Everyone's a critic. Even me. Sorry.

[papillon]

... whether either of their feelings had anything to do with it, rather than her simply having been selected as a 'good match' for a prince who was dallying with an 'inappropriate' woman and needed to be married off...

[Glasskitten]

So...um...how should a person go about creating characters? I am not exactly social enough to have pinpointed that special something that makes a real human being different from another...though of course I do perceive and understand that everybody is different. My difficulties in characterization led to my putting off entry into the visual novel world until I have proven my ability to make reasonable progress on a non-branching novel, but I still face the same challenge of producing characters--either largely influential friends and enemies of the Mary Sue protagonist, or random bystanders on the street who react to the unusual situations that arise in their world, or people with roles in the middle of that spectrum--who are simultaneously psychologically plausible and interesting to read about.

One of my favorite homemade characters is a fine blend of weird influences, but one of the biggest is the Psychology of the Ordinary Housecat. That makes him a noticeably different from most humans in some cute, useful, and downright disturbing ways; I think a psychologist in our world would have a field day with the poor thing, although having grown up among other people of comparable lineage, he carries only the diagnosis of Schizoid Personality Disorder. I try to make everything about him happen/be for a "good" reason, but I have to admit that his personality contains more wishful thinking than realistic humanity. Is that okay?

On a semi-related note, um...to what extent can cold, hard logic and a thorough knowledge of the character's past help us on our way? What do we do about characters whose logic is as defective as that of the real people in our lives--how do we know what they want and how they will try to get it? Do we roll a die?