Ok, so, I have a character who's from a magical kitsune village that hasn't updated its culture since the Muromachi period. I also have it that they rarely interact with the outside world, in fact it's a serious crime (on the same level of high treason) to even leave the village. The character herself is confident, sassy, but she's also...a gigantic derp sometimes. Like, yells at a TV as if the people inside it can hear her kinda derpy. She also doesn't know what a pull door is (since she's used to the sliding wooden/paper doors) She gets angry at an alarm clock (as if it were a living thing) despite being the one who set the alarm. She can operate some technology, like a microwave, and even then that's only cause she likes instant foods.
A little bit yeah, her personality doesn't get in the way of her being a high profile thief though. She's also got some half decent magic abilities, like briefly slowing down time in a radius around her. I was trying to think of things that might be amusing more than annoying, maybe some things someone might sympathize with. And I already used up the two or three I already had in mind heh. I myself am not a morning person so I easily sympathize with that side of her, demon alarm clock indeed.
So, why is she this way? Is it because she's been isolated and so the world is a strange new place to her? Or she just acts this way because that's her personality?
Are you implying she gets out of her closed village and is confronted with these new things? It'd be perfectly reasonable, not silly, if out of force of habit she forgets from time to time that they don't operate the way things do back home. On the other hand, if she keeps screwing it up as some kind of protest or because she's just too stupid to learn . . . Not knowing what a new thing is on first exposure isn't silly, quirky, or derpy. Refusing to learn about it is . . . obnoxious. If you want her to do something others consider silly, give her a habit of dress people consider weird. Like she wears her undershirt as an outside layer, because her honored grandmother told her it was good luck. Or have her be convinced that her first bite every meal must be of a green vegetable; otherwise nothing else can be digested. Or she paints a smiling mouth on her left cheekbone every morning to guarantee happiness. In other words, something she already did in her magical village, that even her fellow magic villagers thought was a little weird.
In this specific case, it's a little bit of both, she's a touch absentminded and gets distracted easily when she's not in 'work mode' which requires a couple hours (literally two) of meditation beforehand. And even then her derp moments can sometimes seep through. To be fair in this particular case she's only been in civilization proper for a couple of days. So she's still suffering from culture shock. She has been outside the village for close to four months, but she's mostly been in the actual 'country' side of Japan, where things are largely similar to her time period other than some minor stuff like electricity and appliances. She might have seen a few cars at the houses and not known what they are etc. I'd say having issues with doors in general (she typically used windows...) is something she'll always have trouble with. Other stuff like yelling at the TV is only used once (and only once) to show that she's still in a bit of culture shock. I guess silly might have been the wrong phrasing, I don't want to say she has ADHD or something similar because I don't really know how to portray that without potentially offending people. Hence me describing her as 'derpy' and easily distracted by new things. I'm more looking for things that would make sense for her to be confused about. As for an actual character trait, I'm still working on that, having her get easily flustered with technology seems like an idea, but maybe not as a defining character trait and more that she's so used to using magic for everything.
It isn't unusual for people to yell at the tv or computer—I do it myself from time to time, and I've seen many other people do it as well. Now it would be different if she actually expects an answer, or believes she's communicating with the tiny people inside. But that wouldn't be derpy so much as a very natural belief because of her background. In her village, is it known that the outside world has newer technology? I think just a few days wouldn't be enough for her to get used to modern technology. She'd get used to certain things pretty quickly, and use them fairly well, though she wouldn't understand at all how they actually work. Just stuff like push this pedal and it goes, push this one and it stops (though she wouldn't be able to learn to drive in a few days obviously, just an example). She might believe there are spirits on the TV and in the phone etc and be pretty freaked out by that, depending on the beliefs where she comes from.
Yeah, and just wait till she responds by casting a spell on the TV and inadvertently blows it up. Though that would be getting into comedy.
Her village is pretty isolationist, it's considered high treason to leave the village without good reason. They know that there is technology out there, but they think it's some freak magic (they handwave it and call it 'alchemy' since most technology is taking smaller parts of something to make something else) rather than technology. And even if they do know about the outside world, studying it and bringing it into the village is forbidden. She becomes a thief to prove that there are valuable things outside the village, especially things they don't have, but she hasn't made too much of a mark in the thieving world. Even the Japanese government writes her off as a myth even with footage of her robbing things.
