December Prompt Meme: Good Characters
Dec. 13th, 2014 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitMy prompt for the 13th was supplied by blnchflr, who asked me to talk about "Characters who are Good whom you like (unless you don't like any Good characters)."
I spent about three days trying to work out an answer to this one, only to belatedly realise that I may be overthinking it -- I kept trying to figure out the difference between good and Good, and it only occurred to me yesterday that maybe the uppercase was just an attempt to distinguish "a morally good character" from "a good character" in the sense of well-written. *facepalming*blnchflr, feel free to chime in with your intentions!
I think most of the characters I like are good people, really? Or maybe not? I don't know who's in charge of making such determinations!
In general, I have a deep love of flawed characters, and some of those flaws put them - sometimes - in the category of Not So Good, if not outright Bad. Snape comes to mind here, and Vlad Taltos. Is Snape a verbally abusive, selfish man with the emotional range of a teaspoon? Absolutely. Is Snape also a man who made tremendous personal sacrifices for a genuinely good cause, because he believed in it? Also yes. Then there's Vlad... Vlad is an assassin, a murderer, a man with no moral reaction to the idea of human sacrifice, and a failed husband. He's also an extremely loyal friend, a man in the process of developing moral discretion, and someone who takes care of his responsibilities, even when they're self-assigned. Even Captain America, bastion of truth and justice, has, as a recent Tumblr post pointed out, quite a body count, which is carefully cropped from the canon so as to establish a certain plausible deniability for readers under the age of ten (or very good at self-delusion).
Honestly, I think the entire idea of a "good" or "Good" character is biased, because it so often comes down to this very basic idea that there are Good people and Bad people, instead of people who, at any given time of decision, can decide to be Good or Bad. If a Good character kills somebody, we want to excuse it because they're Good; but the world doesn't work that way. You don't get assigned a category and then try to make your actions match up to it; your actions are the category. Trying to decide whether a character is Good or not seems to me to miss the point, which is that everybody does both Good and Bad things over the course of their personal narrative, and it's far too easy to find yourself trying to justify their choices after the fact instead of looking clearly at them moment by moment.
As I get older, this has become something of a flinch-inducer for me, because I've started to see how prevalent it is. Take any show or novel or fanfic where somebody is struggling with guilt over something. I'd wager seven out of ten will feature a pat little scene wherein the guilty party feels guilty out loud, and someone will reassure him that "you're a good person" and thus don't need to feel guilty. It leaves me grinding my teeth, every time! Because what this boils down to is if you're a good person then the bad things you do are okay and you shouldn't waste time thinking about them. Which sounds an awful lot like another pat scene I've grown to loathe; the one that ends with "a monster wouldn't question whether he's a monster"|"someone soulless wouldn't worry about whether they have a soul." Heavens forfend that anyone going through a morally dicey decision should stop and take a hard look at it!
Narratively, I think this may be a way of avoiding logical consequences, both for the character and for the reader. Because if bad people sit down and deliberately decide to do bad things, then the only bad people are those whose decisions are made with forethought. As long as you rush your character along through their wrong choices without thinking, they get to keep the "good person" label! They aren't a monster, they just had to [kill someone, set off a nuclear explosive, get revenge, say something hurtful] and as long as they give lip service to worrying about it after the fact then the viewer can pretend that everything's okay and the writer can pretend that the fallout is averted by their Being A Good Person. It's lazy writing, and it's cheating the reader of a chance at real, deep, serious character development, and it's terrible advice for real life! But it probably makes churning out the next instalment in your series or TV show a lot easier. If you let your character change or develop, you might have to stick with that decision!
Instead, make your protagonist do a Bad Thing, and then make them go cry on somebody for quick headpats. It's eerily reminiscent of the abuse tactic where the abuser apologises/grovels in order to make the victim offer reassurance, especially when we're talking about actions on the more serious end of the Bad Thing scale. (Whovians, feel free to chime in here about the Doctor and genocide; wish I could find the meta post that's tickling the back of my brain on that!) Those of you in Homestuck fandom, you can see the overlap directly with Vriska's characterisation. She's the number one fangirl of the "I did what I had to, not what I wanted to" trope, and it's clearly a crock of lies. Whether it's leaving a "friend" disabled or enslaving people via mind control, Vriska is the standout example of somebody who does bad things and then seeks validation from others that she's a good person afterward, and she isn't above using manipulation or coercion when she doesn't get it immediately.
Well, that got long, and kind of turned into a "discuss two tropes you've grown to hate" meta more so than one on good characters and goodness! Sorry. *sheepish* In summary: I have a lot of ~feelings~ about the notion of "Good People" and characters who think they belong in that category, most of which are bound up in the very shallow, platitude-y way that many canons apply it.
Edit: Just discovered my HTML was borked, and half this entry never showed up! Welp. Fixed now, and I did a bunch of editing, too. Hope somebody notices!
blnchflr, who asked me to talk about "Characters who are Good whom you like (unless you don't like any Good characters)."I spent about three days trying to work out an answer to this one, only to belatedly realise that I may be overthinking it -- I kept trying to figure out the difference between good and Good, and it only occurred to me yesterday that maybe the uppercase was just an attempt to distinguish "a morally good character" from "a good character" in the sense of well-written. *facepalming*
blnchflr, feel free to chime in with your intentions! I think most of the characters I like are good people, really? Or maybe not? I don't know who's in charge of making such determinations!
In general, I have a deep love of flawed characters, and some of those flaws put them - sometimes - in the category of Not So Good, if not outright Bad. Snape comes to mind here, and Vlad Taltos. Is Snape a verbally abusive, selfish man with the emotional range of a teaspoon? Absolutely. Is Snape also a man who made tremendous personal sacrifices for a genuinely good cause, because he believed in it? Also yes. Then there's Vlad... Vlad is an assassin, a murderer, a man with no moral reaction to the idea of human sacrifice, and a failed husband. He's also an extremely loyal friend, a man in the process of developing moral discretion, and someone who takes care of his responsibilities, even when they're self-assigned. Even Captain America, bastion of truth and justice, has, as a recent Tumblr post pointed out, quite a body count, which is carefully cropped from the canon so as to establish a certain plausible deniability for readers under the age of ten (or very good at self-delusion).
Honestly, I think the entire idea of a "good" or "Good" character is biased, because it so often comes down to this very basic idea that there are Good people and Bad people, instead of people who, at any given time of decision, can decide to be Good or Bad. If a Good character kills somebody, we want to excuse it because they're Good; but the world doesn't work that way. You don't get assigned a category and then try to make your actions match up to it; your actions are the category. Trying to decide whether a character is Good or not seems to me to miss the point, which is that everybody does both Good and Bad things over the course of their personal narrative, and it's far too easy to find yourself trying to justify their choices after the fact instead of looking clearly at them moment by moment.
As I get older, this has become something of a flinch-inducer for me, because I've started to see how prevalent it is. Take any show or novel or fanfic where somebody is struggling with guilt over something. I'd wager seven out of ten will feature a pat little scene wherein the guilty party feels guilty out loud, and someone will reassure him that "you're a good person" and thus don't need to feel guilty. It leaves me grinding my teeth, every time! Because what this boils down to is if you're a good person then the bad things you do are okay and you shouldn't waste time thinking about them. Which sounds an awful lot like another pat scene I've grown to loathe; the one that ends with "a monster wouldn't question whether he's a monster"|"someone soulless wouldn't worry about whether they have a soul." Heavens forfend that anyone going through a morally dicey decision should stop and take a hard look at it!
Narratively, I think this may be a way of avoiding logical consequences, both for the character and for the reader. Because if bad people sit down and deliberately decide to do bad things, then the only bad people are those whose decisions are made with forethought. As long as you rush your character along through their wrong choices without thinking, they get to keep the "good person" label! They aren't a monster, they just had to [kill someone, set off a nuclear explosive, get revenge, say something hurtful] and as long as they give lip service to worrying about it after the fact then the viewer can pretend that everything's okay and the writer can pretend that the fallout is averted by their Being A Good Person. It's lazy writing, and it's cheating the reader of a chance at real, deep, serious character development, and it's terrible advice for real life! But it probably makes churning out the next instalment in your series or TV show a lot easier. If you let your character change or develop, you might have to stick with that decision!
Instead, make your protagonist do a Bad Thing, and then make them go cry on somebody for quick headpats. It's eerily reminiscent of the abuse tactic where the abuser apologises/grovels in order to make the victim offer reassurance, especially when we're talking about actions on the more serious end of the Bad Thing scale. (Whovians, feel free to chime in here about the Doctor and genocide; wish I could find the meta post that's tickling the back of my brain on that!) Those of you in Homestuck fandom, you can see the overlap directly with Vriska's characterisation. She's the number one fangirl of the "I did what I had to, not what I wanted to" trope, and it's clearly a crock of lies. Whether it's leaving a "friend" disabled or enslaving people via mind control, Vriska is the standout example of somebody who does bad things and then seeks validation from others that she's a good person afterward, and she isn't above using manipulation or coercion when she doesn't get it immediately.
Well, that got long, and kind of turned into a "discuss two tropes you've grown to hate" meta more so than one on good characters and goodness! Sorry. *sheepish* In summary: I have a lot of ~feelings~ about the notion of "Good People" and characters who think they belong in that category, most of which are bound up in the very shallow, platitude-y way that many canons apply it.
Edit: Just discovered my HTML was borked, and half this entry never showed up! Welp. Fixed now, and I did a bunch of editing, too. Hope somebody notices!