Character Spotlight: Catherine Marie HoxleyTo inaugurate the October 20 Journal, I thought we'd take a bit of deeper look at the thoughts that went into creating the characters.
First out is the herione of the tale, ms. Catherine Hoxley. I'll be honest. Her character design is not at all my doing. When I started the process of plannig the comic, I hired the artist Arthur Wang to do the cover pages for the three chapters. For Rai, the male lead, I had specific requests, but for Catherine, I gave him complete freedom to go where he wanted.
The story first came about in a writer's workshop I particiapted in a few years ago, and the first chapter is more or less exactly derived from a short story I wrote there. In a first draft, Catherine was there alone, the last survivor, and it was more of a introspective tale of regret and courage in the face of an even more ambiguous threat that had consumed her life in the wake of an unknown tragic incident 10 years ago. So if you think I am conservative with my info now, you should have read the first attempt at the story. Subsequent drafts eventually saw both Rai and then Ansgar added.
In the beginning, Catherine was for me a flailing attempt at capturing the elusive "Strong Female Character" that everyone keeps talking about. I've later come to the realisation that it is more important to just write well fleshed out characters, no matter their gender. It is important to me to let the characters have their weaknesses and flaws, than creating overly powerful characters that can be role models. That's not what I proiritise. Catherine has her flaws. She is quick to anger, she has an addictive personality and like the others, she has done something terrible to land her in the predicament she is in. She carries great guilt, and is often not strong enough not to let it impede in her life.
What I want to do with her is to explore how a person manages to carry her past, and the knowledge of the horrific things she has done, while still having to be strong enough to weather the isolation and struggle that comes with her plight. How does she deal with the last few people she has any relation to dying around her. What will she do if she finds herself the last survivor. (Not saying that she will be! But she might...)
When it comes down to it, Oct20 is a post-apocalyptic story of three people stuck in a post-human wasteland. It just so happens that society keeps going around them. They are simply shut out from it.
And Catherine is one of the lenses I want to show this through.
You hit the nail on the head with the statement about the strongest characters being the most fleshed-out, regardless of gender, race, ability, etc. Cat is a memorable character because she acts believably for a woman who must bear her burdens, and while she isn't always strong enough to handle everything, at the end of the day she's a good person doing better than most would with her troubled past and apparent death sentence.
ReplyDeleteThis is the one mantra I've always held when writing stories; "Only superheroes overcome. The rest of us cope." Living life on a day by day basis, especially in dangerous times, is far more interesting than being able to solve all your problems.