Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-12736261-20140708180230/@comment-10734109-20150226234322

Yes, the characters need to be discussed a bit more I think. Personally, I think we need to change the gender (and maybe area of study) of some of the characters. After all, there are 13 female characters and 9 male characters (the ratio is 12:7 if we don't count teachers). Trust me, I would've made Janika and Lorraine male myself, but I thought a crazy fangirl and her practical sister would be an interesting combination (though they're both minor characters).

Here's the dorm set up if I haven't mentioned it yet:

Main girls' dorm: Kaitlin, Kim, Janika, Brooklyn

Main boys' dorm: Andrew, Emery, Darren, Farid

If you need any details on Farid, I can help you. I've sort of been brainstorming ideas for his character for awhile to fill in gaps and stuff. I'm not sure if this is important or not, but he's a somewhat liberal Muslim.

I also think it'd be cool if we changed Drake from being mute to being autistic (he doesn't have to be super autistic), whose main interests are animal activism and abstract art. I know 2 people who are definitely autistic, 1 who might be, and 2 with aspergers, which I used to have (it went away after 7th grade). What I'm getting at is that autism (and things like it) is pretty common, and since we seem to be doing pretty well on the race/ethnicity spectrum (1 Korean, 2 Chinese, 1 Arab, 1 Indian) and with the romantic preferences (We have at least 1 gay character and 1 bi character, though I'm not 100% sure), working with different disabilities could work, too :). We already have a deaf person and someone else who's bipolar. Autism is by far the single illness which I know the most people who struggle with a form of it, so it would reflect real life in a way. That's not saying that mutes don't exist, but I just haven't met/heard of any up to this point (^_^)

For the teachers, Sadowski teaches digital modeling/3d animation, Gupta teaches Mathematics, and Lockwood teaches the illustration course, which I'm thinking most of the story will center around.