Superverse in Brief Blog 7
Heroes and Heroines of the Superverse
Stories, especially those epic in proportion are immensely challenging. No different to producing some of the mammoth sized computer games on the market today. I’m a big Fall Out 4 fan and the latest is, No Man’s Sky. Readers, like gamers, who spend big hours in their chosen genre want to be immersed. Not just “oh my, look at that”, kind of thing, but like the Epics of Hemingway, Vern or Tolkien, be truly in the fabric of those worlds. Immersion is everything in a story. It’s not just the vastness of those worlds that the writer strives for, but to pull off one of the greatest illusions ever presented, and that is, to make the reader/observer believe they are in that world.
Just for a moment forget the push of publishers and media driving you to buy what they intend to make the most for themselves out of. What do you want from your characters and their worlds? From the first, when I started writing the Citadel 7 Superverse© series I was hell bent on all of my characters being as real as any reader could know the person living next door only with a serious side serve of radical. But those heroes and heroines come from different lives than the one we lead and out of the heads of some pretty abstract imagination. A hero’s life is bigger, more fantastic and vivid than we see or experience life to be. So How can a writer get the reader/observer into that world? How do you like your heroes best served? Do you like them as an antihero, the reluctant one, the Bat Man, Jessica Jones or one my favorites, the Dead Pool type. Should they be just dark, like The Joker, Hans Landar, Nurse Ratched or Voldemort, or do you like the pithy squeaky-clean kind, He Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man or Frodo. I like mine broken because they have so much more to get right to get the job done. Those who never intended to be “the hero” at any point. They were thrust into the breach by circumstance where they had to step up or a lot of bad shit would go down. Each of those heroes just mentioned have an epic story too, just as my Commander Bloch does, he is very broken too. I think the trick to creating a good hero or heroin is that they are complex and ridged characters at the same time. The world they live in and all its complexity has to in many ways mirror who they are.
In the Citadel 7 Superverse heroes and heroines come in many flavors, from the immensely complex, like Commander Ben Bloch, Ann Mac and Scarzen, Thorr and Beetaa, to the oddballs, like Jenaoin, Roland and Trever, or the everyman, Rudy Barabas in my title Dead End. All of their worlds individually and collectively are broken.
