User blog:Mr. Bambu/Bad Character Workshop

Foreword
Nothing below is concrete and none of it was originally intended for this wiki, these are just flat character concepts I've had for years and I always liked the ideas of them. For a long time I couldn't think of a way to mesh it, but VSBW actually did introduce the idea of a multiverse to me, rather than just one storyline they could interact over different universes. So, here goes.

I'll try to add their respective tiers if I can think of a suitable one. These weren't made to fit the wiki so it may be weird.

The Dreamer
The Dreamer is, for all intents and purposes, the god of my ideal story setting. He doesn't have a concrete name, might never. But ultimately the idea is that he is just a kid (~17ish) that ultimately falls prey to a lethal disease and ends up in comatose. Hooked up on machines, he builds this utopia in his head, a paradise that he controls. I wrote a story about it a long while back because it seemed like such a unique idea (it isn't). The Dreamer was running from time, building this protective shield around him in the form of this universe where everything was perfect, but there were manifestations of impending death and the drugs constantly being pumped into his system that caused it all to come crashing down.

Eventually, in the real world, it was decided they should pull the plug after some six months of zero response to stimuli. The Dream that he had created, however, became his sort of personal heaven, his reward for moving forward. And the multiverse idea expands on that saying that every person within a coma can access that dream and form their own little heaven, as per the wishes of the Dreamer himself.

Tier: High 2-A (Transcends his own infinite multiverse, viewing all of it as nothing more than a dream)

The Huntress
So in the original story, The Dreamer had these two guardians of sorts- The Huntress, who functioned as a sort of mother figure to protect The Dreamer through whatever means possible, and the next character. I always imagined the Huntress as being a hardass to everyone except the Dreamer. That was really the main arc of her character- she was designed to be this cold literal killer (as in, she would kill what she deemed a threat) but a caring parental figure for The Dreamer, who didn't really accept the idea that he was probably going to die.

She made the story more humane, sort of. A loving hand. At the time I was sorta infatuated with death (emo teen, long hair and everything) but I've always been something of a Hopeless Romantic, so I wanted some meaning in it.

Tier: Low 2-C (Could feasibly damage The Sleep, which was encompassing entire universes)

The Advisor
Always pictured him as this sort of cranky (but caring) old man. He was the other guardian of the Dreamer, and would rather expose him to the hard truth and get the ordeal over with. He always had one line I liked. "You always have to move forward, you can't just sit here and stagnate." Not really a father figure but... more like a hard-assed grandfather.

The Advisor didn't care much about shielding the Dreamer from the pain because it wasn't his job. I always like the idea that he did have an idea that it hurt, and that he felt sorry, but his duty was more important than that.

Tier: Low 2-C (Comparable to The Huntress, though rarely did they fight)

The Sleep
The Sleep was always envisioned as this enormous, galaxy-spanning sentient cloud. It was supposed to be the embodiment of the drugs being pumped into The Dreamer's systems. It would slowly cause everything in it to fade from existence, because that part of the Dreamer was being numbed. It was a pretty scary concept when I thought of it.

One little mini-story I had was where the Dreamer finally moved to speak to the Sleep, which was alive, and it tried to lull him into just being a blank mind (like the whole utopia just collapsing) and just giving in to numbness. The original ending of the story had The Sleeper watch numbly while every other character died because he couldn't think of them anymore. Was pretty sad, at the time.

Tier: At least Low 2-C, likely higher (Could encompass entire universes, destroying them and wiping their contents from existence, could manipulate the Dreamer, making their mind numb and blank)

The Dark
A stereotypical name for Death. Not like... literal "Death", but again, a personification of it based on Dreamer's perception of his impending doom. Dreamer always had the idea that he was going to die. He thought he was already dead for awhile. Once he learned he wasn't, Death was a terrifying idea.

I remember the coolest part (for me, at least) was that Death was just untouchable. The Dreamer had this astounding fortress spanning thousands of miles of land, and Death just walked through it all. People tried to attack him and nothing connected, and he just strode up to The Dreamer and talked to him. Death actually wasn't cruel or anything, in my stories, he was very much neutral. He understood that dying was a scary experience. I even remember a point where I considered the idea that he didn't want to kill the Dreamer at all, and he hated killing children.

He just wanted it to be over with. Dreamer did a lot to get away from him in a panicked chapter, like erasing time so he couldn't move and creating another universe where Death didn't exist but he always showed up.

Tier: High 2-A (Eventually killed The Dreamer)

The Baron
I actually had this from Ozmosis Jones, sort of. The Baron was The Dreamer's automatic defense system, and got stronger the more The Dreamer was willing to fight. At first, he was weak and was constantly dying only to come back because The Dreamer willed it. But eventually he got stronger (not that it mattered). When the Dreamer died, Baron died permanently and never showed up in Heaven.

Baron actually had genuine disgust for the Dreamer since at first he wouldn't fight. He considered Dreamer a coward. Baron always had a very military action thing about him. While it wasn't a very important part of the story, I remember the Baron enacting this plan he had when he was fighting a campaign against the Sleep. It was never written out, just that it happened, but Baron blew up a handful of solar systems (I think I pegged it at 24) on a very thin part of a galaxy because he figured the Sleep couldn't cross if it had nothing to feed on. He was ultimately wrong and he died yet again.

Tier: 4-A (Destroyed multiple solar systems in an attempt to keep The Sleep at bay)

The Sprite
A la Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dreamer had this big corps of entities called Sprites that would create the worlds he wanted. The bigger ones would generate entire universes whenever Dreamer wanted something entirely new, like the laws of reality not applying anymore. But the smaller ones would work on planets. Dreamer wasn't exactly a scientist so a lot of the finer things were lost on him- all planets were at first just like Earth and the other planets in our system, and were modified later by these Sprites.

There was on Sprite in particular that would talk to the Dreamer, as they were in charge of the actual Earth. They formed the whole thing to the Dreamer's liking. They were friendly, in a child-like sort of way.

Tier: High 6-A (Formed the world in an indeterminite amount of time)

The Child
After Dreamer died, his own little multiverse was a sort of home for anyone else trying to escape death (as in, in a coma). The Child was one of the more stereotypical ones I focused on. It was a kid, 9 years old or so. He was terrified of death, and he cried, making the whole multiverse unstable. His universe disintegrated and he fell away into whatever was outside of Heaven, and died to his coma. I remember the Dreamer just being destroyed by that.

He wasn't gone forever, though. Because he died, he came back to Heaven, just not as a Dreamer anymore.

Tier: Low 2-C (Had the power of a fully-realized Dreamer, created their own universe, destroyed other universes as a passive side effect of their tortured crying)

The Tortured
Since I wanted an antagonist after Dreamer died, I imagined a fellow Dreamer that dreamed of eldritch beings that came into reality. While it was a lot weaker than Dreamer (I guess on this wiki it'd be High 2-A vs Low 2-C), it drove Dreamer mad, for awhile. This is about where I stopped writing about it, though by this point Dreamer had a name (Lukas). Dreamer went mad and a lot of his worlds stopped functioning, everything just frozen in time.

The Tortured became the big bad, expanding into tons of different universes and taking them over. A lot of the stories from here on out were about the lesser beings in the verse trying to stop the Tortured, and rarely did I deal with Dreamers anymore.

Some of the universes I delved into more were mostly theme based, I guess? Keep in mind that most Dreamers don't realize their power, it's just a lucid dream for them, and their true powers are normally found once they die (the entire universe they made for themselves is destroyed). One was a pretty standard superhero one, where the resident Dreamer was a part of a team and they would battle The Tortured (there he was called "Void"). Another was just a fantasy world where everyone went insane and it fell to smithereens. There were a few I made up. I probably had some 300 pages of this stuff before, on my old laptop, but sadly I lost that.

The Tortured was supposed to be this guy who had suffered for years, decades, and was now cynical and bitter. He was a smart dude, I imagined him in his upper forties, but never had he found happiness in life. So now he just tried to dash everything else out of creation.

Tier: 2-C (Could encompass and completely control their own Dream and the Dreams of several others)

The Ascendent
He was like my ideal universe savior. I never wrote a story for him, but it was this Dreamer who finally realized their potential and tried to battle the Tortured. In the end I imagined they would just duke it out forever. This was my "ohshit" plan as a writer, the deus ex machina if you will. Whenever I realized I wanted to go back to other writing, The Ascendent was my plan to just say "haha everything is sorta fine now, or at least not totally fucked".

Tier: 2-C (Was destined to battle The Tortured at some point in the future)

If I remember more later, I'll leave it here.