As a continuation of the previous article, that did make me think why I like some books and characters, while I absolutely detest others.
If a character doesn’t function in a way that makes sense, if they don’t act realistically in their circumstances, if they don’t act realistically for their intelligence, level of knowledge and so on, I just can’t abide them. For instance, Amelia is one such character. She is incredibly obstinate and stupid, and simply refuses to draw the most reasonable and logical conclusions from her circumstances and the situation she’s in, and deliberately acts in the most inappropriate and unreasonable manner, refusing to learn and understand what the reality is telling her. It’s absolutely jarring. Edward Cullen, in the “Twilight” series, is another such character that’s getting on my nerves, because he obstinately refuses to learn what reality is telling him, refuses to listen to smart people, tries to control other people’s destiny in ways that make everybody miserable, and for what – he has a fixed set of ideas about selfishness and refuses to revise them despite quite obvious lessons that present themselves. Basically, it’s a character that refuses to accept God’s providence and his own feeling of rightness because he’s overriding it with his own intellectual concepts as if they were God. As a result, he almost gets everybody killed and creates an incredible amount of suffering. As I said, I absolutely revile the character.
Martin Riggs from “Lethal Weapon” is the opposite. I love that character. He’s incredibly fucked up when we first encounter him. His wife died in a car accident and she was all he had. He’s suicidal, in permanent emotional anguish, and he’s stumbling through that and trying to do his job as a policeman, hoping to die a hero fighting armed criminals, but somehow always manages to survive and defeat them, because he’s both lucky and good at his job. He’s great at killing people, and yet he only wishes he could have his wife back, and he can’t, so killing himself to be with her is the only thing he can think of. Gradually, as he helps his partner save his family, he finds purpose and comes out on the other side of his terrible grief. It’s an incredibly realistic portrait of a virtuous person experiencing terrible tragedy and trying to pick up the pieces of their life, sort themselves out and find new purpose, while life doesn’t wait for them and instead showers them with an avalanche of rocks.
I love characters that are normally preoccupied with their own stuff, but when a crisis happens, they rise up to the occasion and do whatever the situation requires to resolve things. I find the fumbling, insecure, weak people who get confused and do pathetic or evil things to cover up their failings jarring and abhorrent. I just can’t identify with that; also, all the people I hold in contempt are like that. Weak, no responsibility, no accountability, projection, justification of failings, failure to learn and improve. Yuck.
I can identify with Salvos who woke up completely ignorant in a strange world and is trying to create more of the good stuff that she can comprehend, and fight the bad stuff she encounters. She figures things out as she goes, she never has it easy, almost everything is against her, but she’s inherently virtuous, and she’s virtuous by choice. She could choose evil, but she didn’t, and it’s not an accident that she didn’t. She just abhors certain things as a matter of principle. She theoretically could level by killing as many people as she can find, especially if nobody would know. However, she never does. Her moral core is so strong, that a monster can put her to shame by stating that she came to its home and is trying to kill it in order to harvest its body parts, and for no good reason other than her selfish ones. She really stops to think about it, and changes her opinion and actions. This is a realistic way a virtuous person would act. They don’t automatically know things because they are virtuous. Their idea of virtue needs to evolve; you can’t just put a label of “monster” on a category of beings and then treat them like non-entities, especially when they think, feel and offer good points, they didn’t attack you to justify your response, and you invaded their home in order to murder them. She does the “oh wait, that’s not actually a good thing to do, is it?”, and then she acts upon this realisation. She does what a smart, good person would do.
Edithe is also a very believable character. At one point she tells Salvos to ignore what people think because people are idiots, to which Salvos responds “but you did something like that, too”. Edithe replies “Yes, and by people being idiots I mean myself in particular. I was an idiot and you showed me that I was wrong. That’s just how it is”. I like that – no self-justification, no holding on to past mistakes. You fix it, and you realise it was wrong and you were an idiot. You don’t keep being an idiot just to keep pretence that you were born smart.
So, in essence, the characters I love aren’t those who were born smart and omnipotent and can solve all problems with a flick of the wrist. It’s not a situation I can identify with. I can, however, identify with people who are forced to figure it out as they go, they have strong principles about what’s wrong, and keep revising ideas about what’s good and right as they evolve. Also, I love characters who focus under pressure, and can’t stand those who fall apart under it. I can’t stand “comedies” where everybody is confused, virtueless and fumbles and acts sinfully under pressure. I’d rather have my nails pulled than watch those. Things where someone experiences difficulty and tragedy, but gets their shit together and rises up to the occasion, those are my cup of tea.
I love characters that just get shit done. A good example is Eric Northman from “True Blood”. He sees a problem, he sees that he should do something about it, and then his actions look like a mathematical tree-balancing solution. He takes what he needs, does what needs to be done, tries to get maximum good with the least amount of bad side effects, and then just goes on with business as usual. His actions are determined by the needs of a situation, not his own egotistical considerations. In that, he’s the polar opposite of Edward Cullen, who’s trying to be good so hard, he ends up causing disaster after disaster.
Obviously, I identify with characters who embody things I can personally identify with. I can identify with being in all kinds of disasters and ignorance and trying to figure things out from scratch. I can identify with fucking things up and then learning from it and trying better next time. Basically, it’s the characters that are similar to myself, or at least how I want to be, and how I want to react in difficult situations. If I can’t see myself in a character, if I can’t see myself making their choices, I nope the fuck out.
One summer on the island of Krk, in the enchanting stony hills above Baška, looking toward Rab and Stara Baška… The views and the landscape are breathtaking as they open up one after another, while at the same time impressing a deep, hard stillness upon you. I climbed along some goat path to the top of one of a succession of hills, all of them made of stone and covered with lush gray sage specially adapted to that environment. A dry-stone wall and a passage through it, probably broken open by sheep, and terraced ground overflowing with sage; the sun is blazing, yet the stillness navigates the mind through time.
Among those terraces of stone and sage, a scene: an enormous spider rushing around and wrapping a grasshopper in a cocoon of web. An unbelievably brutal and sudden sight. The spider sharply defined and large, the grasshopper already heavily wrapped and equally distinct—everything somehow possessed very pronounced characteristics in that rudimentary environment filled with only a minimum number of elements. I picked up a fairly large stone and, in that open space between the sage and the rocks, hit the large spider with my first throw, just as it had registered that it was no longer alone in its circumstances and routine. I separated the grasshopper from the web, carried it, still wrapped in its cocoon, to a more distant rock, and carefully used blades of grass to clear the cocoon away. Did it watch everything that was happening? Yes, it did. It may also have been dazed by the spider’s venom, and it is possible that it did not survive afterward, after I left it on that elevated rock.
I am almost certain that grasshoppers do not eat other insects; spiders, on the other hand, obviously do eat grasshoppers—and in a horrifying manner.
After a child grows into an adult, that being fills its information base with concepts that map the surrounding world. Let us say—although it is not necessary—that some pattern contained in such a populated database repeats itself concretely in front of a person, so that the person compares the event currently unfolding with information from a previous event that originally served as the basis for an entry in that database. It is also possible for an individual, within the mind, to use earlier records from the conceptual database and initiate mutual emulations among them.
Darshan. There is a concrete individual in a physical body. Under certain circumstances, an autonomous reaction arises from another, non-physical dimension, and through a specific human vehicle—within that person, here in this world, on Earth, at a specific point in time and space—another kind of being takes over. To that being, the relationships and relations unfolding before it in real time are clear literally to the point of seeming as though it were viewing them from the future—so completely clear is it to that being what is taking place before it and what position each participant occupies. And all of it without a single comment from the mind.
This. This is why I like Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption 2 who is not some super powerful character shooting lightnings from his ass … he's just a regular guy, pulled into life of crime as a kid and manages to turn that around by starting his own path of redemption by his own choice and not giving up until he died doing it.
It's believable, it's realistic and it's fucking rare enough that is just darn impressive.
And powerful characters – let's say Superman. He is completely uninteresting to me until the moment his ass got kicked by his equals and then had to pick himself up and do something about it – that's the moment his character started to be impressive to me.
Unlike Iron Man who is impressive from the very start when Tony builds first suite in a fucking cave 😀
Sure, you could argue that he was born genius, yeey easy for him – but it's clear he is complex character from the very beginning of the story, character who is not only smart, but worked his ass off to get where he is. He is brilliant, brave and takes risks and solve things for breakfast.
And then becomes really impressive when he chose not to go full evil but to fight evil instead – and is impressive throughout entire story unlike, I don't know, Captain America who also got his power without having to work for it and became really annoying with time.
But Marvel story writing is really childish for the most part, so one can only take few good characters from it and be done with 😀
Unlike Tolkien and Lord of the rings for example. And Peter Jackson who put it on big screen in best possible way, not completely fucking up story and characters.
Like those assholes with Witcher series for which they should go to prison not only for wasted opportunity but for completely destroying really good character and story.
But it's really hard to find a boring character in LOTR, regardless if I can relate to them or not (I can't for the most part) – they are interesting and believable and complex and troubled and all of them have to make hard choices to get shit done.
It's also a fantastic display of how powerful women characters can look like and how relationship between powerful men and women can look like unlike this horrible, modern woke bullshit where everything is twisted and mind-fucked … or better to say mind-raped.
As far as good female characters are concerned, I was so dissatisfied with the options out there that I had to write my own. 🙂