Alright, Biters, I have a rather unique entry for you this time. At The Bite, we have a diverse team of professional writers, including members who can ghostwrite, published independent book authors, and legitimate journalists.
On the other hand, I am, I suppose, more what you would call a muse. That being said, Biters, I’ve been tasked with giving a glimpse into my thought process in creating one of my characters, that of Su Lynn.
Gaming late at night is one of my many hobbies, predominantly online multiplayer RPGs. With these games, as I’m sure you know, come loot boxes and microtransactions; from one of these blatant cash grabs was the humble start of my character, Su Lynn.
This particular loot box was filled with rewards themed around the Joker, one of which was a doll skin.
My line of thinking was that everyone was going to do the same thing: how could I be different?
I utilized the game’s celestial powers to create an evil, cursed doll. Now I know what you’re thinking; a cursed doll that’s me being different?
I knew other players would take the gun’s power set and make a green army man, or the power wouldn’t matter, and they would name themselves xxBARBIExx.
So, Biters, there was my conundrum: how do I showcase the new skin without doing what I expect everyone else to do? Instead, turning the character into a china doll dressed like a ballerina who was discarded and neglected. I chose one of the more wild and unkempt hairstyles made, her pink outfit a bit desaturated.
Next came the name, which, after all, other players need a way to identify. You. I spent a good ten minutes racking my brain to come up with a clever doll name, and Biters, I hear you asking what’s so clever about the name Su Lynn. Well, as mentioned, I designed her as a china doll, and I gave her a rather depressed personality, so her full name is actually Poor Su Lynn.
As for Su Lynn’s curse, I borrowed from an old porky pig cartoon titled “The Wearing of the Grin.” This cartoon featured Porky running afoul of leprechauns, who put him in green shoes and forced him to perform Irish jigs.
Come to find out, my inspiration was based on another fable by Hans Christian Andersen called “The Red Shoes.” In this tale, a vain girl curses her shoes so that she can’t stop dancing, forcing her to amputate her feet; however, the shoes continue to haunt the girl. This tale would eventually be turned into a ballet, unintentionally bringing my creation full circle in a way.
One of the final components to the creation of my cursed doll was that I wanted something like Freddy Krueger’s “One Two” song or the vibe given off by the Shining’s Grady Twins, so I wrote a small four-line poem:
Will you please be my friend? Will you play with poor Su Lynn?
With a tattered dress and melancholy grin, our fun shall never end.
You shall dance, twirl and spin forever more with poor Su Lynn.
Writhe and squirm until your light grows dim. You now belong to poor Su Lynn.
As you can probably see, I designed her to be sad and pathetic, so you want to help her and feel for her. By the time you realize things are a bit off, you are already in her trap.
They say there is no such thing as an original idea, and to a degree, they may be right. Biters, this is something I do a lot with my gaming group. We play M.M.O.R.P.G.s, so we are constantly creating characters and fleshing them out.
So, my advice, which you didn’t ask for, is that if you’re looking to start writing yourself, don’t just pull from one source. The individual components that make up Su Lynn are all retreaded material, but by uniquely combining them, I created something interesting.
So with that, Biters, I ask.Will you please be my friend? Will you play with poor Su Lynn?
Gothic Bite Magazine 