rpanons | It's just like my japanese yaois

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so, i have some characters who are really new to certain strong emotions, most of them connected to negative stimulus. they don't know how to be angry, or sad, or how to express those feelings at all, because they have almost no experience with them and were never taught any methods of expressing them. i wanted to some advice on how to show their difficulties/emotional immaturity in this regard without being hamfisted about it/telling instead of showing. suggestions?

Do they have any experience with situations that should make them experience those kinds of emotions in canon? This is a tricky question, because ways of dysfunctionally dealing with negativity are going to be very individualized.

Some options -- depending on your character -- may be:

- bottle it up! You can signal the fact that they're repressing it with physical clues (grinding teeth, twitches/tics) and occasional inappropriate outbursts, like suddenly yelling over something that's not that big a deal because it taps into the fears or anger they're trying not to express. This generally is going to end in meltdowns and/or alienating a lot of people with the random explosions, which can be a lot of fun to play out. They might also try deflection to avoid dealing with the negativity, such as changing the subject, babbling, hitting on people who start to pry about their feelings to scare them away, etc.

- overanalytical responses; robot turned human? this may be where you want to go. Uncomfortable over-sharing of their feelings in dialogue, without realizing that it's unusual or inappropriate; or, for more socially competent types, long awkward silences while they think their way through their feelings in great detail until somebody smacks them upside the head to get their attention.

- skip the repression, go straight for the meltdown: very passionate characters might get their wires crossed on fear/anger/etc and end up taking it out on others (for instance, screaming at someone because they were worried for them, that's an old classic.)

Regardless of how your character is most likely to handle their feelings, they'll be handling them in real-time, and the best way to show how bad they are at it is by showing them being bad at it.

It's just like my japanese yaois

emotionally immature characters

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