Debut RP

There's uh, kind of a lot to take in here, but to keep from doing a huge point-by-point breakdown I'm just going to hit two key things. I feel like they're the most egregious issues, and a lot of smaller problems can be worked on from there.

1.) Spelling, Grammar, Word Usage. It's "wreak havoc," not "reek havoc." Successor isn't synonymous with a victor or winner, a successor is someone in line to inherit (like a successor to a throne). Punctuation, sentence structure--I know it sounds like nitpicking, but frequent mistakes stack up and paint a piece as being amateur. Coming off as amateur is a killer if you're going for an intimidating monster character. You have to convince the reader that you ARE this terrifying force, not that you're a regular guy trying really hard to pretend you are. It's a very, very easy trap to fall into when you're playing a gimmick-heavy wrestler, and having legible promos is the foundation of your presentation.

2.) Find a Voice. This kinda goes hand in hand with the above. You need to be convincing. You need the reader to buy what you're selling, or the entire scary monster angle falls apart. This is hard for a lot of reasons! A big part of it, though, is convincing the reader that the character is real--having the character sound natural, in some way shape or form. Phantom kind of... floats back and forth between sounding like an ominous, above-it-all figure with religious undertones (talking about preaching the truth, inflicting wrath, etc) and sounding like a regular roughneck in the street (calling his opponent a crossdresser, talking about fighting women jokingly, "I don't give a damn") and sounding like a serial killer taking delight in making people bleed.

Like, this can work--a character can have layers. A professional can have moments where that facade slips, a normally focused character can snap when their buttons are pushed, a total bad ass can have a soft spot or a moment of weakness, but that dichotomy has to have a logic to it. Just jumping wildly between tones makes it hard to pin down who a character is, which makes it harder to buy into them. Like, what is Phantom's goal? He says he wants to be the best wrestler, which is more of a plucky babyface thing. He talks about wanting to cause havoc and raise hell, which is a totally different goal from being the best. He suggests wanting to assume some kind of authority ("I will be the high and mighty force that everyone will have to answer too"), which... again, is a vastly different aim than the first two.

Read your promos out loud to yourself. Figure out a dialect, a voice. Is he ominous and detached, or a hothead that takes wrestling personally? Does he savor violence, or is it just a side effect of reaching his goals? Is he a well read intellectual type delivering truths, or is he a backwoods, old fashioned hard ass that likes to get his hands dirty? Even if he's not FROM anywhere, even if his backstory is a total mystery to the audience, figure out what it WOULD be--if he grew up on the streets and had to fight for survival, if he was raised by a cult, if his nice southern Baptist community pushed him over the edge for being different, if he's a Russian scientist on super steroids, whatever. How did he get here? Why is he here? Why Union Battleground? A lot of that can inform what he should sound like--we're all products of our environment--and if you can pin down that consistency, it'll be easier to suspend the reader's disbelief. Even if only you know who he actually is under the mask, it makes a huge difference in writing him as a character, and not just a list of checkboxes.