The 'I Want' PC

Readers who do not live in the dank earth beneath rocks with only woodlice and earthworms for company will no doubt have heard of something called K-Pop Demon Hunters. If you haven't heard of it: now you have, and the title is essentially everything you need to know. It's about K-Pop Demon Hunters - trust me, you now don't have to watch it.

The silver lining in the cloud that is having K-Pop Demon Hunters-obsessed children is that the songs are actually pretty catchy and well-executed, even if the lyrics are cringe-inducing doggerel ('Heels, nails, blade, mascara/Fit check for my napalm era/Need to beat my face, make it cute and savage/Mirror, mirror on my phone, who's the baddest?', indeed). And the soundtrack does have one bona fide banger of an 'I Want' Song: the uplifting, Let-It-Go-beating, every-local-grab-a-granny-nightclub-in-the-country-will-be-playing-this-for-years anthem, Golden. 

If you're wondering what an 'I Want' song is, it's the phrase used to describe the songs that basically all musicals have these days, in which the main character (typically a Disney princess) gives vent to her special snowflake feelings and proclaims the desire to escape social expectation/veer from the path laid out before her/find her true self/break free from an overbearing parent/etc. Prominent examples would include:

This species of song, and its role in the films in which it appears, is easily lampooned, but it is important to remember that everybody is young once, and it would be concerning to inhabit a world in which young people are not moved by the theme of 'I Want' songs. This is a necessary part of adolescence: feeling as though one is misunderstood, as though one has a special calling in life, and as though one is destined to do amazing things. What a sad indictment of the culture it would be if such songs did not exist.

For a long time, RPG culture has tilted in the direction of what I will call the 'I Want' PC, no doubt because this speaks to the adolescent craving to be special and because adolescents (and permament adolescents, let's face it) are the core audience for table top RPGs. I can well remember understanding, even as a 13-year-old, that my own instincts and feeling were being manipulated by the game designers in the extensive chargen options they laid before me so as to create my own, uniquely interesting and special, tiefling/werewolf/turtle-man fighter-mage with glaive proficiency and the curse of the bard's tongue. I recognised that this was manipulative even as I revelled in it; a very great deal of the fun that my friends and I got out of, say, Shadowrun or Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Cyberpunk 2020 was the process of simply making up characters.

A good 'I Want' PC should have the following characteristics:

1 - He or she should be wrestling with inner demons - and he or she must be driven by this sense of turmoil in the direction of adventure, preferably reluctantly. The K-Pop Demon Hunters iteration of this is that the main character, Rumi, is herself half-demon and gradually transforming into one; I have only caught snippets of the things because I find the experience of watching the film to be almost physically painful, but I understand this somehow gets resolved. See also: Elsa from Frozen, who can't control her ice magic powers; Ariel from The Little Mermaid, who wants to be human; Luke Skywalker, who wants to get out of Tatooine, etc. 

2 - He or she should be a misfit and set apart from society, preferably having been bullied or ostracised for some reason. Think Elphaba from Wicked with her green skin, Belle from Beauty & The Beast and her obsession with books, Harry Potter and his upbringing with the Dursleys, and so on. 

3 - He or she should have a special gift or blessing that makes for genuine superiority over the hoi polloi. It is no good wrestling with inner demons and being a misfit if one is not a misunderstood genius of some kind to compensate. Hence Harry Potter is actually the chosen one, Elsa is actually a demigod-like ice sorceress, Luke Skywalker is actually a Jedi and can use the Force, Moana is actually a blessed navigator, and so on.

Not all 'I Want' characters have all three of these characteristics but an 'I Want' PC really should. And it is fairly straightforward to make up some tables to supply them. Here is a 1d8 one, but you could easily expand it to 1d30, 1d100, etc. with more detailed rows:

1d8	Inner demons	Misfit because…	Special gift
1	Actually has an inner demon	Is especially ugly or in some other way repellent	Can manipulate one of the elements
2	Wants to be physically different in some way	Has very distinctively coloured skin or some other unusual physical feature or mutation	Can always tell when somebody is lying
3	Has an uncontrollable, destructive power	Is an orphan and has been raised in unusual circumstances	Can teleport short distances
4	Was prophesied to have a vitally important life mission	Has been raised by neglectful or cruel parents or guardians	Can go invisible for short periods
5	Has a ‘dark side’ that comes out in some specified set of circumstances	Has a disability that is maligned by a misunderstanding society, such as mutism or deafness	Can fly for short periods
6	Goes through periods of debilitating depression, weakness, lethargy, etc.	Is of a different species or is a different type of entity to those in mainstream society	Has X-ray vision
7	Has an uncontrollable appetite or unrestrainable addiction	Has a strange social impairment such as an inability to lie, or smile	Is telekinetic
8	Has an arch enemy	Is the victim of strange rumours	Can breathe underwater