May You Read About Interesting Characters!

Here’s the scoop: I don’t care about good people who do good things for good reasons and are never heart-wrenchingly tempted by evil. Sorry. This explains a lot of my taste in fiction; I’ve never been able to sympathize very much with Lucy and Peter Pevensie, or Harry Potter, or Charlie Bucket.

(Edmund Pevensie, Draco Malfoy, and Veruca Salt are, of course, another story entirely. Pun so intended.)

I’m reading a novel right now in which the main character is a boy who’s the sort-of reincarnation of every historical hero who ever existed. He’s gallant and wise but also fun-loving and innocent and childish. It’s his destiny to fight the eternal evil living amongst humanity that causes all negative impulses and character faults. Though heroes have had faults in the past, he discovers, it was really the negative power of the villain and not any part of the hero at all. Also, the evil guy is evil because of the circumstances of his birth.

Bo-ring.

For me, a hero who can’t be anything but good is no hero at all. A hero like that isn’t better than a villain to whom evil is similarly innate, just luckier. Perhaps that’s why many stories of good-in-the-genes heroes start with the hero being bullied, oppressed, or shunned; not only does the reader or viewer immediately sympathize with someone who’s being unfairly hurt, but with pain comes the desire for vengeance – a pseudo-evil-inclination that acts as a panacea for anyone who wants the story to depict a real moral struggle.

Give me a Frodo who’s sorely tempted to take the One Ring for himself*, or a Will Stanton who must cause others’ suffering to reach his goals for the Light. You know why there were only two knights out of the whole Round Table who made it to the Holy Grail**? Because, if there had been more, it would have been a boring story. The Holy Grail business is the most boring part of the whole epic to read, because none of the interesting characters can succeed, and none of the successful characters can be interesting.

For one thing, a character who has flaws that actually shape her life (as opposed to one whose flaws only tangentially affect the story and rarely, if ever, are acknowledged to cause obstacles or setbacks – Harry, Peter, and Charlie, this means you) is more interesting than one who doesn’t for the same reason that a character who has to fight a dragon, cross a bubbling lava-pit, and outwit a omniscient demon to rescue a princess from her wicked uncle’s castle is more interesting than one who just walks in through the drawbridge and walks out again. Conflict!

And even life-shaping flaws are interesting only if they’re flaws the hero eventually has to overcome. Don’t show me a mortal flaw (especially if it’s “My hero’s flaw is that he’s too much of a hero! He has to save everyone!” *coughPercyJacksonandHarryPotter*) that affects a hero’s life but not her story. Not all flaws have to be overcome*** – after all, who could ever manage that? – but any flaw that stands in the way of the hero’s achievement of his or her goal must be at least confronted. See, I’m totally fine with characters like Percy and Harry if they take one second to think, “Wait, last time I took an impetuous action like this, I got someone in trouble/screwed up our plan,” even if they think immediately afterwards, “But I’m going to take the risk and do this anyway”. And, sometimes, Percy and Harry do. It’s when they skip the “Wait, I have a flaw!” part that gets on my nerves.

I’ll admit, I liked Peter and Lucy Pevensie when I was in third grade, but I liked Eustace Scrubb and Edmund, too, and, while my affection for Peter and Lucy has waned over the years****, my fondness for the two E’s still goes strong. And Jill Pole, too – she always seemed the most real to me of all the female characters who visit Narnia, probably because she’s the only one who’s allowed both to make mistakes and to learn from them. Sure, once in a while, it’s fun to identify with perfect characters in an escapist fantasy, but, most of the time, I want to hang out with a character who succeeds despite his or her characteristics.

(I guess, in the opposite way, the same kinda goes for villains. Don’t trot out a pantomime villain twirling his moustache*****. If it is his misfortune rather than choice to be evil, you can hardly expect me to be scared. But enough with the villains already, right? I talk about them too much already.)

Of course, to be fair, no one wants to read about a hero so overcome by flaws that he or she has no hope of ever being good at all. But, to be even more fair, it’s pretty hard to imagine a hero like that. Even Dexter Morgan, unrepentant serial killer and first-person narrator, manages to avoid total evil-ness. Though he does some things that make you recoil in disgust, in the end, he comes across as a character with okay ethics, mainly because he does good things without the innate understanding of why they’re good that most of us share******.

Terry Pratchett’s main characters always have a good dollop of dark paint swirled in with the light – Granny Weatherwax is a tough old broad, Commander Vimes doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and Mr. Moist is always looking for a way to make a profit. Lord Vetinari schemes, manipulates, and tortures his way to a better civic state; Death may have no malice, but he has no mercy, either. And, as for Alan Moore – well, who can separate the good from the bad in Rorschach, the psychopathic “superhero” who does not forgive, does not forget, and never gives up? Or in V, the deceptive terrorist determined to bring a fascist government to its knees? Moore can make rapists as human as their victims without making the act of rape any less despicable; he can make murderers less corpse-like than those they kill.

One last thought: having a hero do something nasty doesn’t in itself make him or her a deeper, more profound, interesting character. It’s not the existence of a flaw that makes the story complicated any more than just mentioning an epic war between dragons and unicorns makes your story more exciting. It’s only when characters we care about knowingly run into conflict with those things – when Vimes recognizes his rudeness and disdain for authority cost him important alliances or when Rorschach’s allies must choose to either turn a blind eye to his torture of lowlife thugs or fail to find the criminals they seek – that they become interesting.

* Um, but while you’re giving me that Frodo, could you please make him less whiny and more proactive regarding his own fate? kthx

** Results may vary depending on the version of the myth you read, but, as I recall, Persifal and Galahad both make it in one of the sources. And Wikipedia‘s totally got my back on this one.

*** “Ha ha, Harry Potter, you triggered my fiendish trap by being too careless to properly format your bibliography! Too bad you lack appropriate MLA style and grammar skills!”

“Not anymore, Voldemort! Or else how would I have picked out that split infinitive in your speech?”

“Nooooooooooo!”

**** Although it is growing again, thanks to the Walden Media movie where all four Pevensie siblings suddenly have sympathetic personalities, individual goals, and personal problems to overcome. I can admire William Moseley’s Peter because I can see where he’s coming from: he’s still a kid who just wants to be goofy and do what kids do, but somehow he’s in charge of getting his whole family safely through two wars, one in England and one in Narnia, and he’s worried he can’t live up to the responsibility. When I first saw the scene where the wolves chase Peter, Susan, and Lucy across the ice floes, I was all “WTF????” But, upon reflection, I found that the scariest scene in the movie – especially the part where Peter thinks he’s hauled Lucy to safety but finds he’s holding her empty coat. What older sibling hasn’t experienced that moment of panic – “OMG, she was right here just a second ago, and I was supposed to be taking care of her!” But I digress…

***** Which is not to say I dislike twirly-moustached men in black capes. I was a Drama major, you know.

****** It’s like how Snape’s protection of Harry Potter is all the more admirable because he doesn’t want to do it, backslash Random Harry Potter Reference.