OOC - Challenge of the Month of August: Wrinkles Matter

Hello Platformers, as I promised in an earlier post, I am diverging this month from the usual Quote of the Month and instead of trying out an activity that I will call a Challenge of the Month. The purpose of this challenges (and potential future challenges depending on the level of participation) is to bring participants a little out of their comfort zone and to encourage them to think about things they may not have given much thought to.

This month's challenge will be about wrinkles, more specifically, facial wrinkles. The vast majority of stories on Ongoing Worlds tend to focus on the exploits of the young and foolish. While there is nothing wrong with this, I feel there is room to appreciate the older generations in our writing here on OW. Age brings about experience, and experience usually brings about wisdom. In life, most of of the non-experiential things we learn come from those older than us who want to help us. There is power that can come from age, but there are drawbacks to becoming old as well. Our bodies become increasingly unreliable the older we become, and our beauty (as perceived by most people) declines as well. Many of us on Ongoing Worlds have written characters with a high number of years listed in their age box who are not really experiencing the ill effects of age, whether it is because they are elves, vampires, genetically engineered humans, or whatever. That is not what this challenge is about. This challenge is about aging, both the good and the ugly.

For this challenge, we will be nominating characters that we believe accurately depict what it is like to be old, while still being relatable characters with feelings, goals, flaws, and other things we like to see in life-like characters. The minimum age at which I will seriously consider a character shall be 40 years of age for a human, or whatever you guys think the equivalent of that would be for characters of alien or fantasy races.

I will be the judge for this challenge. While character depth and displaying the effects of age will be the primary criteria by which I rate each nominated character, I will also weigh the following factors:

Is the character male or female? Because of the significance our society places on beauty, particularly for women, I will weigh female characters slightly more favorably than male characters (that qualify) because I feel that aged female characters are harder for people to want to write.

Does the creator have some experience being old? It is going to be easier for an older, more experienced writer to write an old character. They may have first-hand experience with the symptoms of aging, and even if they don't, they probably have had much more exposure to people who have. As such, in the spirit of fairness, I will weigh characters created by people I believe to be younger more generously than characters I believe to have been created by more mature writers.

The formatting for nominations for this challenge will be somewhat similar to what we have been doing for the Quote of the Month in that they will be made in the comments section of this post. A nomination includes the character's name and a link to their character profile. If the nominee desires to increase the character's likelihood of winning, they can provide reasons as to why they like the character and provide links to posts that they believe highlight the primary criteria I listed in that character. I will post a couple of example nominations below.

Unlike for Quote of the Month, nominations for characters created by the nominator will qualify, but that is not to say that members cannot nominate characters made by other members. If you see a character that has already been nominated that you really want to see win, you can provide extra reasons why you like that character and links to other posts in a reply to the original submission.

I will give an award to the owner of the character that wins if that person is a member of the Ongoing Worlds Community Platform. If that is not the case, a moderator of the game that the character came from can award that person in my stead. Honorable mention will be made of the person or people that nominated that character.

As always, let me know if you have any questions.