Characterizing Your Inner Kid

A while back, I asked the question "how do you characterize your inner kid?" Well, nobody answered, so I'm going to spend some time answering this question myself.

Any time that you choose to take an emotionally real inner child into a role playing game, you are going to have to do something to make them into a character.

Now understand that I'm not telling you that you should remove all emotional connection that you have to your inner child, or that anyone who creates a character from scratch has no emotional attachment to that character. However, the majority of role playing games start out by giving you a setting, a back story, and a purpose. (Look at the Foster Forest Family Roleplay site for examples.) In order to fit in with this purpose and vision from the owner of the site, you are going to have to have something more than just a personality; You are going to need to have a whole person.

Remember that most of our IKs are in reality simply a personality, usually a part of ourselves that just hasn't grown up. They have no history apart from our own, and that history may not fit in with the vision for the game.

I have a total of three inner kids who are currently recognizable as separate personalities. All three of them are active on my ageplay role playing game. Each of them has a unique and entirely separate personality from the others, including their original families and their circumstances before arriving at Foster Forest. So how did I build their histories, and why did I choose to do it the way that I did?

To start with, let's talk about Toby. She is the longest-running role play character that I currently have. There is a lot of my inner child in this character. And yet yes, she is still a character.

Toby's character began in a different environment than where she is now, and yet she has always been the same; A fourteen year-old child who has been abused (sexually and physically) by her father and his friends since she was nine years old (when her mother passed away). She's been through a life of hell and back, but she is incredibly talented both intellectually and artistically.

The way that I reached this characterization for Toby was to take a lot of what her personality was, and reverse engineer her. Why would she possibly have the low self esteem that has made her anorexic (and when I'm in her head space in r/l, it's almost impossible for me deal with food and issues relating to food)? I tweaked her character to reach that personality trait, assuming that the issues that she's been through in her life would result in her low self-esteem.

Over time, Toby became a solid character. The reasons why she aren't with her parents are obvious: her mother is dead and her father was an alcoholic abuser who is now in prison. She fits in with the theme of Foster Forest because she had trouble settling and fitting in with other foster care environments. She is both an inner child and a character.

If you would like information for how I characterized Rachel, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to explain it. Both she and Mickey were engineered differently, starting out as characters before I recognized them as inner kids. In Mickey's case, I had to see that she had just aged in order to reach acceptance. You can find out more about my processes on my blog Confessions of an Inner Kid.