What types of characters are you favorite?

Those who have a backstory of horrible proportions, an example being a current book I am reading. A grown-up is still scared from abuse from their parents when she was a child and is now on a quest towards salvation of others. This allows me to really get myself behind the protagonist, as I can feel their struggles.

 

I happen to like characters that don't require too much description to picture or visualise - usually on the physical end. The mental processes are a lot different and can be more varied - and I like that being varied, but I think they work best as a simple baseline concept that has plenty of wiggle room.

This has two intended consequences: first, the reader can fill in any 'missing' or 'vague' gaps how he or she chooses (more apparent with physical characteristics); second, the story itself will allow the character a lot of room to grow and change, if you only set a few things as given at the start (rather than a lot of things). Character development is an interesting beast, but altogether necessary for a good story, and the more room that is allowed for growth to happen, so much the better.

 

Visually, a lot of my characters tend to look very different, but whenever I draw a character, the design tends to incorporate a lot of flowing cloth, either in the form of robes, a scarf, a cloak, or something like that. I guess I like them because they show movement better in still drawings. Things like scars are great for showing what a character has been through in the past. If they haven't done something that would have resulted in a scar, things like their choice of attire can be used the same way. A character I'm playing in a game currently has a semi-transparent cloth mask that covers her mouth that's supposed to symbolize the fact that she never lies, but that she can still keep secrets. (I guess it also illustrates her love of symbolism since that's a thing she actively decided to do?)

Story-wise, I like seeing choices that push a character's moral limitations. It's things like that that make a story unpredictable and exciting. Like in Avatar when Aang was faced with the very realistic possibility that he would have to kill the Fire Lord, even though that went against everything he had been taught as an airbender monk. He even tried asking his past lives for advice and even another airbender said that he would probably have to do it. The problems that characters are faced with and exactly how they go about solving them illustrates a lot about their personality.

I tend to like/make a lot of characters with tragic back stories. Once I was making a character for a game and realized that I might be going a little too far with the tragedy, so I held back a little bit and kept my character's friend and son alive, in spite of my initial instinct for them to both have died. It actually turned out interesting later on in the game where I was put into a situation where I had to choose which one I was going to save and which one I would have to let die, which ties back into my point of moral dilemmas I guess.