One of the reasons I never had a problem handing over my characters to other creators is that I knew that they would add their own influences and takes on the characters and make them better for it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When you're crafting a character, it's good to have a lot of influences.
All characters come from people I know, but after the initial inspiration, I tend to modify the characters so they fit with the story.
All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
I have too much respect for the characters I play to make them anything but as real as they can possibly be. I have a great deal of respect for all of them, otherwise I wouldn't do them. And I don't want to screw them by not portraying them honestly.
I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
You love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they're your weird creations in some kind of way. I don't even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It's just absurd.
There's no point in using someone else's characters if you're going to turn them into your own vision. You have to be loyal to that person's worldview and sensitive to what they would and wouldn't have done with their characters, and how explicit or inexplicit they would've been.
I always try to make each character my own.
Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.