bringing together the living, the dead, and the undead in an apocalyptic fight for survival
• Theme:
BUILDING TRUST
• What makes your hero get up in the morning?
Cara's will to live, and a strong distrust of those around her
• What is her heart’s deepest desire, conscious or otherwise?
To find comfort, feel safe, and be able to relax knowing she isn’t alone or the only one that cares if she lives or dies
• What does she think she wants?
Solidarity: A community of strictly humans, no vampires, no zombies. Just the safety of her own ‘kind’
• What does she actually want?
Security: a safe environment where she feels protected, no matter where that strength or security comes from as long as it comes from a place of caring about her wellbeing because she herself matters to someone.
• What tangible goals has she set to achieve them?
She keeps her guard up against the vampire inhabitants of the safehouse where she lives, and questions the treaty between them and her human companions, especially to the house leader, Ethan, who has the authority to make change to their rules/house laws.
• Is her goal possible?
Not without paying a huge price and suffering many losses in the fallout
• How can we relate to her goal?
Human behavior has often been suspicious and distrusting of those who are different from ourselves. We create labels to separate the us’s from the them’s. Often our prejudices while perhaps based on some truths, are not applicable to generic groups as a whole and we come to learn that assuming such is to draw the wrong conclusions about individuals we do not know.
• Why do we want her to succeed?
We can relate to her fear. Personal safety is one of the basic needs of life, right next to food, water, and shelter. We can see ourselves through her as human beings, and we can empathize with her survival tactic when she tries to minimize her own personal risk by shutting out others who have a physical advantage that could and are incentivized to harm her.
edit: Now on facebook.com/twocoinsRPS
Question #2: How does your hero need to change?
• What are your protagonist’s flaws?
She believes that she is enough – an island unto herself, a tough-guy who has to do it all alone. But in a world plagued by a zombie apocalypse and populated by both humans and vampires, a lone wolf is often a dead wolf and she is over estimating herself, or else underestimating the alternative, which would be to occasionally entrust her safety to others.
• Which of them will pose the biggest hindrance to her success in attaining her goal?
Pushing people away is going to be adverse to her goal of attaining community, safety, and security.
• Where does her primary flaw come from?
Her fear of having her trust abused or taken advantage of. She’s afraid if she trusts others, that they will use exploit it and she’ll end up dead.
• What are her wounds and backstory?
She's completely alone in the new world. She has no ties, no family, no one to miss her if she went missing. She's also new to the "safe house" where she has taken refuge, but still feels unsafe. It defends against the perils of zombies, keeping them out, but welcomes vampires in, one of which has already tried to kill her once before and she is still traumatized from that experience.
• How can we relate to her flaw?
At some point in life we come to realize, usually through personal experience, that not everyone deserves your trust. Not everyone would respect your trust, there are people in the world who would use it to harm you. From that we can sympathize with her suspicion, distrust, and doubt.
• Why do we want her to change?
Because we as a species are communal, we do want to belong and we want to be accepted. As we see ourselves in her shoes, we can see why she is so desperate for companionship but also so afraid of it failing. We want her to overcome her fear and find genuine security in the person she comes to trust. We as the outside observers can tell that Micajah, despite being a vampire, is genuinely concerned about her safety and wellbeing and wants to keep her alive. We want her to see that too, and to finally trust someone enough to be able to relax and just breathe without living in fear.
**Project is now live at TwoCoinsRPS.com , this course helped flesh out my main character!**
Question #3: Why do we care?
• What does she stand for?
The basic needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy
How can we relate to her?
We share those same basic needs
• What are her quirks, habits and mannerisms?
She uses a lot of snark or pessimism to mask fear or doubt.
• What does she look and sound like?
She’s an adult woman who’s experienced the pre and post zombie realities and felt betrayed in both. She has the voice of a skeptic, with the snark that goes with it, and her guard is always alert, her eyes always observing analyzing and judging her reality.
• What makes her unique?
She wants to be left alone in a world where people are dying to find safety in numbers. She goes against every impulse of the other humans who are willing to compromise and bargain with the vampires for the added security, when she herself would rather take her chances trying to survive them and the zombies on her own.
• Who matters to her most in the world?
Herself.
• What does she fear?
Betrayal, death.
• How does she act in front of her greatest idol?
She doesn’t have one
• What makes her cry?
realizing that she has grown close to someone and realizing they’re going to die.
• What makes her laugh?
outwitting someone with inherent superiority (vampires with heightened strength, speed, etc.)
• If her house was on fire, what’s the one thing she would save?
Whichever Humans she could reasonably alert and lead out, but she wouldn’t go back in for anyone else but the vampire Micajah (not that she’d want to admit this to herself).
• Who cares about her most in the world?
The vampire, Micajah.
Question #4: What are the stakes?
• Why is it absolutely necessary for our main character to succeed?
If she dies, we would lose hope for life in this reality
• What terrible thing will happen if she doesn’t get what she wants?
She will exhaust herself, put herself at terrible risk, and die.
• What terrible thing will happen if she doesn’t grow in the way she needs?
she’ll face the same fate. What she wants can only be achieved through changing the way she needs to change. She needs to learn to trust her housemates, even the vampires (perhaps especially the vampires) if she doesn’t want to excommunicate herself and die exposed to the zombie infested world. If she refuses their help then she will die
Fill in the blanks:
Question #5: What are the obstacles?
• What or who is standing in between her and her goal?
She is standing in her own way.
• What or who is standing in between her and positive change?
Her fear is prohibiting her from seeing what she needs.
• How can the obstacles between her and her goal act as a catalyst for change?
Discovering that in spite of her distrust, the ones she villainizes are the same people who have protected and defended her continued existence, especially when she failed to defend and save herself
Multimedium Artist