expedient of having more voices to add to the melee. In the same way they open up possibilities for wordplay, and fill space in a scene with a lot of movement. Ever wish your character could be in two places at once, just for a scene? Well, a RaD character can, as long as you are careful to realign the characters at the end of the scene, and make them persistently similar.

Fred and George are another perfect example of RaD characters, taken from Harry Potter. These characters are twinned (pun intended) in a reader's mind, and so their connection is heightened. When one is killed, the other feels it more acutely, and readers implicitly understand the interaction between the two. It is a great way to remove a character with all the sympathies that such an action generates from the reader, while still having the character live on. I would call it a road between the Song of Ice and Fire's killing off willy-nilly of characters, and some author's inability to kill their characters. In essence, you can kill a character, without removing him/her from the plot, or from your reader's hearts!

That's all for me for today, but I'll post as frequently as I can.