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Character musings.
Jun. 16th, 2003 10:01 amI'm currently running a big request on my chapter's fundraising database and can't access any of the DB functions with any kind of accuracy until it finishes. As a result, I've gotten to thinking about some of my characters, and I've been sort of mentally weighing my treatment of them with the treatment other authors afford their fictional offspring.
Years ago, after reading a battered, used copy of Foucault's Pendulum, I decided I had had had had HAD to read more Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose was not available at the library at the time, so I went looking elsewhere - and oh, hey, a little number called The Island of the Day Before had just hit the New York Times bestseller list. I asked for it for Christmas. I got it. I read it in the space of about three hours and experienced something I'd never felt before: the urge to fling a book at the wall as hard as I possibly could. The ending was the worst cop-out I could remember ever seeing in a supposedly good novel. Read it yourself if you want to see what I mean - I hardly remember it, I was that angry at what I found.
The ending isn't important now, though. It was one of the central conceits of the story that I'm thinking of. See, the main character had an imaginary relative, one that he made up as a boy and dumped all kinds of troubles on. I forget exactly why - I think he may have wondered about his parents' odd reactions to certain things, and decided the best explanation was a brother who wasn't present. As he progressed through life he kept thinking of the imaginary sibling/cousin/whatever it was, and added misery upon misery and weirdness upon weirdness to the imaginary one's life story. Eventually, under extremely complicated circumstances, he met the imaginary sibling. It did not go well, because Mr. Imaginary knew exactly who was to blame for his misfortunes...
I promised myself after that book that I would never be gratuitously cruel to my characters. Bad things might happen, but they would happen for a reason and would eventually be overcome. That, or they would at least be repaid for them as a kind of reward, just in case. And even if terrible things happened, they would never be too terrible, for fear that even the most reasonable terrible thing would be perceived as excessive or gratuitous and eventually lead to my being trapped in a Twilight Zone episode with my characters. Silly, I know, but there it is. I don't like kicking puppies, even when they're imaginary puppies. Characters can't defend themselves against me. That makes them imaginary puppies.
Later, I learned of the concept of the Mary Sue. Mary Sue is the character you can't stand, because she - it's generally she - is too damn perfect. She sings. She looks beautiful. She takes the plot away from everyone else. She's a genius and a fighter and a genetic oddity among whatever people she currently dwells with. If she has a painful past, it's more painful than anyone else's, and she gets comforted and coddled for it until the other characters' love for her proves to heal her tragedy. If she has a normal past it's chock full of unbelievable accomplishments - multiple black belts in multiple martial arts by age sixteen, for example. (Jet Li might've been national wushu champion of China by that age, but that's pretty much all he did- Mary Sue, on the other hand, would also have defeated South Korea's taekwondo champion, gotten halfway up the training scale in escrima de arnis, and had a gallery show of her Chinese brush paintings.) Her authors generally treat her with so much loving care that she comes out about as believable as a bleached endive. She's a completely artificial lifeform produced by coddling, or by so much author-induced pain that she's twisted into the fictional equivalent of a bonsai.
I've had the willies about her ever since I learned of her existence. I've examined my RPG characters minutely to see whether they qualify or not. My greatest fear has been for Fang, mostly because damn near everybody he meets seems to like him, which is a typical Mary Sue characteristic. And because Fang has a hell of a voice, and practices acrobatics and some basic martial artistry, and the image I have of him in my head is what I would consider attractive. That kind of thing. He's worried me for some time, although I don't think he quite qualifies; he doesn't generally grab other people's plots away, so that's something. I'm pretty sure my other RPG characters aren't. Alec has no ability to make people automatically like him, and while he knows his trade (luthiery) backwards and forwards and can play any instrument he makes, that's nearly all he knows. He dropped out of school as soon as he got his O-levels and couldn't tell you a damn thing about science, or automobiles, or fashion, or any one of a zillion things. Dave Grishin, long since retired, had a long and glorious history of pissing people off. He might've made friends with unlikely people, but he also made enemies, and he freely admitted that his greatest talent was lying through his teeth. (He was a stage magician; his Garou name was Speaks-Like-Microsoft, and in later years was jokingly referred to as Speaks-Like-Bill-Clinton.) Even Crowmark, my Two Moons elf, was probably safe. She was an obsessive crafter who figured out the secrets of fired pottery, lumpy glass, and soap, but she was a lousy hunter and was regularly accused by her tribe of being part troll. She was a very strange elf and was treated as such, rather than as some kind of elven Ayla.
At the moment I find myself looking at the characters I've assembled as the NPC cast for VicMage.Asia. I've tried to balance them out somewhat, not so much for stats' sake as for the sake of realism. The brilliant alchemist who invents heavier-than-air non-magical flying machines has spent so much of his life working in the lab or trying to catch up to his father's magical accomplishments that anyone with a few years' kungfu training could probably floor him. The highest ranking woman in the Imperial Navy is a gunnery admiral in her early fifties who's spent most of her life since the age of twenty designing big fecking guns and using them in combat something like five days a week, every week. She's not particularly attractive; she's a widow with one son, but then again nearly every single woman in the VicMage.Asia.Chinese military is a widow with one or more sons. The emperor...
That's the point when I pull up short. The emperor's life before he got to the Dragon Throne was absolute hell. I find myself looking at what I wrote for his personal history and wondering - how much of this is sadism, and how much is simply reasonable given what I was trying to do? The nature of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cadhla's VicMage world is that it was spun on the bones of stories, that our world's Joseph Campbellesque archetypes are more often than not history rather than myth. I hung this character's story on the bones provided by the legend of St. Patrick, stirred in with the story of the real-world person of the same name as the character. The result was one horrific childhood, though it did ultimately land him on the Dragon Throne. I find myself wondering how much of what I said happened to him was really necessary - and then wondering if my questioning the way I treated him isn't me chickening out because of the Eco book. Do other GM's wonder about their NPCs' backstories this way? Do other authors? I can't help but wonder...
Years ago, after reading a battered, used copy of Foucault's Pendulum, I decided I had had had had HAD to read more Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose was not available at the library at the time, so I went looking elsewhere - and oh, hey, a little number called The Island of the Day Before had just hit the New York Times bestseller list. I asked for it for Christmas. I got it. I read it in the space of about three hours and experienced something I'd never felt before: the urge to fling a book at the wall as hard as I possibly could. The ending was the worst cop-out I could remember ever seeing in a supposedly good novel. Read it yourself if you want to see what I mean - I hardly remember it, I was that angry at what I found.
The ending isn't important now, though. It was one of the central conceits of the story that I'm thinking of. See, the main character had an imaginary relative, one that he made up as a boy and dumped all kinds of troubles on. I forget exactly why - I think he may have wondered about his parents' odd reactions to certain things, and decided the best explanation was a brother who wasn't present. As he progressed through life he kept thinking of the imaginary sibling/cousin/whatever it was, and added misery upon misery and weirdness upon weirdness to the imaginary one's life story. Eventually, under extremely complicated circumstances, he met the imaginary sibling. It did not go well, because Mr. Imaginary knew exactly who was to blame for his misfortunes...
I promised myself after that book that I would never be gratuitously cruel to my characters. Bad things might happen, but they would happen for a reason and would eventually be overcome. That, or they would at least be repaid for them as a kind of reward, just in case. And even if terrible things happened, they would never be too terrible, for fear that even the most reasonable terrible thing would be perceived as excessive or gratuitous and eventually lead to my being trapped in a Twilight Zone episode with my characters. Silly, I know, but there it is. I don't like kicking puppies, even when they're imaginary puppies. Characters can't defend themselves against me. That makes them imaginary puppies.
Later, I learned of the concept of the Mary Sue. Mary Sue is the character you can't stand, because she - it's generally she - is too damn perfect. She sings. She looks beautiful. She takes the plot away from everyone else. She's a genius and a fighter and a genetic oddity among whatever people she currently dwells with. If she has a painful past, it's more painful than anyone else's, and she gets comforted and coddled for it until the other characters' love for her proves to heal her tragedy. If she has a normal past it's chock full of unbelievable accomplishments - multiple black belts in multiple martial arts by age sixteen, for example. (Jet Li might've been national wushu champion of China by that age, but that's pretty much all he did- Mary Sue, on the other hand, would also have defeated South Korea's taekwondo champion, gotten halfway up the training scale in escrima de arnis, and had a gallery show of her Chinese brush paintings.) Her authors generally treat her with so much loving care that she comes out about as believable as a bleached endive. She's a completely artificial lifeform produced by coddling, or by so much author-induced pain that she's twisted into the fictional equivalent of a bonsai.
I've had the willies about her ever since I learned of her existence. I've examined my RPG characters minutely to see whether they qualify or not. My greatest fear has been for Fang, mostly because damn near everybody he meets seems to like him, which is a typical Mary Sue characteristic. And because Fang has a hell of a voice, and practices acrobatics and some basic martial artistry, and the image I have of him in my head is what I would consider attractive. That kind of thing. He's worried me for some time, although I don't think he quite qualifies; he doesn't generally grab other people's plots away, so that's something. I'm pretty sure my other RPG characters aren't. Alec has no ability to make people automatically like him, and while he knows his trade (luthiery) backwards and forwards and can play any instrument he makes, that's nearly all he knows. He dropped out of school as soon as he got his O-levels and couldn't tell you a damn thing about science, or automobiles, or fashion, or any one of a zillion things. Dave Grishin, long since retired, had a long and glorious history of pissing people off. He might've made friends with unlikely people, but he also made enemies, and he freely admitted that his greatest talent was lying through his teeth. (He was a stage magician; his Garou name was Speaks-Like-Microsoft, and in later years was jokingly referred to as Speaks-Like-Bill-Clinton.) Even Crowmark, my Two Moons elf, was probably safe. She was an obsessive crafter who figured out the secrets of fired pottery, lumpy glass, and soap, but she was a lousy hunter and was regularly accused by her tribe of being part troll. She was a very strange elf and was treated as such, rather than as some kind of elven Ayla.
At the moment I find myself looking at the characters I've assembled as the NPC cast for VicMage.Asia. I've tried to balance them out somewhat, not so much for stats' sake as for the sake of realism. The brilliant alchemist who invents heavier-than-air non-magical flying machines has spent so much of his life working in the lab or trying to catch up to his father's magical accomplishments that anyone with a few years' kungfu training could probably floor him. The highest ranking woman in the Imperial Navy is a gunnery admiral in her early fifties who's spent most of her life since the age of twenty designing big fecking guns and using them in combat something like five days a week, every week. She's not particularly attractive; she's a widow with one son, but then again nearly every single woman in the VicMage.Asia.Chinese military is a widow with one or more sons. The emperor...
That's the point when I pull up short. The emperor's life before he got to the Dragon Throne was absolute hell. I find myself looking at what I wrote for his personal history and wondering - how much of this is sadism, and how much is simply reasonable given what I was trying to do? The nature of
cadhla's VicMage world is that it was spun on the bones of stories, that our world's Joseph Campbellesque archetypes are more often than not history rather than myth. I hung this character's story on the bones provided by the legend of St. Patrick, stirred in with the story of the real-world person of the same name as the character. The result was one horrific childhood, though it did ultimately land him on the Dragon Throne. I find myself wondering how much of what I said happened to him was really necessary - and then wondering if my questioning the way I treated him isn't me chickening out because of the Eco book. Do other GM's wonder about their NPCs' backstories this way? Do other authors? I can't help but wonder...
