Character Design: The Obligatory Plonker

By Ben Miff

When you read most stories, you’ll probably find one character (or more) that never seems to be able to do anything right, and when it seems that they’ve managed it (shock horror), it turns out that the mistake just wasn’t visible yet. While useful for driving the plot on, the obligatory plonker must not be used to excess, for otherwise the reader may find themselves feeling like the story isn’t getting anywhere, and therefore become disinterested, something to avoid if at all possible.

Designing the obligatory plonker as a functional character the reader actually likes can be attempted by following two main paths; either that of comedy, or of sympathy. Needless to say, different storylines will work better with different paths. If you’re trying to write a deadly serious piece, then having a comedic character could work to nullify the atmosphere you’re trying to create. On the other hand, if you are writing a comic story, then it’s probably not a good idea to have a character that inspires sympathy, as that could quite easily result in the reader feeling too depressed to even giggle slightly.

Writing the two different paths isn’t necessarily to do with your initial outlay; more, it has to do with how you write the character. Frelchek (my Fur Future character) is a prime example of how to avoid the sympathy response, merely because instead of hurting himself, he tends to injure others. Especially when he’s falling out of vents. If I desired to gain sympathy, I would instead need to ensure that he incurs all the negative effects that falling from heights would normally inspire, and (possibly) make the falls not his fault. As such, since he normally lands on someone else, is stupid enough not to know when to give up, and doesn’t seem to recognise the existence of vertical vent shafts (even though they still recognise him), it’s his own fault, and so the reader doesn’t feel guilty at laughing at him (well, not much anyway).

However, the initial outlay is important for getting the obligatory plonker to work. If the character has a plethora of (useful) skills, then when they start generally fluffing things up all that will happen is that the reader will sit there is disbelief, not quite knowing what’s going on. The character needs to be one that can actually be believed in his role as the twit. A good way to achieve this is to have the character have some little aspect that explains away why they can never get anything right. Frelchek has the minor fact that his mind seems to have any kind of integrity, probably as a result of not having much of a face left. Many of the obligatory plonker characters have an innate clumsiness, or generally do not understand the situation as it truly is.

The obligatory plonker also has that rather useful ability of “storyline extension”. You get the villain trapped in the corner, and are in the perfect position to kill him / her off and finish the story. The minor problem is, you don’t want to stop there, and you don’t want to have to do rewriting. This is where the obligatory plonker shines; have them provide a disabling or distracting manoeuvre, and watch as it all falls into place. Have them miss with a shot and hit your hero in the paw, or have them fall out of the ceiling (like Frelchek does on frequent occasions). The villain can quickly run away (or jump into their rocket ship, or whatever), and by the time your hero would have recovered, you’ve got a hunt to play with.

However, through mistaken accidents, you can sometimes use the obligatory plonker to end the story. A perfect example of this can be seen in the ancient cliché which involves the villain-standing-over-hero-gloating. The plonker knocks something over by accident (and seemingly completely at random), and traps the villain / knocks him into a random deadly machine / shoves him off the edge of something very tall indeed / pushes him into his own trap, and saves the day. Of course, then he’s likely to follow by blowing something else up, launching the hero into orbit, or something equally annoying, but there you go.

All this talk so far has been about the heroes, you may have noticed. Yet the obligatory plonker also fits well into the villain structure. After all, most of the evil men (and women) in this world will, inevitably, have to rely on some people lower down their structure from time to time, and it’s reasonable to assume that one twit can slip through the net. (Maybe the admissions officer didn’t get much sleep the night before?) Also, the nature of villain groups is that some people in that group are going to get hurt, and the target is quite likely to be the obligatory plonker, merely because they’re an easy target. Also, the obligatory plonker can be fun to use for the end; after all, chances are they’d fluff and end up doing something to give the heroes the edge. Anyway, I’ve got to get back to controlling Frelchek, so this is it.

Honest.

There’s nothing interesting down here.

Shoo.