BUILDING CHARACTER

Rule 34

of

Steven Universe

Lesson in:

Profiling characters

Sapphire and Ruby light SM.

Today I'm gonna talk a bit about how to understand characters and how to put them into an (exaggerated) sexual environment.

Most of the characters we draw 34 of are from SFW works of fiction.
Many of them are from kids shows.
With the few odd exceptions in which a show tries so desperately to earn money that they blatantly try to sell sex, like all of Seth McFarlane's shit or the later seasons of Futurama, we do not actually know very much about the sexual affinities of a character.
Hell, sometimes we don't even know their sexuality.

Here is a picture of Ruby and Sapphire from Steven Universe that I just finished:

Ruby is clearly enjoying herself being on her knees at Sapphire's side.
Now, we've only seen a couple of seconds of Ruby and Sapphire interacting, but in the following I'll explain a bit about the logic behing finding out what works with a character and what doesn't.

To start off, I'll admit that I never really thought about it, myself.
I just put a character into a role they seemed to fit into. I'm sure most other 34 artists do the same.
That's completely fine, actually preferable, as our first intuition is usually right.
However, a few days ago I decided I like to actually know what I'm doing, so I thought of a small chart to help me assess a character's sexual ... alignment, if you will.

Of course I'm no psychologist, and even a psychologist wouldn't be able to create a completely accurate sexual profile of a human. We're just way too complex for that.

But this is the chart I figured out a couple of days ago:

 Basically, it's just the good old d&d alignment chart, just for sex (plus I removed the neutrals, since they are pointless for something as naturally exaggerated as pornography).
As you can see, instead of the moral and ethical axis, you have an axis for the degree of activity, i.e. quantity (aggressive/passive) and a type of activity, i.e. quality (in this case not good/bad, but sub/dom).
These might not at first seem to be very conclusive.
That's true.
It can't be more conclusive, because these are the hard basics for the way your characters act.
This chart was made to aid in determining what would work best for a character, not what the character would actually be like in bed, because, well, that sort of canon simply doesn't even exist in most cases.
It is impossible to determine a character's specific fetishes in this chart, and yes, by that I also mean the sexuality of a character. Sexuality, much like many other fetishes or sexual preferences is mostly based on the individual character's idea of aesthetics.
Sure, you COULD make assumptions about a character's idea of aesthetics by noting small things in their behavior, therefore their subconscious, like our good friend Sigmund Freud tried to do (even if he made some assumptions that were just plain false).
This, however, is sadly not applicable to fictional characters, as no writer, no matter how good they are, can say of themselves that they actually created a human mind.
So, as much as I would love to get into that, I'm afraid it would overshoot my goal for this post a bit.

Instead, this is a chart to assess the basic behavior of a character and can, in turn, be construed from the behavior that the character exhibits in canon.

Let's take the example of Ruby and Sapphire for this, since it's such a great example of how this works:

 

Ruby was so concentrated on finding Sapphire in the short amount of screentime she had, that we really didn't see much more than her relationship with Sapphire, so this relationship is what we will use to create a sexual profile.

-She cares more about her partner's well-being than her own ->submissive

-She is reckless ->aggressive

-she doesn't know what to do without Sapphire's guidance, stumbling over words and unable to express herself ->submissive

-She can not bear to be without Sapphire, to the point that it seems to physically cause her pain ->sub

-> aggressive submissive

Now, with how their relationship works on a Yin-Yang balance we can already say that Sapphire has to be passive dominant, which is quite useful, since we don't actually get to see too much of her, even less than of Ruby, but let's look at her character as well, for the purpose of this post.

 -She sings a calm, peaceful melody ->passive

- She stops when Jasper bangs on the wall instead of standing up to her, which might be interpreted as submissive, but because  she obviously doesn't express any submissiveness towards Jasper and because of the way she interacted with Ruby I think it should be clear that that is not the case here, so ->passive

-Unlike Ruby she takes the lead and pulls Steven by his hand in a straight line through the ship ->dominant

- She kisses Ruby's tears away and comforts her in a motherly way ->dominant

-> passive dominant

So, yeah, those are their basic sexual alignments.

With these, we can determine the way they are gonna interact sexually with each other and with others.

Despite this not telling you explicitly which fetishes work best for a character you can still use this to get a good feel for the character.

This is how I would try to think of a good scene that is in-character:

I would think of possible ways to showcase the parts I like most about the characters, in this case it would be Ruby and Sapph's strong love for each other and the bond of being a fusion for so long.

So, personally, I immediately think of bondage, but since Ruby is extremely aggressive, being tied up doesn't work too well for her, so instead I think about other SM scenarios. This worked quite well.

Ruby's a strong, muscular character, which, when combined with submissiveness often translates to masochism, because in many cases of submissive strong characters the pain of building up muscle and physical exertion are being associated with the pleasure you feel from the same and from enjoying your body afterwards. This is something I personally enjoy a lot, so it was the perfect choice for me.

(I'm not saying that the picture actually encapsulates any of this really well. I don't really like this picture, myself)

(If you don't want to venture into the whole SM territory, they would simply have slightly rough sex. Likely, Ruby would take it anally and also like to service Sapph. Ruby would do most of the work and use toys on herself, whereas Sapphire would probably just enjoy Ruby's affections passively)

So that's how that works.

I know, it's not an exact science, but what can ya do?

I'm no psychologist.