BoM/TWS Message Forum

There's a lot of ways of explaining Will, inside or outside the story. The above nicely encapsulate him from within the story. I can tell you some of the "outside" stuff that went into making him the way he is.

I started BoM a very long time ago, very self-consciously, as a writing exercise. Characters in any kind of story make choices and shape themselves as they progress thru the plot, and writing an interactive, which forces choices at the end of chapters, was a way of practicing writing chapters that forced the protagonist to make choices. (I also consciously named my protagonist "Will" as a pun on the fact that he would be "willing" certain possibilities into existence. Numerous alert readers over the years have noticed that fact.) So one of my rules was that every choice would be a choice for the protagonist to exercise, never a choice between results of an action. That is, every choice would be of the form "You do this" vs. "You do that." Never: "This happens" vs. "That happens."

Characters create themselves through their choices. A character is what he does, and his choices are for doing one thing rather than another. So if Will turns out differently in different branches, it is because he has self-created himself in different ways in alternate branches. That is not through authorial purpose. It simply emerges from different choices being made and consistent consequences being drawn from those choices.

Finally, making Will a Sulva wasn't a starting decision, but almost a kind of retconning after I invented the Stellae and decided to make him one. Sulva was the closest fit, though even there I fudged and fiddled with the Sulvan attributes in order to make it an even better fit.

It is true that Will does enter the story with a native personality, but it's a personality designed to be maximally flexible and adaptable to all the metamorphoses. He is unformed, tentative, yielding, somewhat colorless, anxious about himself and his place in his world, but possessing an adolescent's willingness to experiment, sometimes with disastrous abandon. Other characters who play with the Libra are unlikely to have so many possible adventures because they will be more settled and rigid in their established character. To the extent they are as flexible as Will is as a protagonist, they will closely resemble Will and therefore not be really distinct from him.