Justifying Alyssa

One of the main problems I have when coming up with ideas for my stories (a weakness that a guy called Drakhael in the OCBZ chat loves to exploits, nuking my character and sending me back to the drawing board) is that I often can’t justify the existence of my characters in a certain setting. Either that, or the reasons I use to justify them end up causing more problems and plot holes than before. And the character I can’t seem to justify at all is, ironically, my main character, the ones people might know me for, if they know me at all: Alyssa Gillespine

Alyssa originated in a story called Encounter at The Art Gallery, which you can still find in my scraps on my DA page.  http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1xty9n In this story, she was a former cultists of a so-called ‘god’, who decided to use the powers of Yog-Sothoth (a more powerful, and relatively more reasonable Lovecraftian outer god) against her former colleagues, and against the magical girls, who were so focused on dealing with outer threats that they did not realize they were actually helping the false gods themselves.

Over the course of the past couple of years, she has had many changes, but a few core traits have remained:

1) Alyssa always wants to be in control of her life, but situations arise that takes it out of her control, and into a territory she is unfamiliar with, or into the hands of people too powerful for her to overcome. She constantly struggles to get it back into her control, even if that means doing questionable acts such as mass murder and the like.

2) She loves talking, almost to Miss Exposition levels; she never lies outright, preferring instead to be misleading; she loves taking memes, tropes and quotes  and use them when she speaks; and finally, she is hard to anger.

3) She has a thing for surprise attacks and disproportionate retribution, so much that every time she attacks, she leaves people wondering “WTF just happened here?”. Ways to achieve that have included explosives, Great Old Ones magic, bringing guns to a magical fight, environmental kills, and changing the rules and the stakes of the game.

4) She has a strong dislike for magical girls, which has lead her to become what I term as “the Joker ( especially Hearth Ledger’s one) to the magical girls’ Batman”.

Based on these traits, I am trying to build up a new version of Alyssa for my NaNoWriMo story, and so far, I have come up with a couple of plausible ways to explain the above traits that she has. There are still others that I need to tackle, some of which I shall be posting here. But the main problem I would really want to solve, as almost everything else about her is connected to that event, is this:

Why is she killing magical girls?

The only idea I have come up so far involves her having a magical girl sister, who at some point in her past blew up half her village, and thus wrecked her entire life, in order to destroy some dangerously genre savvy monsters of the week. Alyssa witnesses all this, and, enraged, she strangles her own sister to death, and then start murdering magical girls to ‘eliminate these variables from my life’, as she would put it.

Now, the thing I have found wrong about this idea is that it’s too much, too sudden for Alyssa. And I really don’t see her murdering her sister like that, hot blooded. Especially after seeing that her sister could level an entire village if she so wants to. So the way I have to work around it is that, after her initial anger, Alyssa would calm down, try and find out more about her opponent and the reasons she did it, then realize something negative about the magical girls that makes it clear that the only good magical girl is a dead magical girl, and that it’s her duty to mankind to take them all down.

So, do you think this line of reasoning is sound and reasonable? And if so, what could Alyssa find out about magical girls to justify her killings? In my setting, most, if not all of the magical girls are engaged in a civil war between Celestials (those who get their powers from the planets of the solar system, and their associates), the Terrans (those whose powers derive from Gaia herself, and who consider both Celestials and Infernals and invaders), and the Infernals (a catch all term to indicate those enemies with powers from different sources other than the ones cited above), but how do I present it in such a was that Alyssa believes all ‘magical girls’ are to be killed, rather than make her realize that “Oh, they are actually some that are really good, and without them, we are all screwed, and maybe I can help them out instead of murdering them indiscriminantly”? And if you think that my idea was taking it a bit too far, then what else can I use to push Alyssa over the edge, without resorting to drastic measures, and without making her realize the above?

Enjoy cracking your head around this puzzle. See ya later!