7:30am July 20, 2015

“For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters.”

—

Terry Pratchett
(via twin-city-ankh-and-morpork)

Wow, that’s… disappointing, from Terry Pratchett, no less.

I often hear an idea out there that good characters are too simple and evil characters are complex, that nice characters are too simple and mean characters are complex, that good and nice people are unrealistic, that nobody can identify with them, that people who’ve Been Through Shit won’t be good or nice (and shouldn’t be expected to be), etc.

Not that I think you can just divide people up into good versus evil, nice versus mean, or nice versus screwed up (how is screwed up mutually exclusive with nice, anyway?).

But you know what I mean.

And good, in general, has incredible depth and complexity and strength to it. And the depth, complexity, and strength often ascribed to evil usually strikes me as a smokescreen at best, a surface-level look at the world.

And Terry Pratchett doesn’t normally strike me as someone who takes only a surface-level look at the world. And his good characters are often complex and have a lot of depth. (Although whether he would call them nice or not, I don’t know. It depends what you mean by nice.)

But then even a lot of people (including but not limited to authors) I otherwise respect really do seem to buy into the idea that good or nice is boring (or worse), and evil is automatically more “interesting” or “complex” or other things like that. And even without believing in a cartoonish sense of good and evil, I can still tell there’s something messed up about viewing the world this way.

Not the least of which? When you yourself are fairly messed up, and you’re looking around for characters that represent important aspects of your life experience, and all you find are villains or evil monsters or “dark” characters, so you begin to associate all those things with yourself, even if you’d had no reason to do so before. And that can all happen subconsciously. And then you end up with a weird attachment to truly awful fictional people, like people that if they were real live people you’d never want to be within a million miles of them, but somehow in fiction you do, and you start to think that there is no such thing as a good person like you, a nice person like you, a loving person like you, etc. And you start to glorify characters that honestly have very little business being glorified.

And all of this sounds like it’s not of much consequence because it’s all fictional characters, but Terry Pratchett would be the first to say that stories shape who we are, and the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, have a nasty habit of coming true. Anything that affects your mind on such a profound level can have consequences you’re not even aware of.

Oh, and if you’re curious about an instance I saw of, if not exactly the above, people deliberately emulating social and political ideas they got from fictional characters, in ways I found incredibly disturbing, read my quite old post (which means don’t assume I believe everything I said in it, it was written almost 10 years ago):

What the X-Men movies didn’t say.

As those movies were coming out, I had to watch mostly younger autistic people discovering them for the first time, seeing that the most anti-cure mutants in the series were the “bad guys”, and then doing things like deliberately modeling their ethical and moral choices after Magneto. As in, shaping their entire moral identities around a creepy-ass fictional villain, himself based in some pretty shitty ideas about what certain political views “have to” mean, because they were sold this idea that there were two sides and only two sides and that each side existed exactly with the combination of traits that the X-Men movies showed.

Which isn’t exactly the same thing I’m describing above with the good and evil characters, but it’s a very good example of fiction shaping people’s ethical choices in incredibly disturbing ways. Like this was literally happening right in front of me, on a regular basis, when X-Men 3 came out, and I saw so many autistic people buying into the entire ethical framework of that movie. (See my post for more explicit information on what that ethical framework was, in terms of how it divided up the “two sides”.) Some of them decided that they didn’t want a cure so they had to model themselves on Magneto, which was disturbing. Some of them decided they wanted to model themselves on Professor X, because he was the “good guy”, and that therefore their actual opinions about ethics had to change to be more in line with Professor X’s, whether they originally were or not. Which was equally disturbing. Then people who’d picked their sides would fight it out in the way they imagined “their side” would fight the “other side”.

Which strikes me as being like… the moral/ethical version of the character thing I describe above. Like, the same thought process that involves internalizing certain ideas about characters, except this is mostly about the ethical positions taken by groups or characters rather than about the identity and emotional reality of the characters.

I hope any of that made sense, because I get the feeling I’m talking around something without actually managing to talk about it. But it’s important.