I have certain characters I call my sunshine children, so when I saw this prompt by Writing.Prompt.S I knew I had to include it. Conceptually it is more like The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis with a more optimistic and nice character than it is my sunshine children. If you use this prompt I highly recommend reading that for ideas on what your demonic character might try.
For my own works, the first sunshine child I created was Xanthe. At first glance she might be super Mary Sue with her yellow eyes and what I call diamond hair, and I won’t deny the possibility that she is a Mary Sue, but I was nine, so are we really that surprised?
I probably designed her hair after one of my My Little Ponies, a white 1st Generation Bridal Pony I named Kristal, because I named everything Kristal at the time. The eyes I know for sure were a variation on the theme in a story that was one of the inspirations behind Xanthe’s story world, a wonderful read called The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts.
Trying to make the eyes make sense I made the eyes common with both those with a certain type of ability, the part that was inspired from book, and later also made them genetically within her family giving them to both her father and later her son. I’ll have to work on that if I ever share the story world with the world at large, because it just doesn’t work.
As to what I called a sunshine child, Xanthe was an eternal optimist, someone who liked to help people in need and always thought there has to be some good in people. She had a good foil in her twin brother, Timothy, who was often suspicious and felt the need to protect his naive sister from her own easily trusting nature.
In this prompt I can see the story falling under one of two very different genres, humor or horror. As a comedy I can see this exclusively following the demon who is mischievous and very frustrated as they continue to fail at every attempt, but for whom there is not serious consequences, just frustration.
On the horror side, I can see a duel lead between the demon and their target. The demon faces consequences from higher ups with every failure or every specific time frame where they fail to make progress while their target is having trouble holding onto their optimism as they try to deal with everything going wrong with a smile on their face and a kind word or action. The same premise with a very different feel to it.
How would you use a character who was “the embodiment of sunshine and just keeps being nice”? Would you aim for a humorous story or a horror one or do you think a different genre entirely is appropriate?
