Stuff About Characters

I can't really come up with a better title. Sue me. It's more about authorial treatment of characters than the fine nitty-gritty of characterization.

• It is inexplicable to me that any of the people reading A Song of Ice and Fire actually give a damn about the characters. I mean, it's basically torture porn, it might as well be Saw VI except instead of a hamfisted healthcare revenge fantasy as its tissue-thin excuse-plot, it's a hamfisted revenge fantasy against people who dare to have a different political structure than Martin's society. Why do you even bother to give a damn about characters who are that doomed?
  
  The whole thing should come crashing into the Eight Deadly Words, not least because Martin obviously said them himself, about his own characters. I think much of the acclaim for the books is something like Battered Woman's Syndrome, or perhaps akin to the Sunk Cost Fallacy—Martin's dreck is essentially emotional abuse and requires a great deal of effort just to slog through. People don't like to admit that they subjected themselves to abuse or wasted a lot of time and energy, so they delude themselves.
  
  There's also the Puritan/"subversive" angle, of course, where its very unpleasantness makes it "challenging" and "truthful"—therefore it lets them assuage their neurotic guilt over reading fiction (or reading "genre" instead of "literary"). No, seriously, read the praise for the series sometime; "Oh, this is a frivolous entertainment, but it's okay because it's also self-improvement!" is the subtext running through just about all of it.
• It's always amusing to me when Marvel fanboys claim Marvel is better because its characters are "complex" and "multidimensional", because what they mean is "I am so emotionally dead inside and incapable of empathy that I mistake anyone who doesn't act like a Jerry Springer guest for a mannequin."
  
  I mean, seriously, Scott Summers' uncontrollable powers, angsty backstory, perpetually dying love-interests, and being related to every third person in the universe: Captain Atom, Bruce Wayne, Kyle Rayner, and Damian Wayne all have one of those issues apiece. Because DC doesn't think that "characterization" means "make them a ball of ridiculous soap-opera angst". But Marvel does. Because, they say, that makes the character more relatable. Am I crazy or did they just insult you?
  
  Also, a setting that involves Wolverine, Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, and the Hulk doesn't get to accuse another setting of being overpowered, especially not when the other setting contains its powerhouses so much more gracefully.
• I was reading a thing about how to write female characters, for male (screen)writers. One of the points was that female characters tend to fall in love more quickly and define themselves by their relationships more, and also more likely to seek comfort. This is chalked up to Hollywood not seeing women as equal to men, rather than, y'know, 50 million years of the evolution of all non-lemur primates.
  
  But on the other hand, it's interesting, because that's much less the case in Japanese stuff. The relationship part, I mean—Japanese men are about 12 times as "strong silent type" as American ones. But think about manga characters: a lot of guys define themselves by their relationship to particular girls. It can be love, like in Magico or Nisekoi, or partners like in Soul Eater or Slayers, or master-servant like Hayate the Combat Butler or Monster Princess. But these men's universes revolve around the women in their lives.
  
  Of course, a part of it is that Japanese culture tends to define people by their relationships (or else tautologically—they say "I am myself" more often than anyone except a Hopi god). It also probably didn't hurt that a major component of their conception of masculinity is a class of people who defined themselves by who they worked for ("samurai" literally means "vassal").
• The derps at io9—a Gawker site, so any day they don't eat from a bottle with a skull on it is a personal triumph—were discussing character names that they don't like, because, apparently, everyone reading books will assume that the character will act like some other character with the same name. Because as we all know, that one person you know who makes a big deal out of any news report where people have the same names as an acquaintance is totally normal, and not an idiot at all. Although then again, Gawker site—perhaps in the circles they stumble around in, gape-mouthed and rusty-zippered, that sort of behavior is unremarkable.
  
  Also, though, what if you are deliberately drawing a connection, not just as an homage but in-story? One of the characters in my werewolf story was the original of Carmilla—the rationale is that LeFanu got ahold of some accounts of her and, assuming it was just a bit of folklore, based a story on it. Now, admittedly, I didn't name her "Carmilla", since it's, y' know, not a real name; at first she was named Karmille (she's German, remember), and then, when the fact that's not a real name either started to bug me, I remembered that (spoiler for a book that went public domain in 1948 at the latest) Carmilla's not her real name, "Mircalla" is. So I decided to give her the name "Marzella", the German form of "Marcella" (which leads me, by the way, to conclude that those people who ship the Vampire Queen with Princess Bubblegum may not be completely off-base).
  
  Speaking of Carmilla, did you know she's the same thing as Freddy Krueger?
• Joss Whedon's perpetually-quoted "Why do you write such strong female characters? Because you're still asking that question" exchange...never really happened. He was scoring rhetorical points in a conversation where he acted out the other side, and also, sorta, complaining about the one-note nature of a one-note narrative he was very largely responsible for. Which hypocrisy is, admittedly, pretty much par for the course for Mr. "I'm totally a legit feminist even though my female characters get abused as much as John Norman's".
  
  But it's sorta funny, because Whedon is the poster man-child for what gets called out here, that "strong female characters" are at least as flat and one-dimensional as "damsels in distress" were, only they have crazy-awesome Mary Sue abilities. And while damsels in distress were getting rescued by princes played by Clark Gable, "strong female characters" wind up with guys who need to be rescued by them, played by Shia LeBeouf (that's pretty much that last link in a nutshell, though you should read it anyway).
  
  Seriously, consider. Whedon probably would say that he's "subverting"...something or other...by his male characters always being morons, weaklings, man-children, and asses (when they're not cannibals, rapists, or human-traffickers, I mean...although then again he whitewashes human-trafficking). But since his female characters are utter paragons, and you can only get so much mileage out of lesbianism outside of a niche market, nearly all the romance in his work is, ipso facto, the story of a woman settling for a man who is completely beneath her. I'm pretty sure there has been a SNAFU somewhere, if that's supposed to be feminism.
• Not unrelated to that thing about Martin, above, my younger sister (not the older one) had an interesting point the other day. Namely, if you make a big deal out of "anyone can die", why will anybody mind much when they do? Whereas, as she pointed out, when Cedric Diggory dies in the fourth Harry Potter (that is not a spoiler, that book came out when Bill Clinton was still president), you're shocked, because nobody had died before that.
  
  See, if your whole story is set up so death doesn't mean anything, death...won't...mean...anything. And, uh, fiction kind of needs for the things that happen in it to have meaning, there's a reason the PoMo buzzword for "imposed meaning" is "narrative". Fundamentally, the big flaw in "dark" fantasy is not its puerile gutter-wallowing or politically-motivated distortion of its (claimed) historical models (those just make it complete garbage). Fundamentally the big flaw, the one that invalidates the endeavor itself, is that the genre undercuts the very concept of a story.
• On a similar note to that Marvel business, I think the whole idea of "flawed characters" as usually presented is because people don't get their Mary Sue fanfics out of their system before they start to write, thus they need to be warned off. But the opposite flaw, the anti-Sue, the character loaded down with soap-opera/daytime talk show sleazy baggage, is a far more common problem in this culture of ours. Watched Burn Notice or Law & Order or, really, anything? We can't even have spy fiction or cop shows that don't ultimately derive from people's unhappy childhoods. Hopping on the "it worked for Evangelion" bandwagon a little late, aren't we, America?
  
  Again, the only people who think having a bunch of Jerry Springer flaws makes a character "relatable" or "realistic" are the people who don't understand that Jerry Springer guests are sideshow freaks—do you complain that the women in fiction don't have beards and the men have hands instead of flippers?
• And again, as I have said other times on this here blog, it's not an RPG. You don't need to take flaws to balance out your perks. RPGs need game balance, so nobody hogs the GM's time and makes the other people at the table feel left out. But there's only one player at the table in non-interactive fiction, imaginary people aren't going to feel left out when only a few of them get to have awesome superpowers.
  
  Also, it's actually relatively new, as an idea, that games need balance, or at least that kind of balance. I was reading an article, where the writer points out how utterly different an approach the first two editions of AD&D took. In those, if you've got over a certain point in your most important stat ("prime requisite", because Gygax liked to talk like Jeeves)—i.e., if you're already favored by the dice—you advance faster.
  
  Basically what Gygax was modeling with that rule was what the book "Outliers" is about—the guy who catches more breaks is going to keep catching breaks. Does that make the person who catches those breaks less worthy of our interest, as a character in narrative? Every sports figure in history has benefited from some of those breaks, we sure don't seem to mind making them the protagonists of our movies.
• The big problem, I think, the thing I could've made the theme of a whole blog post if I were better at writing nonfiction, is that there is an idea abroad in the land that you shouldn't like your characters, that you should hurt your characters. Now, admittedly, sometimes artistry is hurt by the author being squeamish, and not putting the characters through the actual events of the story; but people interpret the adage as meaning that you should actively dislike your characters, and strive to make them miserable. Because the only legitimate story is one where the characters are miserable!
  
  Now the question is, who the shit wants to read about that? If you're not writing characters you like, what's going to make me like them enough to read your story? There's also the issue that throwing in a bunch of misery and angst and horror is, pure and simple, puerile, juvenile, adolescent; I used to write stuff not unlike Martin (minus his chronological blackface minstrelsy), and then I went into the 11th grade. My brother's in his high school's creative writing club, and my (younger) sister sometimes helps out there, since she substitute-teaches at his school all the time. The stories the club members write are heavy on the misery.
  
  Adults know a bit more about the real troubles of this world and see no need to invent further ones for their fiction, without a damn good narrative reason. Kindly remember the words of the last director of the Grand Guignol.