does anyone else have a hard time with writing damon’s voice in fics? why is his voice so oddly specific
Weirdly I don’t have an issue writing him and you think I would given all the flack I give him but it’s for the reason it’s hard for you, his voice is oddly specific.
When writing his dialogue I I always make sure he’s never direct. I do that with most characters because I don’t like dialogue as exposition but with him I have to do it in a special way where to the point that he’s avoiding whatever the topic is altogether because that’s his characterization.
His actions I can make sense of when writing because while his impulsive randomness is apart of his characterization Plec still managed to make that OOC, but I use the same rule as with his dialogue, never direct, does everything to avoid being direct because no matter what it’s never something he wants to do. Which is also a weird facet of his character, with as selfish and self serving as he is he never really does the thing he wants to, everything is an inconvenience.
But probably what you’re having issues with is that though his voice is oddly specific, it’s also all over the place, particularly when Elena is involved. Considering you like this ship to a degree you might get his actions while he’s with her or their about her, but from what I’ve observed they turn his character into what I’m going to call PlecBot which essentially is doing everything Plec wants him to do via fanservice and completely ignoring his characterization.
Like when Elena broke up with him and he starts murdering mindlessly. Now him being a murderer isn’t news or out of the ordinary but his motives were as in he had none. His reasoning for killing has always been off, but there was at least some semblance of logic to it, like he’s hungry, annoyed, hell I’ll even take bored as a reason because that’s right up his alley. But randomly killing people with a guy you feel guilty about because he’s sad??? doesn’t make a lick of sense since that’s not what he does when he’s sad, he wallows, kills people and wallows, but always wallows which none of that happens. In fact I would even say he was sad which brings me back to what are you motives?
And over the course of the show he’s done several things in this vein that makes you ask, “what are you motives?” The answer usually is “to create Delena drama” which is stopped watching in season 5 because they had exhausted that with me, a casual viewer, bu that point. Anyway my point is that he has some very specific and strong characterization that often gets lost in Plec’s Delena fantasy which makes him a hard character to peg down because his identity almost seems like to be that but it’s not. That’s not a character, it’s Enzo (who I’ve often described as pieces of a character) but if he had something distinguishable about him. And there are distinguishable things about him unfortunately they aren’t there much after season 1 maybe 2 and they do sorta come back more frequently in seasons 6-8 but as long as his sole motives are “delena drama” without any basis for it they become lost and that masks his character (pretty well I might add).
POC of TVD 