I have begun brainstorming some character ideas, I've done two mind maps for each character shown below. They are currently quite basic and just go over some vague ideas of what i could do for these characters.
This is the mind map for the character that will suffer from some form of mental illness. I have listed a few mental conditions that the character could suffer from, i have not included dementia as i would like to do something new and not dwell on the same condition for each assignment. Split personality disorder is always an interesting one but can be overused. post traumatic stress disorder is an unusual one to cover, there aren't many well developed characters that suffer from it, it is also a hard condition to display visually. Obsessive compulsive disorder may be a good one to do, you can do a lot of little details that show this. Cannibalistic psychosis is from a small assignment i did back in the first few weeks of my first year. I had come up with a short narrative that featured two characters, ideally a protagonist and an antagonist. My idea was about this couple, the husband developed a psychosis where he took the saying "you are what you eat" literally and thus became a cannibal where he ate who he wanted to become. The protagonist was his wife who was the first person he ate, she had a new prosthetic arm given to her by some governmental organisation in a kind of bionic woman style scenario. Alcoholism would probably be one of the easiest one to do, though is may be a physical dependence on a substance, the actual addiction is still a mental disorder, the same way things like bulimia are.
Here are some ideas for what the other character could be, i listed 4 main kinds of roles that this kind of character would fit into. I included family member because of the dynamic i used in the previous project where it was a father and his daughter trying to help him, also there are many cases where people look after their loved ones instead of admitting them to a care facility. Probably the most obvious one was the doctor/nurse/medical professional, this one probably wouldn't be that interesting but on the orderly one i thought about flipping the roles, sort of how it was in the movie Sucker Punch.
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Oscar Issac as Blue Jones in Sucker Punch.
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I find that corrupt, evil or otherwise not normal doctors always make more interesting characters.
The last one is the pacifier, i looked at the relationship between batman and the joker as a prime example of this, Joker is indeed all kinds of crazy and Batman in a way must pacify him and return him to his cell in Arkham Asylum. My idea from my first year had this same dynamic.
I also thought that why should i have to create 2 characters that look the way they're supposed to, in my last project the world was viewed as it was. This gave me the idea to have the character suffering from the illness as the main character, thus already flipping the dynamic i used in the last project and have as if this person perceives everything different due to the illness. An example would be that this person sees the orderly or doctor or whoever who is trying to help them or get them back into their room as some kind of monster trying to chase and capture them.
