I admit I haven’t much thought about trolls as characters to be developed and that’s why this prompt caught my attention. There isn’t a lot here, a normal situation for a character bank prompt, but what there is tells you a lot.
To start with this character is a troll. That alone is quite interesting and carries a lot of potential baggage and expectations. I don’t know what all those expectations are, but I know people do not look at the word troll and think, nice guy. Pretty sure trolls can’t even manage a Nice Guy™.
So here we have this character who is part of a race that is not well thought of and he’s old. We aren’t talking grandpa age, no, he’s fantasy race old and other than elves, at 201, he’s older than most of the fantasy races even tend to get. I guess if you spent literal centuries guarding a bridge, you might feel entitled to collect tolls for it.
The next thing we learn about this character is that he has purple skin. That gave me a slight pause as I don’t think I’ve ever seen a purple troll in a story before. Now I kind of want the variety of colors for trolls to be all the colors of the rainbow or at least the primary and secondary colors. Sorry, indigo. Usually I advocate for you, but in this case where I think a variety of shades of colors would work best, I don’t think it make sense for indigo to actually be a separate color. Side note, the sixth color in the rainbow is not actually indigo. There are seven distinct colors in the rainbow, but the color between blue and purple is actually another shade of blue, not sure what it’s called, but indigo is a much more purple leaning color. It is an absolutely beautiful color, but not the color found in the rainbow.
This troll has a pet snake.
There is nothing wrong with having a pet snake and I have known people who had pet snakes. I even got to hold someone’s pet snake once which was pretty cool. It’s just that snakes are not the first animal people think of when they think of pets. Also the fact that he has a pet at all is kind of surprising and makes him more relatable as a character.
The only other things we have about this character are that he is self-indulgent and intellectual. Self-indulgent makes me think of someone who will spend their money on whatever brings them pleasure and given the other half of this, I think it’s possible that the thing that brings him pleasure is books or more specifically the knowledge in those books thus I think it is very possible that this purple troll is a bookworm. What do you think?
