"The hook is how unique, how memorable your character is. A character without a hook is a generic character... Now there is a place for those sometimes if you're designing characters in a crowd or just random NPCs... If you want your characters to stand out, a hook is required. You'll know you have a good hook if you can describe your character with a single sentence, the shorter the better, and have someone easily pick it out from a crowd."
--this drawing tutorial I'm watching
>>56459366Superhuman elements have always been around and have only gained relevance as the decades go by. We had Sabrina bend a spoon Geller-style, now we have an entire Trainer class across both sexes levitating Pokeballs and most recently had Tulip and her weird butterflies. We had shrine maidens get possessed by Gastly, we had an Elite 4 member who could commune with ghosts, then we had actual dead people and another Elite 4 member whose room is filled with ghosts. Aura is one that so far has only had one human representative in the games (Riley channels aura in his palm if you verse him in the Battle Frontier) and quite a few Pokemon reps. It has the dubious double accolade of being sorely unexplored and also a lot more limited than people expect after watching the Lucario movie.
The best way to handle it is to stick as close to the source material as you can for authenticity, or otherwise make sure there's much more to the character than just whichever supernatural gimmick you're portraying. One-note characters are good for NPCs, but for a fanfic you're probably looking for more nuance.
