Welcome to Writing Tips, where I place my subjective opinion with sometimes objective facts. Whether you're writing a fan fiction with ocs or your story with copyrighted characters, tips and tricks are always helpful.
Added reviews!!! I'm here to h...
Here's a section dedicated to the elements, mostly my series. You can have as many as elements as you want, I'm going by the Tales of series' logic. (Such as categorizing "rock" into earth. Electricity and ice are sub elements of light and water respectively.)
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Elements in this sense are what can hint to a personality of a character, their abilities and their likes sometimes.
Good and Evil:
Let's look at ice, while usually being seen as cold, dark and mysterious, it can also be beautiful and elegant. Disney's Frozen. Elsa's power is ice and it's shown through her cold and distant personality. She started out being happy go lucky then after realizing her power can be dangerous, she locks herself away. She's not evil, like many may think the ice element is. As Larxene says, a power is good or evil depending on how someone sees it. If Elsa sees her power is evil, it will become evil. So really, good and evil are a matter of perspective.
Darkness, I see people mistake the element darkness for evil. While the two are similar, they aren't the same thing. As stated above, good and evil are a matter of perspective, if a character thinks their power is evil, it will become evil. Darkness is usually the one that's cold, mysterious, and distant. A character from my series, Shadow (his title is Shadow, not his name) is a good example. He's exactly these traits, but he's not evil. Darkness isn't pure evil and light isn't pure good, while the two terms are used in the same vein, darkness is evil, they're actually two different things. It's why I use "malevolence" and "purification" to describe evil and good.
Personality:
As I said, it hints to a personality. A fire element can be hot headed, easily angered and/or lash out while an ice element could be calm, quiet and/or elegant in movements/speech. These are parts of their personality, but not everything. I hate "one liner" characters, when they're defined by one word.
Abilities:
This one is a bit more limiting than personality. A character can only use the element of what they were born with. In my series, a character is naturally born with one element, only experiments can be born with multiple (and they're unstable) and pacts allow for other elements, so the character can use those powers (artes in my series) but it's not "born with". Characters can also have a weapon with a different element, depending on who it belonged to. If the weapon is infused with mana while the character is holding it, it will be the same element as that character. Yeah that's a lot to know, I have it written down somewhere.
In general, if a character is a fire element, the power they're going to use, is fire. Quick and simple. The how, why and ways they use it depends on the writer. Even how tue character has it depends, born with, given by magic, experimentations, etc.
What is an Element?:
The definition depends on what the writer wants, unless it's never going to be described then I'm fine with whatever explanation you make up. If the explanation is "everyone has the same mindset as me so I don't have to describe it" get out of my house. Even if it's the same term used in a previous story, don't assume the reader has read that story and explain it again. Trust me, it does suck, but you have to do it.
Above I said that I categorize the elements into eight pieces. If you don't, then you'll need to explain how the other elements are different. Rock and earth are the same to me, so I've categorized them in the same category, and most people do. Diamond is a bit, strange. I go by real life logic but if you have magic that can manipulate diamonds, sure why not?
