So like, in my danganronpa fanfiction I’ve sort of hit a dead end, as everyone hates everyone else for being different ideologies. I want to have a scene where Pavel convinces them to put their differences aside temporarily so they don’t all get murdered after the first class trial, but I feel like that would be pushing the apolitical “muh politics bad let’s all be friends line.” However, the alternative would be him just sitting in his room all day thinking about shit until somebody dies.
Any thoughts?
Related to this, another good trick to make characters more life-like is to base them on two real people because it can make those internal contradictions know visceral. If you base a character on only one person, you only know them from the outside so you don’t see their internal struggle. But you can craft an internal conflict by mixing the ‘external’ appearanxe of two people. The resolution of that conflict can then drive your story.