Stranger in a Strange Land

Pro2 Day 2: Stranger in a Strange Land*

As I was trying to wrap my head around HOW I wanted to describe the world of El Valedor, I was suddenly came with a vision how I would like the main character be formed. My favorite trope ironically enough is the

• quiet
• androgynous-looking
• white-haired
• mysterious background
• young adult
• with an insatiable curiosity of the world around them.

I asked myself WHY I liked this trope, and the answer came as surprisingly as it was quick: that character was me.

Explored a little bit deeper in my introductory blog post for Perfecting Your Protagonist, I realized that growing up, I matched all those qualities.

Growing up in America to First-Generation Immigrants, I was walking somewhere between the worlds of the United States and El Salvadoran culture, but couldn’t really identify myself to either one. I didn’t find the normalities of either world to be appealing, so it led me to hiding my voice because I felt like I had nothing to contribute to any conversation. My growing up also paralleled the rise of the Internet being available to common households, and thus a new schism of myself being born, my online persona.

As the Internet can become quite an anonymous locale, I have been addressed as both male and female regularly, and both instances leads to very different interactions. I started to lean towards creating characters that could not be easily identified as one or the other, because I felt like I could “walk between another world” and gain access to somewhere new once more.

Subconsciously I leaned toward the white hair as it stands for a symbol of wisdom and age, which I egotistically accepted as being “smarter” than my peers despite my young age (and the more closer to the present we reach, the farther from the truth that actually is haha).

I also enjoy the young adult aspect because the generation before me (my parents who are around 55 years of age) and my age (25) are VASTLY different in terms of having goals figured out. Again with the advent of the Internet (that darn internet, huh?), as more choices became apparent to those few who can wield a world of information, the less decisive our generation became. We are slower to commit to families, to homes, to places to settle down, because we are always questing for the next best thing. There is always the argument that what you have is enough, so that makes me wonder what “world” is truly better to be in.

Despite being alive for 25+ years, I unfortunately cannot think of even 5 defining events from my past, but the more I get to know the people around me and explore their upbringing, the more lights begin to awaken inside me to show that something DID happen, I just have no sentimentality until I really get a chance to think about it.

Long rambling aside, I think I have decided on a main character name. Met. It’s short for Meteora (Another online name I randomly chose because I liked the imagery of Meteora sailing across the sky, and it’s actually a very neat place in Greece), and I think the more people I meet, the more of my past I get to unlock and draw meaning from, hence the past tense.

@homeroom11