Do your minifigs have personalities? Ethics? Drives?

[AmperZand]

Do you ascribe personalities, ethics, ideologies and so on to your minifigs?

http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=99494&st=650#entry2165072

The linked post above is about licensed minifigs, but it got me thinking about minifigs more generally - licensed and unlicensed - and whether AFOLs imagine their minifigs as having human qualities.

In my case, I think of licensed minifigs and MOCed ones drawn from source material as having the personality, outlook etc of the character they represent. So Batman is a well-intentioned but troubled vigilante; Darth Vader is an evil slave to the dark side of the force.; the musketeers are as depicted in Dumas' books and the films inspired by them and so on.

As for unlicensed minifigs and creatures, I class most as either good or evil with a few neutrals, and display them according to their faction. Within those groupings, I think of some as having particular loyalties, motivations or personality traits. For example, I have two knights that I MOCed at the same time many years ago. They don't look similar: they have different hair colours, armour and weapons, and clothes colours. But they somehow seemed destined to be together. They're both male and I decided that they were gay.

Apart from the good/neutral/evil groupings, I don't define the personality of each of my minifigs - I have too many. Only a few are more detailed.

I was wondering if other AFOLs think of their minifigs as having distinct personalities or if I'm alone in doing this. If you do, how do you decide what qualities they have?

[Wardancer]

Good topic!

Since I have a Warhammer past, I tend to mentally assign the features that Warhammer figs have in their profile to my lego figs. That is how fast they move, how far they shoot, how much hits they can take etc. This also includes special abilities like being fearless or able to cause panic in the enemies.

Besides that I think of most special characters in terms of all the archetypes modern fantasy media offers. Of course, the leaders are noble, courageous and strong and of course the wizards are wise etc. That does not make them personalities, but only archetypes.

To only very few I ascribe individual character traits. I have one hero who is selfish and arrogant, mainly because his face expresses this. My queen I want to be beautiful and loving, but sometimes cruel and deadly. Both cases again can be reduced to modern archetypes. LOTR Galadriel already includes these two opposites. The queen example shows that I could not decide between the good and the bad queen archetype, so I combined both.

I guess once my army building is finished and I move on to scenes which depict scenes of a narrative, personalities might come in. Not necessarily, most fairy tales are narratives without round characters.

Edited March 14, 2015 by Wardancer

[Andy D]

I don't know about ethics or personalities, but they seem to have one very, very strong drive. They like math (I guess) because they just seem to keep multiplying. ;) ;)

Andy D

Edited March 15, 2015 by Andy D

[Karalora]

I have one fig I MOCed back when I was really into Castle and liked so much I kept her even after my interest in Castle waned. She's third from the left here:

I call her my Mad Alchemist. She's not evil, but she takes a cavalier attitude toward property damage as well as damage to her person. (It's hard to say how she would treat damage to someone else, because everyone's wise enough to stay away from her lab.) She lost her leg in an alchemical accident years ago, but it didn't change her mind about her craft one bit.

[Peppermint_M]

I love to write, so my figures end up as characters whether I aimed to do so or not. Sometimes they are backgrounders or bit players, othertimes they end up like the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and turn their moment in the sun to a full tropical holiday. I'll always put a little into a MOC write-up about the characters involved.