Writing Tips and Reviews

Personality

I think the personality of a character is what shines the brightest about them. Their backstory, relationships and development all come during the story, but it's the personality that takes the reader in at first look.

Let's look at at Kingdom Hearts Union Cross. From first look we can see Lauriam is skittish and wanders out often, Blaine is curious and scientific, Elrena is shy and doesn't really care about strangers, Strelitzia is an introvert with social problems. Just from a few minutes of them on screen we get a taste of who they are and become invested over time. Sometimes dialogue doesn't have to be there at all. Just seeing Strelitzia hide behind walls and watch from afar is enough to show she's introverted and shy. Lauriam goes out often and let's Ephemer make the decisions with his vote by Ephemer's side.

When a character is first shown with no personality, then either have the open up or grow a personality, or just rewrite them. Even the nobodies of Kingdom Hearts do a better job of this: Larxene is a straight up bitch, Marluxia is a mad man, Demyx is like a teenager, screw Luxord and his games, Axel is insane but lovable, Saix acts like he's on a joy ride most of the time, Vexen can go to hell with his experimentations is mad man, and Zexion is basically the calmest out of the bunch. Nobodies are said to have no heart, they can't feel anything and any semblance of a personality is just what they remember from when they were human. But then why are they better written than most characters who don't have a personality to begin with?

All I see is "death and destruction is fun, I came from a place where people murder because it's fun, I can't die because I'm immortal". Besides how stupid that all is, what are we given about the character? That they're a whiny prick who doesn't actually have any qualities that make the reader want to get to know them? Yes. Giving everything about a character the first time they're introduced is not only bad writing, but just plain boring. We don't get to see them grow, we don't get to know anymore about them, they're just put on the character shelf of "okay this happened". Especially if you think that all your characters being this dark edgy "death is fun" thing is "cool". That's straight up not trying honey.

Even Kairi from Kingdom Hearts has more of a personality and she's known for having no personality. Namine, her nobody, has more of a personality and Namine has had a fourth of the screen time Kairi has in thirteen games. Without a personality not much can be done, a tragic backstory is great and all (especially if every single character has the same tragic backstory with name changes, please try harder than not at all) but without a present to show the effects of the past, you've failed.

Personality is necessary for a character, emotionless doesn't count in natural sense. Being a psychopathic murder, no matter how stupid the reason, is not a personality and saying "killing is fun" isn't "cool" or "edgy", it's annoying and stupid. Which, your character has effectively gained a personality, a really annoying and pandering personality that no one likes.

Do your homework if you need to a find out what a personality is, if you somehow don't know, and match personalities with character typing. Not everyone has the same type of personality.