[Characters] Crafting the people of Pokemon

[theclaw]

What resources are there to better understand personality traits and visual attributes typically indicative of humans in the Pokemon world? I'd prefer to avoid ending up with clothing details and hairstyles that belong, well, somewhere else.

I'm aware speech patterns help too. Pokemon media tends to steer clear of things like profanity.

 

[Venia Silente]

I'm not sure there's any such resources, at least none that reasonably covers "visual attributes typically indicative of humans in the Pokemon world". So far and even reaching almost 10 gens, Pokémon has too few human characters showing enough visual composition that one could establish representative visual trends for anything other than, say, the Evil Teams having their uniforms. Everything else is just stuff like the availability of anime colors for hair or eyes, there's nothing really that sets them apart from a human that you can typically find on any given street.

For personality, the games at least don't delve into the personalities of relevant characters enough either, let alone the NPCs, but sites like Bulbapedia do usually provide enough sources on characters's quotes and actions across continuities that you can derive good trends for characters in their rank (eg.: "what would a typical Gym Leader do").

Are you looking for something more specific? Or perhaps from the other perspective: what is what you want to achieve, to see if there's a more canon way to do it than "make your own"?

 

[theclaw]

Not very specific. I'm just hoping my character designs, stay in the ballpark of being Pokemon characters.

But sometimes out-of-genre experiences are a lot of fun to invent (for instance I have a gifted mecha pilot, whose talents are wasted because only the perpetually-losing Team Rocket trio regularly uses giant robots)