What is the worst thing you have ever bestowed on a character in terms of personality or act or whatever the character is meant to be or do? And would you feel guilty if one or two of your readers got offended? This is just a general question because one must , the writer, cover all avenues and awareness is key.
I would feel guilty if none of the readers would not get offended. If you are even a bit truthful about anything, you will offend those who see dishonesty and opportunism as a good chance to go forward. They will get offended. Some of them will seek for retaliation. For you it is a mark that shows you have done something right. You can avoid offending anyone only by being so insignificant that none has a reason or a trigger to get offended. If you get bullies, thieves and crooks offended, you have done your work well. If some one of them starts to stalk you, you have done it very well.
I'll answer the second question, and put the first one aside. Would I feel guilty if one or two of my readers got offended? No. And not some readers. All readers. I would feel guilty, or at least bothered, of I offended myself. It's happened before.
I meant I censored myself. I was writing things I really didn't like, and that offended me, so I censored myself (took that stuff out put and rewrote it). But, for the story I'm writing now, I'm thinking of ing some of it back in. Maybe, some of that offending stuff went away.
At one point in my story, one of my characters kills another one. It's not her fault, she wasn't in control of her actions. The killed character's son, despite knowing this fact as well as having the killed character tell him to help her, actively decides to try and kill her. He gets pretty close, too. After everything quiets down, they do make up, eventually. Ah, I do have another character, who comes from the criminal underworld, who tortures a grunt to find his boss by systematically shooting off fingers. He only gets two off before the grunt cracks, but he would've kept going. I would probably feel bad if someone got offended, but it be a momentary pang of guilt because I don't like upsetting people. If I could, I'd make something that didn't offend anyone, but I know that's basically impossible, and way too much for my skillset to handle. So, I know that I won't be able to avoid offending everyone, so I try not to worry about it that much.
No, I like what I write. It's just that I didn't want to deal with that character's violence any longer. It only happened once that I remember.
My first long story I tried to write, originally called Nights of Bloodshed, went through many stages. It was about a war against dragons, like Spencer, and humans. In the first version, the main character, Spencer, who would have been only seven years old if he was human, witnessed his mother get murdered by a small group of outlaws. They threaten his life, and I forget why they didn’t just kill him. They tell him something involving “there will be bloodshed tonight.” Something else I forget is why the now-orphan (his father was presumed dead, but in reality, he was captured by the humans and trained to kill other dragons) ran from home. Out in the snow, he passed out, and a scientist finds him. He turns him into a cyborg (the third title was Cyborg, but by the time that was the title, it was a metaphor for “living but not alive,” a theme that carried over to my current WIP. It had no literal cyborgs anymore,) and even goes to the extent to put metal tips on his ears for threatening decoration. Those hurt like Hell! His name was changed to Bloodshed, and he was trained to kill other dragons like his father was. It’s super fucked up honestly. Would you believe I was thirteen when I came up with this idea? In later versions, his mother never died, the outlaws were only thieves, and there was no evil scientist. I might have been planning on killing the mother again, but never got to that point in my writing before I became bored of my own story.
Good question, you actually made me think. I wrote this story in my creative writing class (about 3 years ago), we had to write the most despicable villain doing the most despicable thing we could think and at the end of the class we would read our stories and the class would vote to see who was worthy of a 10 (only those with 10 votes or more, it was a classroom of 30 so only 3 could get a 10), the teacher handed us one pre-requisite we should follow in the form of genre, some got high fantasy, some got low fantasy, some got Sci-Fi and another chunk got historical fiction set in a certain period, I was in the latter category, specific period??? pirates. So I wrote about a pirate captain of a small flotilla (3 ships), they attacked a fleet consisting of 4 "travel" ships filled with rich people and 2 "guard" ships (I wasn't exactly an expert on ships), of course, the pirates won, they sunk both guard ships and killed every single man regardless of age and old women, they decided to sell the rest of the passengers as hookers in Jamaica but there were too many for them to carry (I think they could only carry 60 and they had about 100) so the captain, in all his "wisdom" decided that they would "test" them, this way they could keep those who were more appropriate for the job and kill the rest, so they tested them and selected who would go to Jamaica and who would be shark food. And so I took a page out of Nazi Germany and killed them in the most sadistic way I could think of, the captain had all the "trash" tied together in a line (they also tied their hands), put a few of them in the plank and shot at last (or first) woman, he also thought that it would be hilarious to tie the second to last woman in such a way that when the last woman was killed by the gunshot, not only would she fall with her but she would also break her neck and stay hanging lifeless for as long as the line could hold the weight of 2 dead females. While this was happening the captain was laughing and the rest of the crew were betting on how long would they be able to stay on the deck. Finally, when everyone was in the water, they started to shoot at a few of them and to throw dead bodies to the water with the intent of "summoning" the sharks, and sure enough, when the fins started to show up they were betting on who would die first and last. Needless to say, I got a 10 on the assignment with 17 votes, a friend of mine got second place with 11 votes by killing kittens and puppies with a tree grinder and showering their owners with the blood, so not only we got a 10, but we were called the king and queen of psychos for like... a month.
What was the point? Also, your pirate story sounds a little too close to absurd for me. Certain point with shocking violence where it just feels surreal instead of frightening.
Hmmm, engineer almost-World-War-I for fairly petty political reasons? It doesn't as edgy as some personal cruel torture but the in direct and other-people-were-involved-too does nothing to diminish the scale of the potential damage.
Of what??? I actually agree, but hey, I made it in 1 1/2 hours so it was a first draft with no research and no fucks given because gosh darn it, I wanted that 10. Edit I now realize that I forgot to answer the 2nd question... but of course, anyone with half a functioning brain would've realized that no, I don't give a fuck if I offend someone, in fact, the only reason why I don't give negative fucks it's because I don't go out of my way to be offensive, it's just that if it happens it happens.
Why ask people to come up with these scenarios? It doesn't seem like the most productive creative exercise to just make gorn.
Well all three MCs are extremely violent. Though to be fair Major Graxis is the most reserved of the three, even though he chops people up with a pair of twin short swords. Through out the overall story the worst stuff that happens all the way from the first book up until the present spot in the sequel WIP. In no particular order: Decapitation Pistol whipping a guys eye out of socket Breaking a woman's spine with brute force Impaling with a plasma sword (more horrific than messy) Near slicing in half with shrapnel Dismemberment by either explosives or bladed weapons Pounding a guys face off literally with basically brass knuckles Biting off a finger Sucking out an eyeball and consuming it Rapping a guys knuckles with a metal meter stick exposing the bones Ramming a rifle muzzle into the eye socket to muffle a gunshot Lifting up a guy by his cheek using a surgical retractor Euthanizing a woman who had all of her organs removed Crushing a guys skull with brute force Smashing people with a heavy war-hammer Stabbing a guy in the heart with a combat knife Neck breakings Carving up a woman's face like a jack-o-lantern Beating a guy to death with the grip of a trench knife Allusion to and actual flaying alive of three people Crudely removing embedded objects or medical practices in general Punching though a guy showing him is heart People burnt due to explosions Many, many bullet wounds Shrapnel wounds from artillery bombardment Removal of molars forcibly Solitary confinement in a pitch black metal cell Use of large stones for stealth kills Mental and verbal threats Back handing a hybrid female that hit a child Slight abuse of a stimulant to keep alert Smoking and drinking Ripping a guys arms off Taking a knife slash to the face Taking a knife stabbed through the end of a tail Plunging a knife into a guys skull Use of seduction as a means of benefit Live dissection of an alien Physcial examination of alien genitalia Harvesting organs of the poor for military use Throwing a sword that get lodged in a woman's liver Knocking out people with fists and other devices Life and death hand to hand combat Other psychological and physical tortures Alien sexual acts Alien and Human nudity Cat calling Alien and Human romantic relationships, some mixed species (Straight, Bi, Gay, Lesbian) Capture of alien species for slave labor purposes And quite possibly Uldavarion cooking in general. (This is just the general overview of everything form both the Protags and Antags, and in the context of war taking place in the 28th century. Mind you that we don't discriminate against male/female, young/old, Human/Grey/Centurian/Uldicvaion, and Corlixia the bio-engineered female that is 1000yrs old. ) What is there to be guilty about, it is just a fun 80's style gruesome romp fest with some interesting and kinda thought provoking undertones. Sure it might offend poeple, for language, violence, and other general themes, but that is on the reader and their personal biases and thoughts to such subject matter. Think that covers the general gist of my bigger work of Sci-fi/War story.
Some of the worst things that happen to my WIP characters Mortally wounded by their possessed friend, then possessed in turn- keeping them at the edge of death but not in control of their body. Turned into a vampire involuntarily and manipulated into killing people, and sleeping with someone they're not actually sexually compatible with, both repeatedly over more than two years Pumped for information by a close relative, who uses that information to stage an attack against them and their friends and help kidnap one of them, and then said relative trying and nearly succeeding to kill them Their boyfriend from another social group is killed by people from their own group in a pointless brawl
Worst thing - any kind of difficult choice, especially when it goes against morals and principles and was not something they wanted to do but had to do. If you want to kill a wagon full of orphans its' not that hard on the character (maybe for you the writer) but if they inadvertently did it or had no choice for some horrible reason it can bring about guilt and shame and of course internal conflict which we like to read about. Other bit no. I wouldn't like to cause offence to anyone and it's never my intention because I have no issues against others in any way. But I find people are so bloody sensitive these days that I just don't care about offending some people. You could fart and offend someone these days (maybe not the best example) but you get the idea.
I think you have a legit concern. There's two reasons people decide (and yes, being offended is a conscious choice) to take offence to something. One, because they just want to. They are people who just want to feel offended because it gives a sense of moral superiority. These are not people you should worry about. You could technically write a story about a paperclip and they'll still be offended. The second reason is more understandable. The second reason people get offended isn't because you put something in there, but because you didn't put any thought when you put it in there. Take adding characters from marginalized groups. The people who do the worse with diversity characters, are ironically the ones with good intentions, but none the less, they didn't put any thought into, proving that intention alone isn't enough. One of the worse examples was a comic called America published by Marvel comics. The character was Latino and gay and the writer was Latino and gay. Slam dunk, right? No, because the writer put zero thought into the character or plot. She put no thought into it, it didn't matter what her background was. The comics read like the early 90's cheap "say no to drugs" cross overs with licensed characters. (Now before you over think this, remember, you should be putting thought into all your characters.) So, what does it mean to put thought into it? I'm sure everyone will have a different answer, but in my opinion it means you put at least some effort into understanding the subject and some thought in how you portray something. So to get to your first question, the worst thing I did to my character was make her a victim of sexual assault. When I decided that was actually what I was going to do to this character, I decided that I needed to learn more about the topic, so I started researching. It was good I did, because there was a lot of assumptions that I made about that topic. I made the assumption that sexual assault involves a lot of aggression on the perp's part. In most cases it's not. I learned victims often suffered in silence. I learned that full grown men didn't represent a "small number" of sexual assault victim. They, in fact, represented a significant number in fact. Most importantly, I learned why so many people brush victims off. It's not that they don't believe them, it's that they don't believe it was rape. That's because people focus on the circumstances. She was drunk. He was in jail. That child doesn't seem traumatized. Or there were no bruises. Stuff like that. We have it in our minds what we expect to see, which we base off of nothing, and then when we don't see it we can dismiss it.