Forums » RP Discussion » What to do with this character idea?

Rufus Raccoon is a basic concept I came up with for a character in a TV Tropes RP revolving around classic-style cartoon characters. The RP never got off the ground so I never had much reason to give him more detail, but I thought it'd be interesting to make a page for him and see what I could do. He definitely needs a lot of work to become interesting and worth doing stuff with. What should I do with him?

Hmmm, he might need a fleshed out backstory/history, but then again, I can't think of any Looney Tunes/cartoon characters from that era that have complex histories. It's all just one or two lines, if at all.

Maybe a catch phrase? Like Elmer Fudd's "Be vewy vewy quiet. I'm huntin wabbits." Or Tweety Bird's "I taut I saw a putty tat". You can give him a wierd speech thing like that or not, plenty of them don't. "Eh, what's up doc?" - Bugs Bunny.

The best way to develop characters is to use them. I'd write a story with him in it, maybe he's a Looney Tunes OC and he can interact with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck etc.

Hope that helps!

The idea would be more Roger Rabbit-esque. Like, he's an animated actor who played a bunch of different roles. That way he could be pretty versatile and show up in different settings as if they were roles he was playing, and also have a sort of "real life" backstory for his showbiz career. But yeah, catchphrases and things like that would be good to give him a consistent identity no matter where he shows up.

A thought I had was that, rather than waiting for a cartoon-based setting to come along for Rufus to show up in, it'd be better to just come up with one myself. Having a setting would naturally make it easier to come up with a story. So now I have to figure out a setting.

Generally, I think the setting should be based on the real world, with the same countries and history. However, cartoon characters (we could follow Roger Rabbit and call them "toons" for short) are real, living beings, albeit created by human imagination. Cartoons are filmed the same way as live-action movies, but with toon actors. While toons are capable of a wide range of physical responses, far beyond what humans can do, they tend to be less capable of varying their personality beyond what they were created to be. Thus, unlike human actors who will play a variety of different roles, toon actors usually end up "playing themselves", even if they might be cast into different situations.

Of course, there are also a lot of other factors that need to be considered. How are new toons created, exactly? Do they exist in the same world as humans, or in an entirely-animated world that is simply influenced by humans? When would the story take place- modern day, or in the past? Would real-world cartoon characters exist in the setting, or only original ones? There's a lot of things to consider about this.