Since I love me some good post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction, I was wondering what y’all used as inspiration for your character creation/backstory?
I didn’t consciously base Flora on anyone, but I realised shortly after writing my character sheet that characters from two books I’d recently read had undoubtedly crept into my subconscious and influenced her creation: The first was Nellie Kinnan, the protagonist from the first of Beth Goobie’s pair of dystopian novels, ‘Flux’ and ‘Fixed.’ They’re ostensibly childrens’ books but deal with things like underground political rebellion and religion as a tool to control the masses and children being trained as soldiers then mind-wiped so they won’t cause problems by thinking too much about the moral repersuccions of the things they’ve done. I adored Nellie as a protagonist- She’s smart and tough and arrogant and won’t listen to people who clearly know more than she does. She’s only twelve, but I think Flora ended up with a lot of elements of what I imagine a grown-up Nellie would be like.
The second was Julie Grigio from ‘Warm Bodies’ by Isaac Marion. I really, really liked the movie, but I thought that the eloquence of the novel’s narration and a lot of just how tough the lives of the humans living in its world were were lost in translation. Book-Julie is a lot darker and a lot more self-destructive than what came accross in the film.
What were yours?