Personality in perspective

I didn't really intend to roll Kamai, my troll mage. I was playing around with the character creation screen and really liked her hair (you have no idea how much gold I've blown in the barber shops of Azeroth, people). And then she was level 14.

So unlike Ahami and Silang, she didn't have a rudimentary backstory in place when I started playing her. And unlike Ideale, she did not even have a personality.

But now that I'm actually leveling her, I found I was having some trouble distinguishing her personality from Ahami's and it was really making playing her a bit odd. The backstory and personalities of my characters has always driven my enjoyment of the game. I have an eidetic memory, so once I've been through a zone, I remember all of the quests I completed down to the text (not word for word, but close enough for horseshoes and handgrenades), and if I'm not figuring out how a character would react to the lore and the quests, I get bored superfast.

The first thing I did was get her to another zone. Ahami leveled almost entirely in troll, orc and shaman zones — she did perhaps a handful of quests in the Ghostlands, and I think two in the Plaguelands. As a shaman, it made sense; as a burgeoning member of the Earthen Ring, of course she would be questing in areas where elementals were particularly active, and as a healer, of course she would be working in areas where there were other shamans and even druids who worked with nature rather than the Light to heal.

Kamai, as a mage, was particularly suited to go to the Forsaken and blood elf zones, to "learn more about magecraft," so off she went. That way, while I got to know her, at least she would be doing something different.

Nonetheless, there are similarities between the two, and knowing that Ahami had siblings, it only seems natural that Kamai would be her younger sister. Both are a bit eccentric in their intellectual pursuits for trolls; Ahami is a big reader, particularly of texts that describe healing and cleansing techniques and histories, and Kamai is an engineer and always poring over schematics. Both seem to have a deep-seated loyalty to the Horde. But that made developing a separate personality for Kamai a bit more of a challenge; I keep wanting to play her as I did Ahami.

So I sat down with some of the RP Friday Five questions from Too Many Annas. Really, for developing a character, they're fantastic. Answering some of them for Ide really helped me to get brave enough to actually roleplay with her! So if you're struggling, they're a wonderful resource.

Here's what I learned (well, Ahami I already know fairly well, but I am writing some out for comparison purposes):

AHAMI
Ahami is the more practical and grounded of the two, because she is the older, because she works with Earth and Water, or because of the nature of practicing the healing arts, or maybe some combination of all three. Because she's a healer, she tends to be patient and think logically; while she regrets every life she cannot save, as a soldier she does have to weigh who is most necessary to the fight and where to best spend her energies. She also has to think of herself, because if she burns out or uses her mana impetuously, then she's of no use to anyone.

This practicality extends to how she works with other classes; while she doesn't care much for those classes who work against nature instead of going with the flow, and particularly has a distaste for warlocks and death knights, she recognizes that they are another tool against the Horde's enemies, so she works with them. (On a side note, she realizes that death is a part of life. She also sees banning cannibalism as wasteful — people ARE made out of meat, after all, and if they're already dead ... — and often finds herself exchanging recipes for gnome with her Forsaken guildmates.)

She dreams, but they tend to be abstract and deeply rooted in the natural world around her. Sholazar Basin was a welcome relief after the snows of Howling Fjord and Dragonblight, for the dreams of waterfalls and trees alone. She likes to explore the world, but not necessarily for the sake of tourism so much as because she feels very connected to Azeroth and wants to know every nook and cranny of it. Sometimes she dreams of storms or earthquakes in completely other parts of the world.

She doesn't "get" fashion, and she hates most cities for the way that they destroy the natural world rather than working around it (though she likes Thunder Bluff and would love Darnassus if it weren't full of pesky night elves). She mostly travels, staying wherever she ends up for the night, whether in Orgrimmar or camped out in Un'Goro Crater.

Ahami's favorite holidays are the Midsummer Fire Festival and, to a lesser extent, the Lunar Festival.

She's fiercely independent — while she likes to feel as if she is useful and contributing to any group with similar goals, she has her own goals and she's not going to abridge them for anyone else, and she is quite happy spending weeks without human contact out in the wilderness.

Her philosophy? Go with the flow, work to keep balance, and stay away from da voodoo, and you'll be fine.

KAMAI
Kamai is the younger of the two, and much more of a social creature. She loves cities and can sit and talk shop with her colleagues for hours, something that would drive Ahami crazy. She's impetuous and, because of this, often gets into trouble over her head. Like her sister, she's fiercely loyal to her friends.

She's not a big reader — she learned how, because she's a mage after all, but she sees books as an annoyance that stand between her and what she needs to know. She prefers tailoring patterns and engineering schematics, because she can use them to get immediate results (by making them).

I don't think she'll ever be much of an arcane mage, since she seems to be pretty drawn to frost and fire. Arcane magic would probably require too much stuffy studying in libraries and not enough pyromania and shooting shards of frost at things. Plus, frost and fire remind her a bit of shamanism, and while she's studying magery on a whole other continent, she's still a troll and it reminds her of home.

She's far more energetic than her sister. Ahami is content to let things happen and react here, give a nudge there, until they're going the right way, then she goes with them, and what's past is past and cannot be changed. Kamai is much more hands-on, and always has to be doing something. She gets very upset in situations where she's helpless to change things, and has a tendency to obsess over them later.

One thing she does love about Silvermoon City is all of the parties. Kamai loves parties, and people, and while she recognizes that it's frivolous, she is a bit of a clotheshorse. (She has more dresses than Ideale.)

She's an inventor — while she's much less practical than her older sister, she's more cunning. She runs off of instinct, but somehow it all ends up working out, even if half of the stuff she dreams up shouldn't work. Unfortunately, Kamai also has her head in the clouds a lot, and sometimes she fails to account for reality in her schemes, with disastrous results.

She dreams, but mostly her dreams simply reflect her actual life, or she dreams of home. She's a bit of a follower, and while she recognizes that what she's doing will soon be important, she still misses her home (her childhood home, not the apartment she keeps in Silvermoon City). Trips home can be somewhat uncomfortable, though; she doesn't feel she's at all lived up to the expectation of what a Darkspear woman is supposed to be.

Her favorite holidays are Winter Veil and Children's Week — she might be an adult now herself, but she loves children.

And if she empties her pockets, there would be thread and a cloth stuck with needles (no thimble, though, because who needs them?) in one, and a handful of assorted bolts and springs in the other. She always has something in her pockets to keep her hands busy.

THEIR RELATIONSHIP
If they are sisters, they have to have some sort of relationship. My thoughts are that, as children, they were closer to each other than their other siblings because both had a deep love of learning. However, they grew apart as they grew older, since Ahami was drawn to the healing arts and shamanism, while Kamai found herself chasing more arcane pursuits. However, as Kamai follows in her sister's footsteps in serving the Horde, they are starting to regrow that connection and find common ground again.

Even so, I think Ahami is probably often exasperated with Kamai's head in the clouds personality, while Kamai probably loves to annoy her practical older sister with frivolous things. (That's what younger sisters do, right?)