So like, in my danganronpa fanfiction I’ve sort of hit a dead end, as everyone hates everyone else for being different ideologies. I want to have a scene where Pavel convinces them to put their differences aside temporarily so they don’t all get murdered after the first class trial, but I feel like that would be pushing the apolitical “muh politics bad let’s all be friends line.” However, the alternative would be him just sitting in his room all day thinking about shit until somebody dies.
Any thoughts?
The vast majority of people are not super ideological and even those who are can sometimes be surprisingly flexible in their ideology depending on the circumstances. Sometimes people will hold seemingly conflicting views at the same time, people are messy and complicated and typecasting them into clearly defined ideological boxes usually ends in you writing flat and contrived characters. Contradictions abound in reality. Generally a good rule of thumb for predicting people’s behavior is to identify what their primary motivation is at any given time. What is the main conflict or the primary contradiction which will force people to temporarily unite despite secondary contradictions? Dire material needs and existential threats are usually enough to get people to rationalize compromise and stretch their beliefs somewhat.
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
Related to this, another good trick to make characters more life-like is to base them on two real people because it can make those internal contradictions know visceral. If you base a character on only one person, you only know them from the outside so you don’t see their internal struggle. But you can craft an internal conflict by mixing the ‘external’ appearanxe of two people. The resolution of that conflict can then drive your story.
deleted by creator
Every fucking Ayn Rand character.