You’re only a reflection of the author

Being a fictional character has some challenges. Not nearly as many challenges as being a living breathing human being who uses the bathroom (no, luckily most fiction fails to include that bodily function unless it’s relevant to the narrative), but some challenges. Sometimes your name will be changed, or even if you’re written as a ‘you’ or in the third person, or even your entire character can be rewritten, trading a motivation that once ruled your every action for a more general goal or simpler emotion, or, more often, the change occurs the other way around.

Your relationship with another character may be altered - maybe the author only knows what you feel when around said other character and can’t picture you alone, or fathom what thoughts might rattle around in your head. If you’re a villain, yikes, best of luck. Your only purpose then is to arouse emotions in the main character, and maybe, if it’s a revenge fantasy sort of story, be murdered by magic or sent to another country. In more realistic stories, you’ll exist as an ever-present threat, only you obviously aren’t overtly evil all the time - nobody is. 

You don’t believe yourself to be evil at all. You may genuinely believe the protagonist wants what you’re doing to them, or not really care, overcome by lust the way many real human beings can be, only in fiction, your lust is by definition cruel because you will act on it. The author writes what they write so often not because everyone who has ever felt that way has acted upon said desires, but because when they don’t, the author is often left feeling worse than when they do. So the author writes what they feared would happen, what failed to happen, what happened in their nightmares. The fear never leaves until it’s out, nutrients released back into the ecosystem by a parasite, and as a villain, you exist to induce fear and little else, except sometimes also pity or love and the anger/guilt that comes with both existing in one relationship. 

The author could always decide instead to write you as both protagonist and antagonist, the postmodern man versus self. Regardless of if you’re an actual man or that saying is sexist because women can hate themselves too, you may be the character causing your worst problems. This can take many forms, such as: your past self had different motivations and goals than your current self and past decisions are interfering with your current life trajectory; you simply hate yourself and self-sabotage, possibly without realizing that’s what you’re doing; or your character flaws interfere with your motivations unknowingly, like the egotistical guy unaware the reason he can’t find love is because he’s more interested in advertising himself as loveable than loving another person himself. 

Your author may be writing as a way of coping with their own self-hatred, projecting their flaws onto you, or perhaps you’re a character that existed in a pre-existing canon, and your author wants to explore how far you can be pushed until you break. Both are often the case. 

You can never just say something. No, your author agonizes over dialogue, either stealing it from its original source or just rewriting until you don’t even want to talk anymore, you’ve gone through so many quotation marks. Your author has a bad habit of overusing dashes - your very thoughts, nevermind words, stutter the way the author agonizes over authoring them, as each letter was a neuron, as though your existence takes energy because it does - just not your energy. No, your existence takes energy from the author and adds it into the universe of projects the author pours pieces of their experiences into.

Movement is even worse than speech - the author cannot decide where in space their characters ought to exist, especially if the work is original, meaning buildings aren’t confined to pre-existing set pieces. Furniture confuses the author, but still, you’re usually sitting or lying down, occasionally walking while you have conversations (if you have conversations) or internal monologues. When you’re not interacting with other characters, it’s easier, but put two people in a room and wait until the author fails to position them. The author has a failure of imagination when it comes to placing characters.

Nature is the one reality your author has no difficulty describing, so you may bend down to observe a beetle or sit on the sidewalk, self-consciously watching ants as you wait for the bus. You may watch trees sway in the wind whilst you walk, or, even if indoors, find your eyes focusing on a fly that’s landed on a nearby surface rather than the person talking to you. Again, the author projects their way of seeing the world onto you, their characters. 

You’re most likely to suffer when the author is stressed. The suffering might be identical to what the author happens to be going through, or it may be different - perhaps the author procrastinates preparing for a job interview by writing about you sobbing in the shower after an argument with your boss. The author can’t actually relate, having never had a boss, but the anxiety, the uncertainty, the uselessness of your effort in the wake of replaceable people are - the author writes about these because they feel the same emotions they make you endure experiencing. 

The author has the ability to know, afterward, that none of what’s happened is real. Perhaps your suffering makes them feel better about their life. You don’t exist, so you can be harmed again and again, hundreds of ways. You can die only to be immortal, creating questions about the point of life without death. If there’s even a life without death accompanying it like an object and a shadow. The author has a habit of making you only realize another character is approaching by seeing their shadow. Your existence is like a shadow, a shallow vessel in which the author sails the sea of plot through.