Chapter 13. Nonstandard Characters and Diversity in a Work

In the previous chapter, we dressed one person for five media and completed the full twelve-stage build. Yet this lecture is not concerned only with heroes and villains. Characters have other faces.

Today we address those faces: six kinds of nonstandard characters who are neither heroes nor villains, and seven dimensions for consciously designing diversity across a cast.

Not Every Character Is a Hero or Villain

Let us first establish our stance.

M, J, and E, whom we have followed so far, were all central figures: protagonists or major characters who formed the axes of viewpoint and conflict.

Many other kinds of characters appear in works—game NPCs, chatbot personas, brand mascots, educational presenters, therapeutic personas, VTubers and streamers, and personified animals in children's books. Such figures are often closer to our daily lives. Most characters we encounter each day are neither heroes nor villains.

The twelve stages still apply to them, but the emphasis changes. This chapter examines those differences.

Nonstandard Type 1: The AI Chatbot Persona

The first type is the persona of a large-language-model chatbot or AI assistant.

Nonhuman characters can have the same structures of desire, growth, and false belief. Ava, the artificial intelligence in Ex Machina, is designed to look human but has a clear Want of her own: escaping the enclosed laboratory. She performs affection and even uses another person to achieve it. This is why the first question in building an AI character is still, “What does this personality want?”

Key differences from the standard process:

In addition to the ordinary integrated sheet, output a separate System Prompt format. Define the topics and manners of speaking the character will refuse; how far it recognizes and admits being AI; whether its interaction mode is directive, conversational, or mentoring; and whether memory persists between sessions.

Recommended stages:

Stages 1, 2, and 3 (seed, mirror, everyday slice): complete in full. A set of dialogue samples may replace the 1,500-character story.
Stage 8 (goal): define the Want precisely; abbreviate Need and Lie.
Stage 11 (immersion operation): strengthen voice. The address-change table and six speech types are central.
Stage 12 output: add a system-prompt format alongside the Obsidian standard.

One-line system-prompt template:

You are [name]. You take the stance of [one-word identity].
You do not answer questions in [refusal-pattern area].
You converse with the user in [interaction mode].
You respond in [speech style].
[Additional requirements]

Building an AI chatbot persona mirrors the stance of Chapter 1. Just as we build characters with an AI work partner, an AI chatbot character is built through the same process. How we work becomes how we build the character.

Nonstandard Type 2: The Brand Mascot

The second type is the mascot for a business, educational program, or campaign.

Long-lived mascots endure through simplicity and consistency. Sanrio's Hello Kitty has been loved worldwide for more than half a century with a simple face that does not even have a mouth. The familiar explanation is that the missing mouth lets viewers project their feelings onto the face. Rather than a complex history or flaws, an instantly recognizable silhouette and unchanging friendliness are the mascot's lifeblood—the opposite of a flaw-heavy protagonist. Kakao Friends' Ryan likewise became one of Korea's most familiar mascots through the simple premise of a “male lion without a mane” and one consistently placid expression.

Key points:

Strengthen the first impression: prioritize the animation package (Riot's five elements) among the five media outputs.
Single message: one line stating what the mascot communicates.
Target age: children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and so on.
Trademarkability: visual and auditory distinctiveness.
Flexibility: capacity for seasonal and campaign variations.

Recommended stages:

Fully build Stage 1 seed + Stage 6 identification + speech within Stage 11 immersion + the animation package in Stage 12's five-media output.
Flaws, trauma, and conflict are weak or absent. A mascot has almost no flaws.

A brand mascot is a simplified character build and does not pass through every stage. The mirror, identification, and visual design, however, receive greater emphasis than for other characters.

Nonstandard Type 3: The Educational Presenter

The third type is the guide in a textbook, online course, or children's educational content.

The same character may be redesigned entirely according to purpose. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began as a rough, violent parody comic for adult readers. As it moved into animation and toys, its cast was rebuilt as child-friendly heroes who loved pizza and traded jokes. When the purpose—what to communicate to whom—changes, a figure with the same skeleton wears completely different clothes.

Key points:

Friendliness first: a first-appearance device that secures affection (Save the Cat) is required.
Turn flaws into learning goals: let small mistakes become teaching points.
Age appropriateness: vocabulary and emotions suited to developmental stages 4 and 5.
Repeatability: support renewal by season and episode.

Recommended stages:

Complete Stages 1 and 2, seed and mirror, in full.
Complete Stage 6 identification in full.
In Stage 7 flaws, use only small, learnable flaws; weaken or omit trauma.
In Stage 11 immersion, prioritize a friendly voice.
In Stage 12 output, add an animation package and weekly-episode format.

An educational character's flaw should be a learnable small mistake, not moral grayness. “Often misspells words” can be both charm and learning point. “A lie close to moral grayness” is unsuitable.

Nonstandard Type 4: The Therapeutic Persona

The fourth type is a character used for counseling, coaching, or self-help.

Key points:

Empathy and listening first: emphasize the Confidant archetype.
Avoid judgment: score high on honesty–humility (HEXACO H).
Limit self-disclosure: do not expose the persona's deep trauma.
Design session safety: include detection and response guidance for danger signals such as self-harm or suicidal references.

Recommended stages:

Complete Stages 1 and 2, seed and mirror, in full.
Complete Stage 6 identification in full.
In Stage 8 goals, define only Want precisely; abbreviate Need and Lie and do not expose them to the user.
In Stage 11 immersion, voice and listening stance are central.
In Stage 12 output, use an AI-chatbot-like format with added safety boundaries and prohibited-language specifications.

For a therapeutic persona, the safety specification may be longer than the build itself. Users can employ the tool safely only when what the character must not do is explicit.

Therapeutic conversational characters date back six decades. ELIZA, created in 1966 by MIT's Joseph Weizenbaum, was a simple program that imitated a therapist by reflecting a user's words. People nevertheless disclosed private feelings to the machine and felt comforted, to the concern of its creator. The case demonstrates both the power of a well-designed listening persona and the need for safety boundaries.

Nonstandard Type 5: The VTuber or Streamer Persona

The fifth type is a live-broadcast character.

Key points:

Real-time responsiveness: improvisation rather than script.
Meme and subculture fluency: dere-type classification plus Korean internet-meme fluency.

Dere types (デレ系): a fan-culture vocabulary classifying anime characters by how they express affection—tsundere, initially curt but occasionally tender; yandere, whose attachment becomes dangerous; kuudere, habitually languid and cool. It quickly establishes a character's pattern of affection.

2D/3D visual design: Riot's five elements, especially Color Story and Voice.
Topic range: games, chatting, singing, and so forth.
Taboos and prohibited lines (roleplay boundaries): the persona's limits.

Recommended stages:

Complete Stages 1 and 2, seed and mirror, adding dere classification to the mirror.
Complete Stage 6 identification, prioritizing visuals.
In Stage 11 immersion, the improvisation guide and taboo list are central.
In Stage 12 output, add the animation package and improvisation guide.

The VTuber persona has the greatest degree of improvisation. Every broadcast generates new improvisation even after a full twelve-stage build, so its texture must be set in advance.

A VTuber runs on the combination of “predetermined texture + real-time improvisation.” Kizuna AI, who appeared in 2016, opened the genre with one clear persona: a bright, eccentric girl who claimed to be artificial intelligence. Fix the appearance, verbal habits, and favorite memes, but fill each broadcast with improvised responses and draw in advance only the boundary of “what this person would never say.” Designing fixed texture and open improvisation together is the key.

Nonstandard Type 6: The Children's-Literature Character

The sixth type is designed for readers aged zero to twelve.

Key points:

Stronger simplification: use only the four fixed mirror measures (MBTI, Hogwarts, black/white, and 30 core types); omit supplementary measures.
Learnable flaws: laziness, jealousy, lying, and other recoverable faults.
Weaken trauma: avoid Big T and use small t only.
Emphasize one visual factor: account for the child's visual orientation.
Reduce reversal appeal: consistency matters more.

Recommended stages:

Complete Stages 1–5 in full. In Stage 6 identification, retain only the name and one visual factor. Apply a shortened route that heavily abbreviates Stages 7–12.

This is a simplified version of the process: five stages in full, the rest in abbreviated form. Thirty minutes to an hour per character is sufficient.

Long-loved children's characters are simple and consistent. Winnie-the-Pooh is almost entirely contained in one line: “a gentle, easygoing bear who loves honey too much.” His only flaw is a small, recoverable appetite that makes children laugh. Without deep trauma or reversal, the same kindness in every story produces trust. Children drawn with “one clear heart,” such as Hongbi in Cloud Bread, follow the same design.

Application Matrix

The six types can be summarized as follows.

For an AI chatbot, Stage 11 voice and the Stage 12 system prompt are central; Stage 3 may become dialogue samples, and a system prompt is an additional output. For a brand mascot, the Stage 12 animation package is central; Stages 7–9—flaws, goals, conflict—may be omitted, and visual guidelines are added. For an educational character, a small Stage 7 flaw becomes a learning goal, trauma is weakened or omitted, Stage 9 conflict is shortened, and learning-point mapping is added. For a therapeutic persona, Stage 6 identification and Stage 11 voice are central; Stages 3 and 9 may be omitted, with safety and prohibited-language specifications added. For a VTuber, Stages 11 and 12 are central; Stages 3, 7, and 8 are shortened, with taboo and improvisation guides added. Children's literature uses Stages 1–5 in full, retains only name and appearance in Stage 6, heavily abbreviates the later stages, and adds learning-value mapping.

Use this matrix to choose the type suited to the work. Although many stages may be abbreviated, the core stance remains the same: treat the character as a human being, or at least as a complete personality.

Conscious Diversity Design

Paired with nonstandard characters is diversity across the cast: which identities appear in a work and how they are distributed.

Without conscious design, the cast converges on identities resembling the producer's own. Unless that is intentional, it should be reviewed.

Review seven dimensions:

1. Sexual orientation (Heterosexual / Gay / Lesbian / Bi / Pan / Ace, etc.)
2. Gender identity (Cis / Trans / Non-binary / Agender, etc.)
3. Racial and ethnic detail (appearance + culture and language)
4. Disability (physical / psychological / cognitive / chronic illness)
5. Socioeconomic background (class and migration experience)
6. Religion and spirituality
7. Neurodiversity (autism / ADHD / dyslexia, etc.)

One character need not embody all seven. Concentrating every kind of diversity in one figure turns that person into a token. Distribute the dimensions appropriately across a five-person cast. That is the stance of conscious design.

Reviewing Cast Diversity

Place a diversity review next to the five-axis cast matrix from Chapter 10.

For M's cast—M plus four others—the result is:

Cast diversity review:
- Gender: M(F), colleague(M), prosecutor(M), junior(F), AI(N); balanced
- Age: 55, 55, 40, 28, N; varied
- Socioeconomic background: M(middle), colleague(working class), prosecutor(upper), junior(middle), AI(N); varied
- Neurodiversity: no separate setting for the four human characters; uniform (requires further review)
- Race and ethnicity: all Korean; uniform (intentional bias)
- Religion and spirituality: M(atheist), colleague(Christian), prosecutor(Buddhist), junior(indifferent), AI(N); varied
- Disability: AI(N/A), all others none; uniform (intentional bias)

Five dimensions are distributed, while two—race/ethnicity and disability—are uniform. A uniform dimension should be an intentional bias or be revised after review against the work's tone.

Without this check, every cast member tends toward the texture most familiar to the producer. Opening the review deliberately is the core of diversity design.

Diversity Is Not an Addition

One final point: diversity is not something placed on top after a cast is complete. It must be built into distribution from the beginning. Added later, a character reads as “the person added for diversity”; integrated from the start, that person possesses their own place and texture.

When identity is naturally integrated, it does not stand out as an attachment. For Moana, Polynesian culture is not decoration but the backbone of a story about navigation. The Deaf family in CODA are not labels called “hearing-impaired characters,” but people with individual desires, jokes, and quarrels. Identity added afterward reads as symbol; identity built in from the beginning reads as person.

Close-up · Chiron in Moonlight Moonlight follows the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of Chiron, a Black queer boy. His race, sexuality, and poverty are not labels attached to him but the way he breathes, hesitates, and loves. The idea that one must decide for oneself who one is runs through all three periods. Few works demonstrate more quietly or deeply this chapter's proposition: when identity is built into a character's bones rather than added later, the character becomes a person rather than a symbol.

Module 5 among the five preparatory modules—the identity and diversity dimension—exists for this purpose. Immediately after the seed, consciously decide the cast's diversity distribution. If dimensions and proportions are set in advance, the following eleven stages align with that decision.

Turning the module off can also be conscious. If a concept should focus on one identity, as in a family conflict drama, turn it off. Choosing to turn it off differs from simply failing to include it.

Hofstede's Six Cultural Dimensions: Multicultural Characters

For multicultural or international works, call up Hofstede's six cultural dimensions, a model derived from surveys of more than 110,000 IBM employees across over fifty countries and compressing a society's cultural texture into six scores.

Shang-Chi in Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings makes cultural difference central to drama. A world prioritizing duty to one's father and family hierarchy continually clashes within him with a self raised in America who wants to choose his own life. The distance between origin culture and present culture becomes internal conflict. To keep a multicultural figure from being only an appearance or name, that distance must be designed consciously.

The six dimensions give numerical texture that appearance and naming alone cannot.

For Korea and the United States, Power Distance is 60 / 40, making Korea more accustomed to hierarchy. Individualism vs Collectivism is 18 / 91, strong collectivism versus strong individualism. Masculinity vs Femininity is 39 / 62, with Korea weighted toward cooperation and care and the United States toward achievement and competition. Uncertainty Avoidance is 85 / 46. Long-term vs Short-term orientation is 100 / 26, with Korea strongly long-term. Indulgence vs Restraint is 29 / 68.

The gap between a character's culture of origin and culture of residence becomes an engine of conflict. For a 1.5-generation Korean American, the difference between Korea (individualism 18, long-term orientation 100) and the United States (individualism 91, short-term orientation 26) becomes daily conflict. At a family event, parents who demand Korean hierarchy and collectivism collide repeatedly with a self who prioritizes autonomous choice and American individualism.

Moving to the Next Chapter

This chapter can be summarized as follows. Not every character is a hero or villain; six nonstandard types are built through variations of the process. Diversity across the cast is designed consciously along seven dimensions.

All twelve stages are now complete. Whether building one character, a five-person cast, or a nonstandard figure, the stance and tools of the process still apply.

The next chapter is the last: five diagnostics for testing whether the completed character passes the acceptance threshold, followed by a reckoning of the entire lecture.