Discussion Character Fears/Flaws

[Valery Noble]

Hello!

A little while ago, I made a discussion thread about quirks and habits, so I figured I'd do another!

This time, mention a flaw, fear, or something about your character that can hold them back — but one that they (likely) won't overcome.
It can be as simple as a fear of spiders that will last forever, or something deep related to character trauma.

~~~

I'll start it off with Valery here. Her biggest fear is fear of loss.
She has lost a lot of people close to her in her life, and that fear of losing another Padawan, or worse, family, is always going to be a part of her.

 

[Corazona von Ascania]

One of Cora’s driving forces is her biggest fear- disappointing her family, and failing to protect her people.

Also, thunderstorms are scary.

As is seeing too much of Valery’s skin.

 

[Noah Corek]

Noah’s biggest fear is being alone. He grew up caring for his two younger siblings, in the army he had his comrades and the same with all his life after that and now with his wives and brood of kids he’s never actually truly been alone and I think that if he was he’d spiral.

 

[Jasper Kai'el]

Jasper's gotten a bit better on it, but he's afraid of failing. First it was more because he had low thoughts of himself, but now it's more so a fear of failing the people who look up to him.

 

[Seku Bondara]

Seku grew up on Nar Shadda, and has unresolved issues stemming from it that will be explored at some point in her evolving story arc.

 

[Koda Fett]

Less of a flaw, more of a fear. Isolationism and identity, with a generally callous sense of self that toils with the idea of being a face intended to be among millions while also having an incomprehensibly large ego (flaw, I now realise), Koda is a loner in all aspects of life that aggressively rejects any attempt at closeness.

 

[Jorah zos Darnus]

Girls.

When you grow up around Nightsisters, this is a healthy fear. Avoiding girls, angering girls, talking to girls, or making eye contact with girls -- particularly of the Dark Side magic variety -- is clutch to survival as a Nightbrother.

Also probably why I hang out with Jedi more often. Their girls are way less homicidal. Or prone to throwing fireballs.

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

Being enslaved again
Losing his family
Not being good enough for his family, especially his children

 

[Briana Sal-Soren]

Briana has quite a few different flaws and fears.

When I started writing her, Briana was very self-confident as a result of her upbringing and constant praise from both her mentors and peers. This ended up working to her own detriment where she'd march into situations with unearned confidence, only to be faced down with her own limitations.

These trials, coupled by numerous circumstances that have cropped up in her life, has created in her a deeply rooted fear of failure. Both in her role as a Jedi and her role with her friends and family, often struggling to find the right balance with them.

She cares deeply. Much more than she will usually let on, and has a bad habit of taking on burdens that are not hers to bear, in part because she fears losing the people she loves and strives to keep them safe.

I'm not sure if these flaws will go away over time, or just change/lessen, but these have been the main ones that have driven and molded her.

 

[Silas Westgard]

Hurting his friends and family is the thing he fears most.

 

[Alex StormWolf]

Alex has a real bad habit of disappearing without letting a certain Twi'lek who cares about him deeply know where he's headed, and letting his troubled past lead him towards the Dark Side again.

 

[Cyran Vaas]

Although aided a lot by his encounters with Valery and other Jedi. Cyran is still scared of The Force and the way in which it can be used. Force shenanigans is what orphaned him and that's not something he'll likely get over, despite his positive interactions with Jedi. To him The Force is an indifferent, impossible to understand cosmic horror that still leaves knowledgeable and powerful Force Sensitives that have studied it for their lifetimes scratching their head over it for. Even now thousands of years later. If a Jedi grand master hundreds of years old still can't fully understand it, than what hope would a simple freelancer like Cyran have? So largely by choice he stays pretty ignorant of The Force and orders that form around it.

Another fear for Cyran is sort of a fear of loosing himself. Essentially the equivalent of falling to the dark side for him. This is one of the reasons he stays as true as he can to his principles, especially his no killing rule. he dreads to think about what someone of his skill level and the amount of firepower possesses could accomplish if not beholden to his principles.

 

[Katherine Holt]

I'll throw my new gal into this with one of her biggest fears: Fire.

Sure she'll be fine around small flames, but be in front of a blazing fire, or an inferno? Kat is gonna freeze up and just shut down.

 

[Ishani Dinn]

Rhi is afraid of her husband disappearing on her again, especially for a long period of time. The idea of being alone for months or years is intolerable to her.

She's also begun to manifest a fear of losing control over her environment. Now that she finally has some power, she's keeping a very tight grip on it and doesn't want to share it with anyone.

She's afraid of her children coming to harm - but she's even more afraid that she might harm them herself, even if only indirectly.

She has a lot more secrets now, including some that she is terrified might be revealed to the wrong people. The idea of people manipulating her weaknesses and vulnerabilities is intolerable to her.

Oh, and she's afraid of spiders.

 

[Amani Serys]

Oh boy, Amani's had a lot of ups and downs. Early on in her jedi years she was a stickler for rules, and was afraid of doing things that broke her stubborn and traditionalist view of the Jedi code. Which by extension led her to bottle up a lot of her emotions, and became a self-fulfilling prophecy that saw her use the dark side. That, unsurprisingly, made it even worse, as she became terrified of the idea of fate— her fate in particular. The concept of an inescapable predetermination did a number on her, and was a defining part of her years away from the Jedi.

But nowadays Amani denies the idea of a future being set in stone, having grown past that as well as her old dogmatic views. Instead, she gets to deal with the fear of loss! Granted that's kinda been around since she was orphaned, but her attachments haven't been as strong as that until meeting Alicio. Now that she's got a family of her own, it's unsurprisingly superseded all other commitments in her life. Fear of losing them or failing them easily tops the list.

More a flaw than a fear, She also suffers from a pretty big Atlas complex. Amani tries to help anyone and everyone she can to her own detriment. Whether that's healing someone who's hurt, trying to redeem a darksider, or just lending an ear, chances are she'll give it a shot. It can be a bit overbearing to some, and exhausting for her.

More humorously, she also used to kinda have a fear of driving. Didn't know or care to know how to operate a speeder until she was like 18 or 19.

 

[Starlin Rand]

Starlin is a tad bit scared of pregnant women. The whole concept of pregnancy unsettles him. It's a mild phobia that gets played for laughs.

On a more serious side, Starlin is afraid of false victories, the people he loves and trusts suddenly changing personalities and turning against him, and pretty much any form of deceit. He fears being lied to, manipulated, used, and betrayed.

When he was younger he cared a great deal about how others saw him. Over time his fear of losing face has diminished, but it hasn't completely gone away. He's still a little bit prone to peer pressure and might do dumb things in an effort to impress others - though more often than not he just winds up annoying them.

 

[Jand Talo]

Jand has one single fear: loss of freedom.

It is inherent in all Nagai, following from their time as a slave species to the Tof in the Firefist Galaxy, and has been founded in their culture ever since.

For Jand, this translates to being owned, being controlled (to a strict/extreme degree), or outright being captured and kept in a cage.

Beyond that, he literally has no fear.

 

[Aoki-Barran Mira]

Character flaws are one of my favorite parts of writing characters!

Gwyneira Vizsla is a basket case of flaws and mess, lol! She grew up practically raising herself, was shunned by society, and both parents were awful. She learned growing up to look after herself, but she never developed much empathy and sympathy as a child. Fast forward to her late teens and adulthood, and she tends to misunderstand loved ones and can't look at things from their angle when she's upset with them. She's slowly developing better empathy, but there's been multiple occasions where she's simply been unable to use understanding to look at things from another person's angle. She focuses on how she feels and how she's affected. This same gap in not learning empathy growing up has also helped her dehumanize enemies better, making it easier to kill. She is starting to improve in this area, but it's her most interesting flaw to me.

Gwyn also has severe abandonment issues and struggles, no, refuses to let go of her attachments. She struggles not to helicopter and battles her desire to hold loved ones too close.

Aoki Mira doesn't have the same selfishness type flaws that Gwyn has. But she lost her entire family, and more, in her developmental years & teenage years. She has an innate fear of losing the people she loves now. This can drive her even to extreme rage, when her loved ones are threatened. As Mira is usually cool headed and calm in combat, this can be a stark weakness for her. A generic flaw, I know...

 

[Declan Durinson]

Declan’s flaw is to know the truth. To see plainly what others refuse, which wouldn’t be a flaw at all if it wasn’t for the fact that this “truth” was always framed by his cowardice and shame.

His unconquerable fear of the unknown. His shame for fearing the dark like a pup. Shame for wanting more and fearing it to be too much. His fear to not be good enough. Fear of what it will mean to fail again as he surely knows he will. Shame to know that so many believe in him and to be unable to find the strength to believe in himself.

His fear and outright certainty that every terrible thing he has thought about himself is true. His fear that the life that was taken from him was the better for it. A fear of death that leaves him clinging to a life that amounts to nothing on the best days and on the worst causes pain to those he cares for and shame for his refusal to face the pain he has caused.

 

[Hailyn]

I can actually do this one with Amara! It's the one thing I come up with first when creating a character, actually.

• Vesta: The shapeshifter that was always deeply afraid of being out of control - out of control of her life, of the people she kept as company, of the choices she could perceive to take. She chose the manner in which she died because it was the only thing left that she felt like she had control over.
• Amara: Being alone. Not just in the superficial sense of literally physically being alone for extended or brief periods of time, but in the sense of connections with other people - social isolation, feeling cut off from the outside world, being entirely and forcibly independent. She was born incapable of being kept off of what was essentially life support and could not function on any notable level until after the events of Exegol, due to force-related circumstances that gave her an avenue to pursue a life outside of a laboratory setting - only to find her immediate family broken up because of the events that led up to her awakening.
• Sable: Death, in a nutshell. Not every character needs unique fears, Sable is essentially just a normal person in extraordinary circumstances with normal behaviors and habits like most people across the galaxy - and she is afraid, almost paralyzingly so, of situations that may put her in near-death situations.
• Elle: Being forgotten, honestly, and probably combined to a degree with being left behind/alone. Essentially being moved on from by people in her life that she anchored herself to. I don't think this is fear is really justified at this point, given the fact that she was rescued from the Netherworld during the Omni event by essentially the only person left in her life, but then I don't think humans are rational in their fear beyond the initial cause-and-effect.