Aaron's New Powers

I developed the character of Aaron because I wanted to create a type of superhero who wasn’t an ‘ideal’ or ‘classic’ superhero. Aaron is not your typical good guy superhero, he is a broken-down man who hasn’t really made good choices in his life. Then with the introduction of superpowers into his life he has to decide how he wants to use them and these powers ultimately change his life to some extent. 

Aaron basically sees these powers as a way for him to get back at the society per se that made him the man he is now. Aaron not having the upper hand in his childhood, he now sees these powers as the universe giving him the upper hand over those around him. So his general ‘want’ to go just enjoy life and take advantage of others the way he was taken advantage of as a child. Whereas, Aaron ‘needs’ to understand empathy and develop compassion for those around him, something he currently doesn’t see and doesn’t understand. 

Reading through Aarons's story we can see at many of the choices we make for him stem around him realizing these wants and needs. Most of the time one of these choices offers a way for Aaron to start to break out of the pessimistic view he has and develop a little bit of compassion or offer a way for him to fall back into his normal cynical world view. 

There are five main story beats I had in mind when creating this story: Backstory, Powers, Bad Choice, Regret, and Good Choice. Although these beats may be a little different depending on the choices that the reader chooses for the character, these beats are the main things that the character Aaron is faced with. While the outcomes may be different, all of the choices that the reader must make are centered around these general themes. 

So balancing the reader’s interest with the character’s motivations was quite interesting at times in this story. There are some points in the story where I found the reader’s interest held because the characters actions got him in situations that make the reader wonder kind of ‘yikes, this could go bad for them, how are they going to get out of this?’. Aaron’s future is dependent upon the character's motivations to either help him become a better person or let him keep living this kind-of self-loathing life.