Do You Have Character?

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Creative Writing was brilliant last night and I got to draw some of my co-writers (which you can see on mu other blog) but it did leave me wondering about my own favourite characters and why I like them, and also why I like character more than I like plot.

This is of course just an observation: after all, we are only a couple of people in a wooden and spacious room, but we came to a very sound conclusion about characters, and specifically some main characters.

We decided surprisingly that boring characters are what usually make up our main characters. Why? Because we have to be able to replace them in our own personalities to be able to be in that situation. We discovered this with a few examples we discussed and apparently it's known apparently as "The Batman Effect" where a character is actually rather boring, but the setting, the plot and the characters surrounding them are actually far more interesting.

So despite the fact the series has been with me with childhood - Harry from the Harry Potter series is actually rather boring in comparison to the other characters and their personalities which made me personally completely agree with the theory, and made me think a lot about the stories I read and it really came to be true with my own reading habits. Harry Potter, Darren Shan, even Tin-tin himself is a boring character in an amazing situation.

Anyway, just a blog post I thought I'd put up whilst this was fresh in my head.

What characters do you like and dislike and do you agree with the boring character theory?

Comments

  1. Saikoujikan22 November 2011 at 17:03

    I believe this practice is only used in protagonist settings which include such things as the ever-popular "hero's journey" which are about a character struggling against an opposing side.

    For a character to be an apposing good, (a good guy) they need to be shown as much more wholesome than the environment they are place in so the audience can believe that they are actually rooting for the right side. This is why so many stories with incredibly strong pulls towards light and dark have many over characters along with the protagonist to keep things from getting too boring (eg: Pirate of the Caribbean, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings...) Since the protagonist from these stories are the driving force of the narrative, making them too interesting will mean a lack of focus on the plot (compare PoC 1 with PoC 4)

    However, the inverse can be true in which we have a relatively mundane environment with a completely unusual protagonist (ex: Ace Ventura, American Psycho, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Lolita, Hannibal) in which the focus on the story isn't the events themselves but the way the characters deal or affect the events.

    Which leads into the interesting territory of villain protagonists. Although Ace Ventura is a notable exception in that list of examples, most of those protagonists have something terribly sinister about them. Yet they're such a joy to watch. Though as Ace Ventura shows, this can be a really good way to create a comedy of the "fish out of water" variety where someone really doesn't fit in but continues going about their life anyway.

    These two principals are basically the same, it's about juxtapositioning the mundane with the surreal. Either it's putting an everyman into the midst of an unfamiliar setting, be that setting a host of characters (Batman) insermountable odds (Indiana Jones) or even something as simple as the fears that are associated with trust and hope (500 Days of Summer)

    Or it's about seeing how the real world bends to the wills and ideas of the out of this world character which you are learning more and more about. You want to see how their presence effects the world around them (the Pink Panther films), how their internal views shapes the narrative of their lives (Submarine, The Science of Sleep) or even just to understand how their warped understanding contradicts what we (and the other characters in the narrative itself) have been brought up to understand is correct (Johnny the homicidal maniac).

    But here's the kicker in my mind. I don't believe there is such thing as a mundane setting or a boring character. Sure, you can say that the pokemon world is more mundane than Narnia, but are either one of them truly that mundane? Even the real world isn't mundane if you look at it closely enough, "Mary and Max" is a really good example of how two seemingly normal lives are actually the most absurdly interesting things you could imagine.

    So I think it's all about focus. Whether the author focuses more outward or inwards, and thus which ones have the greater detail directed into them, which determines whether the story is about how a character struggles with the world or how the world struggles with the character.

    However, it's not as binary as that. Which of these two would you think "Dr Who" applies to? And then, which Dr?

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