![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, we've had two dislikes in this series, so I figured I break it up a bit by getting into something I like.
What I like is characters who are complicated and human. I like the Cloud Strife who has a working spine; the Zack Fair who is more than a meat-headed jock with a puppy-like personality; the Tifa Lockhart who isn't just a small-town spoiled princess; the Steve Rogers who is more than a perpetually innocent boy-scout; the Tony Stark who actually has a lot of compassion for others buried under the snark; the Squall Leonhart who does actually care about his friends; the Seifer Almasy who does give a damn; and so on.
Why? Well, for a start, people who live in this world are complicated. We aren't all able to be pinned down to single issues and ideas, and we aren't incapable of doing things which effectively cause cognitive dissonance in other people when we do them. Which means simple characters who are pretty stereotyped tend to bore me. There has to be more to them than that. Show me something below the surface.
For example, one of the characters in FF7 fans love to hate is Yuffie Kisaragi. She's the sixteen-year-old ninja who joins your crew if you go about things the right way, and nicks all your materia when you go to Wutai. She's loud, brash, a bit of a jerk, and convinced of her own ability to the exclusion of all else. On the surface, she's not very likeable, and she really does annoy people to the point where they wind up dropping her from the party or just not bothering to recruit her.
But then you go into her back-story - and once you realise she's effectively the royal heir to Wutai, there's a lot of back-story there to go into. She's the only other character in the story aside from Cloud and Tifa to have been harmed by Sephiroth (the rest of them have been harmed by Shinra, but not Sephiroth), although the harm he did to her was indirect. She's left home at a rather young age (and if you play Crisis Core, you realise she's been effectively out on her own since she was about eight or nine years old) and she's trying to do her best to find a way to rebuild her country, which argues she still feels some responsibility toward it. Yes, she steals your materia. But she gives it back (more or less in the order it was taken) and she apologises. She genuinely bonds with the other members of the group (if you have her in your party at the point where Aerith dies, she breaks down and cries on Cloud when it sinks in). So there's more to her than just the brat, even if it does take a while to discover it.
That complexity of character is what makes me interested in a character. I like the process of finding out how they came to be who they are now. It gives me something to get my teeth into as a writer, and it gives me something to play with as a story-teller. It also makes the characters a bit more human, a bit more real to me.
What I like is characters who are complicated and human. I like the Cloud Strife who has a working spine; the Zack Fair who is more than a meat-headed jock with a puppy-like personality; the Tifa Lockhart who isn't just a small-town spoiled princess; the Steve Rogers who is more than a perpetually innocent boy-scout; the Tony Stark who actually has a lot of compassion for others buried under the snark; the Squall Leonhart who does actually care about his friends; the Seifer Almasy who does give a damn; and so on.
Why? Well, for a start, people who live in this world are complicated. We aren't all able to be pinned down to single issues and ideas, and we aren't incapable of doing things which effectively cause cognitive dissonance in other people when we do them. Which means simple characters who are pretty stereotyped tend to bore me. There has to be more to them than that. Show me something below the surface.
For example, one of the characters in FF7 fans love to hate is Yuffie Kisaragi. She's the sixteen-year-old ninja who joins your crew if you go about things the right way, and nicks all your materia when you go to Wutai. She's loud, brash, a bit of a jerk, and convinced of her own ability to the exclusion of all else. On the surface, she's not very likeable, and she really does annoy people to the point where they wind up dropping her from the party or just not bothering to recruit her.
But then you go into her back-story - and once you realise she's effectively the royal heir to Wutai, there's a lot of back-story there to go into. She's the only other character in the story aside from Cloud and Tifa to have been harmed by Sephiroth (the rest of them have been harmed by Shinra, but not Sephiroth), although the harm he did to her was indirect. She's left home at a rather young age (and if you play Crisis Core, you realise she's been effectively out on her own since she was about eight or nine years old) and she's trying to do her best to find a way to rebuild her country, which argues she still feels some responsibility toward it. Yes, she steals your materia. But she gives it back (more or less in the order it was taken) and she apologises. She genuinely bonds with the other members of the group (if you have her in your party at the point where Aerith dies, she breaks down and cries on Cloud when it sinks in). So there's more to her than just the brat, even if it does take a while to discover it.
That complexity of character is what makes me interested in a character. I like the process of finding out how they came to be who they are now. It gives me something to get my teeth into as a writer, and it gives me something to play with as a story-teller. It also makes the characters a bit more human, a bit more real to me.
