Tuesday Character: Tinman

In the interests of keeping my post count relatively steady, I've decided to start doing some regular features.This one involves detailing, in a few paragraphs, a character for a game, a story, both, or something else. Sometimes, as in this case, the characters will be ones from story fragments or settings I've already posted or will post to the blog. Other times they'll be self-contained things left here for future reference. 

Tinman is a handsome, lanky 20-year-old man with a bright blue mohawk, a remarkably elevated and unshakable self-esteem and a quick, nasty wit¹.  He makes a living as a concert promoter and minor pot dealer. Born Royce Benjamin Cloward, Tinman picked up his current moniker during one long fake-ID'd summer night three years ago. At one point, late in the night, an unattractive girl tried to dance with him. Royce proceeded to wittily point out every one of her physical flaws in rapid succession. Sputtering and stuttering for almost a minute, the girl finally simply shouted "You're heartless! You have no heart!" at him and fled the dancefloor in tears, to the delight of Royce's friends. Someone mentioned the Wizard of Oz² and the nickname (as well as could be drunkenly remembered) was coined.

Ironically³, the heart Tinman isn't supposed to have grew three sizes that day. He realized that he'd gone too far, but of course he couldn't apologize to the girl, and his pride wouldn't allow it even if he could have found her. The incident haunted him long after the hangover cleared the next morning; he never saw her again, and sometimes, late at night, he wonders about that. In the intervening years, he's tried to fight his natural instinct to be a prick, with mixed results - he's a bit nicer, sure, but there's still an element of solipsism to him where he forgets that other people matter. Nevertheless, the change led to him slowly gravitating away from his old social circle (who still consider him their friend, but mostly subconsciously understand and don't really question why they don't hang out any more) and into a different group. The name followed him, since everyone was already calling him that.

Among the new friends he's made is his girlfriend Ronnie, a fairly typical polka-dot-dress and Betty-Page-hair rockabilly girl with a voice that can be heard over club sound systems and a sense of humour similar to his old one, but much blunter. Tinman might be trying to help Ronnie be a better person (and thus help himself) by subtly passing on his epiphany, but this tends to take the form of carefully-aimed insults to which Ronnie simply returns fire. The basis of their relationship is more or less just tearing the shit out of each other, both rejoicing in the chance to abuse someone who never takes it personally. As yet, Tinman's primary effect on Ronnie has been making her a little bit funnier and a lot more effective at being cruel

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1. The pain in the ass of Tinman as a character is that I've got this mental image of him as being self-obsessed, funny in an exceptionally cruel way, and charismatic as hell, but I can't really write a character like that. You'll notice that both his role the original Kimota and his nickname origin story here commit a cardinal sin of writing by telling you what the gist of what he said rather than using actual dialogue. I need to hang around more charismatic assholes and take notes, I guess.
2. Funny how that keeps coming up on here. Especially since I've never actually read it.
3. Does anyone else just feel their whole body clench every time they use "irony" or a variant? The Internet's ruined it for all of us.