I could've sworn that I've answered this question about musical themes before, but I can't seem to find the thread or my post. That's okay though, because I remember what I said, I have more characters now than I did then, and I can see that several people are taking "character themes" to mean something other than music, which is neat.
Nimdok - I used a track from the soundtrack to Halo 2: "Heretic, Hero". Great soundtrack, have always loved it. I chose that particular track because it has a very industrial sound that reminded me of the sounds you would hear at a construction site or dig, but it also has a choir singing in addition to those noises, which lends it a more ancient feel. Nimdok is an archaeologist, so the combination works really well.
Aside from that, his character themes primarily revolve around identity. Is he Nimdok, or is he just an impostor pretending to be him? Is it possible for him to become the "real Nimdok" eventually, and by what paths could he achieve that? Just by being possessed by the spirit of Nimdok? My thesis is no - there's much more to Nimdok than that. I use the various prisms of his identity - the teacher, the scholar, the seeker, the father, the husband, the lover - to explore what it means to be him, and by extension maybe even what it means to be human. But that's just me blowing smoke up my butt.
Inanna Hoole - Ah, poor Inanna. She's supposed to be retired soon, but I did have a lot of fun writing her for the most part and I do consider her one of my stronger PCs. Her theme was a little tune from Galaxy Express 999 called "Planet Maetel - Arrival". It's a very melancholic lullaby/love theme, like something out of a dark fairytale. In this case, I was never fully on board with the choice of music, but I couldn't come up with anything else that suited her. For whatever reason this piece of music stuck to Inanna like glue lol. "Maetel" was also one of the fake names she used.
Her character themes were always about how far she would go to accomplish her goals. I knew from the moment I conceived her that she would be someone who wouldn't mind degrading and debasing herself, so long as she did it for a cause she truly believed in. Of course, this earned her one of her other themes - that of the Fool. Sort of like the tarot card, she marched right off a cliff when she waltzed into the Sith Empire thinking she could charm the right people and get what she wanted. Instead, she got treated like a doormat, was basically tricked into betraying her own family, and had her hopes dashed to the ground and stomped on. I will happily admit that one of the reasons I'm trying to retire her is because she has been through so much, I honestly don't know how I would handle heaping more trauma onto her. I don't think I would be able to write it without hating every word, at least not so soon after all the other abuse that was heaped onto her these past few months. It would get into needlessly cruel territory at that point.
Starlin Rand - Well, he's currently sitting at the top of a pivotal precipice for his character, one that will decide what direction he goes from here, so I consider his theme outdated. But his was Daft Punk's instrumental "Da Funk". It's exactly what it sounds like - a funky song meant to evoke an urban city, with all its rhythms and moods. Starlin's a city boy, his character playlist is full of funk (the musical genre lol). It seems to really speak to him and his enthusiastic personality.
Starlin was a character I made on a whim that somehow turned out to be really great. He evolved completely naturally, I didn't force anything with him. So what the hell is his theme? Well, I always approached him as a bit of a dumb kid who doesn't know what he's doing, doesn't realize the danger he's in, and is very innocent, but in a
believable way, not as a dopey stereotype or caricature of a kid. My primary inspiration was Luke Skywalker, the dumb farmboy from Tatooine that I hold so near and dear to my heart, but as I wrote Starlin he started to absorb characteristics from people I had known in my real life. In particular, he has a lot in common with one of my cousins I'm fairly close to. Like Starlin, my cousin was raised in a broken home in a bad neighborhood, he loved music and used it as an outlet, and he went off to join something bigger than himself (the military = the Jedi I guess lol) because he "needed time to mature".
Messala - The villainous Messala's theme is "Darkness Fails" from the soundtrack to the movie Legend - or at least the first minute or so of it. It's a dark seduction theme composed for a character who is quite literally meant to represent the Devil, the Lord of Darkness. I've been debating switching this theme out for the version of "Al Nadda" from Civilization IV: Warlords, mostly because I can't make heads nor tails out of this character. He keeps changing. I originally conceived him as a "seductive", persuasive character, hence the seduction theme, but so far he hasn't been able to convince anybody of anything. So I may introduce the Warlords music for this new theme he seems to be manifesting - a general love of violence and chaos. Because if you can't have power for yourself, the next best thing is to make sure that nobody else has any power either.
Now, his backstory is still very vague and nebulous and not well fleshed out yet; he's technically just a one-off villain for a story that wound up getting stretched out over multiple threads. I've been trying to let him breathe and just throw him into whatever threads I can to see what happens, but as a result he is far from consistent right now. So far, I've seen his character themes as being about trying to find balance - or perhaps a better term would be to game the system so that he can do whatever he wants without upsetting the balance. "To everything there is a season," is a phrase he's fond of. He has a gray alignment in the Force, despite being a truly abysmal being as far as his actions go. That was another thing I wanted to explore - morality in SW outside the Light/Dark black and white duality of the Force. Can a truly horrible person still have a neutral or even Light-sided Force alignment, so long as they don't use the Dark Side? Ooooooh,
nasty!
Tom Kovack - Lolol, this character is basically brand new and I have no clue what his deal is, but he does have a musical theme: "Kodo" by the Yoshida Brothers. I consider it a cousin to Starlin's theme.
Bithia - Girl, not only do you not have a voice yet, you don't have a theme either! Ah well, I'll at least bestow upon you a theme song: Balanescu Quartet's orchestral cover of Kraftwerk's "
Computer Love". I was using this as a theme for Ayreon before I decided to downgrade him to an NPC, but I don't think it ever truly fit him. For those of you who don't know, "Computer Love" was originally an electronic song, but here they've performed it with an orchestra, and I actually like it better this way. It's an interesting thing, translating something that supposedly sounded cold and mechanical into the organic warmth of musical strings. Suits Bithia much better, given that she is a human soul transplanted into an inhuman (but still technically organic) biot body.
As for Bithia's character themes, she was made to be a replacement for Inanna in the story. She has a more personal reason for getting involved. More than that, I'd say she's made a much greater sacrifice - she willingly gave up her human body in exchange for something far more powerful and capable, but now she's afraid of losing what humanity she still has left over. She won the battle for independence and is no longer a servant enslaved to her programming, but she's missing a lot of the input that we associate with the human experience - not only physical senses, but many of her emotions are absent as well. She doesn't feel fear anymore, not in the visceral way we do - nor can she feel sadness, joy, anger, or impatience. It's debatable whether she can feel love, rather than just the memory of it from when she was human. It's a classic sci-fi framework for a story about what really makes us human, and one that I've been wanting to play with ever since I first started writing.