Character musings (Theo)
I’ve been working my way through a drawing meme which is essentially expression practice: twenty five boxes, each labelled with an emotion/expression, for you to draw your character with said expression. I’ve decided to start with Theo.
One thing I’ve noticed – which is a thing I’ve noticed before – is that some expressions are really difficult for me to draw him with. And the reason isn’t so much that I can’t draw those expressions, for the most part, as I can’t picture him with them. It’s hard for me to imagine him in the appropriate emotional state to wear the expression. It’s come up before when I think, “I want to try drawing Theo like this” and then find myself completely unable to picture him being like that.
For some of those, it’s because of his character/personality. Like on the drawing meme, there’s a box for “flirty”. Theo… doesn’t really flirt. (He’s not much of one for small talk, either.) But others, I realized, are for a completely different reason. I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting him to show sadness or fear, for example, and it finally dawned on me last night as to why.
He is, basically, a spoiled rich boy.
It’s not immediately obvious, because he doesn’t have any of the stereotypical traits one associates with being positively drowned in privilege. He doesn’t have obvious selfishness or a strong sense of entitlement. Basically, he is spoiled, but he was never a brat.
He’s the only child of loving, wealthy parents who are unable to have any other children and who weren’t expecting to even be able to have him. His mother was especially inclined to indulge his every whim and his father was a generally cheerful, tolerant man who wasn’t much inclined to much in the way of discipline. He was not much of a target for bullying, due to being taller than other boys his age for most (if not all) of his life, and to his natural self-confidence rendering attempts at hostile teasing for his eccentricisms largely ineffective.
He never intentionally caused trouble, although he would get into trouble on a few occasions off at school as a side-effect of his casual disregard for rules or authority. As his transgressions were never especially severe, however, neither were the reprimands or punishments he received. As I mentioned earlier, his father in particular was disinclined to discipline him unless absolutely needed. Since Theo rarely made it necessary, it rarely happened. He never got into any major fights with any of his friends, or lost a friend, or had any injuries beyond the normal scrapes and bruises of childhood.
In short, nothing bad really ever happened to him.
(At least not for the first twenty-odd years of his life – which is about where book one picks up.)
I must have been aware of this on some level, but realizing it explicitly explains so much. It explains his assumptions that things will work out; his inability and disinclination to really understand Sam’s qualms at breaking (spoken and unspoken) societal rules; his, as I believe Sam puts it semi-jokingly at some point in the first draft, “distinct lack of self-preservation”. He has no experiential framework for negative consequences, so they simply do not register as real possibilities.
It’s a fascinating thing to think about and, quite honestly, is helping me refine my story arcs. Character development! Hurray!
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