I am gonna be honest and say that I never understood English speakers and their desperate need to see characters wrote by other people that don’t know that many of them even exist as a Perfect Representation and Copy of Themselves™. They really act as if writers do X characters with them in mind. Not like the writers don’t know them at all.
Generalizing is ridiculous and it just makes writers more scared to write not Perfect Pure Princesses because some moron thinks that they wrote this character to Personally Insulting Them™ and I am like… Who are you?
Imagine being such an egoist to think everyone is always writing about you just because you share one trait with the character.
Is not only that, is that they imply that you can’t relate to a fictional character unless the Look 100% Like Me™, like what the hell? Normally fiction works by you relating to the emotions that the characters feel, not only the looks. But now apparently you Have To Look Like Them and They Have To Look Like You to you to able to relate. Like… Am I an Scottish man/alien because I feel empathy for the Twelfth Doctor? They are ridiculous.
I relate to characters that are like “Something shitty happened to me, I’m not over it, and I want to fuck up the entire planet and everyone on it as vengeance.” Y’know, villains. I don’t tend to share all of my innate characteristics with those characters, but what I relate to is probably best described by the wonderfully edgy Smashing Pumpkins lyric “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.”
For me and in the real world, anger is something that you have to set aside and heal from, that you have to view as a poison that hurts you and those around you if you can’t let it go. In the real world, you’re just a person, just a tiny spec, filled with intense feelings that surpass your own abilities – you’re helpless, and that breeds more anger and resentment against the unfair world, emotions that feel so huge but amount to nothing. However, by its very nature, anger doesn’t want to just fizzle out, be ignored, or accept its own futility – anger wants to spread and explode, anger wants to be felt and be acted upon, and anger can become quickly parasitic and detrimental.
In fiction, anger gets what it wants – at least until the good guy comes along and ruins the fantasy – it gets to be this dangerous and seemingly unstoppable force, the fictional person feeling it gets to live out the intensity of the emotion in fire and rage, cackling with the glee of finally releasing it like a flock of bloody doves, and the glee of finally being freed of the weight. In fiction, you get your vengeance, you get the power that you’re owed for what you endured, you’re not a rat in a cage, instead you’re transformed into a monster that can break free.
That fantasy, if lived out in reality, would be sick and disturbing, and would cause untold harm – but in fiction nobody can get hurt, none of the characters can feel because they aren’t real, so these villainous characters can do things that you know that you could never ever do.
When people relate to characters, it’s because they see something deep about themselves in those characters – emotions that they could never really live out, emotions that plague them, existential questions gone unanswered, and so on. For some people, their race, sexuality, disability, etc, or something related to those traits for them, is that deep thing, and they long for characters that they can connect with on that level – that I can understand.
That’s relating to a character, not being represented by a character – and I feel like that distinction should be made, because I cannot understand people who passionately demand that characters represent this, that, or the other, and I cannot understand people who harass creators because they decide that their character was an inadequate representation.
Characters do not represent anybody, nor do individuals. When I speak on trans issues, I do not represent trans people, I was not elected as their representative, I do not speak for anybody but myself – and the same is true of fictional characters. This kind of thinking – that fictional characters are representative – is what leads to countless misunderstandings, from people believing that a gay character in a TV sit-com displays what real gay people are like, to people believing that those angry characters are what I truly want to do with my anger. Those characters don’t represent me, what I would do, or how I really wish to behave – I simply relate to their emotional situation.
Fictional characters are elements of a story, and they are only beholden to what the writer wishes to do with that story. If you want characters that you can relate to, then that’s natural, and that’s okay. If you want characters that represent you immaculately, then not only are you making solipsistic demands, but you’re feeding the idea that these fictional extremes are in any way something that you should judge real people by, and you’re feeding the ideas that lead to fools judging all of us by the actions of a few or by the actions of fictional characters.
~ Vape
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
I think the problem is that a male character is seen as ONE male character while any and all female/black/gay/whatever character is seen as representation of ALL women/black/gay/whatever people which imo is a really big problem. If I’m gonna write a female character who is a giant unapologetic character she is ONE female character, she isn’t all women everywhere. This is really starting to piss me of cause I want to be free in who I write and how.
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