ticky, ticky, tickybox: characters, identifying, all that

[mrissa]

Please note the use of tickyboxes: you may always, always tickybox more than one thing, and if they appear to be contradicting each other, it is all part of life's rich pageant, right? Explain or elaborate in comments, please.

Also please note in the second set of questions: identifying with someone based on a factor does not necessarily mean that you share that factor. If you're more likely to identify with math geeks despite being terrible at math yourself, or with Turkish characters despite being Hopi yourself, or whatever, go ahead and tickybox away.

[Poll #745998]

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I cannot stand works where I hate all of the characters (see: Death of a Salesman). I don't have to love them all, but if there aren't any that I feel sympathy for, then I end up detesting the whole thing, however well-executed it may be.

I mostly identify with characters based on their psychology, not any external elements.

The extent to which I think differently of characters in different media is, I think, a function of the way that books in particular can show you interiority, whereas other media are often more opaque on that front. Corollary to this is that yes, RPGs (face-to-face ones; I don't do computer RPGs) have affected how I think about character, because the interiority element becomes so high. Even moreso than with a pov character in my writing, because I'm not as frequently having to step back and provide external information (descriptions, etc), and I don't have to simultaneously be running other characters and worrying about what's in their heads; I stay in one place, mentally.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I identify with characters mostly on the basis of behavior and philosophy instead of the tickyboxes you listed.

I may very well have a single favorite character across all media or just one, but have never given it enough thought to be able to identify that fact in a useful time frame.

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to identify with characters based on what's most important to them.

Whether I'd be creeped out or flattered by a character based on me would depend on the character the author came up with. :-) I think we all have aspects of our personalities that we'd rather have diminished or magnified in others' eyes.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Character is one of the most important things for me. Character, character development, and dialogue. And story, which is different from plot. But character is what grabs me first.

In some moods, I just want a protagonist I can fully *like,* dammit. I feel like protagonists I don't really comfortably like take a lot more work. If a book has a protagonist - and, bonus, also other characters - that I enjoy and am not troubled by (morality not too questionable, things like that), then I'll go along with the book for whatever. If there isn't a character I can enjoy identifying with (because sometimes I identify with a character's flaws, which is interesting but not always comfortable), then it needs to be a really well-written book on a lot of levels, and even so, there will be days when I don't want to reread it. On the other hand, I'll respect it a lot.

It's a bit like coffee, for me, really. I won't drink *really* bad coffee at all. However, with enough milk and sugar, I can drink even fairly bad coffee quite happily. If coffee is good enough, I don't need much milk and sugar, I can enjoy the more complicated, bitter flavor in its own right. On the other hand, there are days when I just want something sweet and milky to drink.

I find that I most identify with characters on the basis of how they relate to people. Your examples are of interpersonal roles they fill, and I mean that, but I also mean, for example, "The way she keeps trying to persue a train of thought to completion, while everyone around her has flitted off to the next subject," and, "The way she's flattered and yet creeped out by someone having written a character based on her in their novel."

[aet.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough I found the poll too difficult to fill out.

It is not that I do not care about characters - while I have no problem reading/watching about characters I do not care about, sometimes I DO identify or just care.

I guess I mostly identify either by being cheated into it (if I read "I did this/ I thought that ..." I may sometimes forget the "I" I am reading about is not me. I am absent m inded like that ... also, as I often read to escape reality, it is so much easier to slip ) or by finding an emotion or idea in the character that also applies to me (or appeals to me). So the gender, appearance or species has no importance when I seek to identify - if it is a stove that likes to eat dried fish, then I can feel we are of same blood with the sayd stove ...

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what makes me identify with certain characters. Attitude towards the world, maybe?

The more I think about it, the less sure I am what "identify with a character" means.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Oh, and--

- I identify easily with characters who have different genders from my own, but at the end of the book, if there wasn't anyone for me to identify with of my own gender, it's a cause for disappointment in the book.

- Age is super-important to me, which I find baffling and annoying but consistently true. It's not just a factor in who I identify with - actually, less a factor in identification than other things - but of how I understand the characters at all. I need to know who's older, who's younger, who's an adult, who's a child, who's somewhere in between, who's older than me or younger than me. I often find myself seriously distracted from a story by going for too long a time not knowing how old the protagonist is. This is more of an issue when the protagonist is not an adult, but still an issue even when s/he is. I thought about this in the context of your question about appearance. I like to know what a character looks like, at least vaguely, particularly size and shape, but if I don't get an adequate description I'm not seriously distracted from the book the way I am if I can't get a fix on the character's age.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I am most likely to relate to characters based on their attitudes, and how they are affected by and react to things. (Whether that be events, other characters or circumstances.)

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yes. Different authors might have different attitudes toward the same qualities and character traits, and the author's presentation can make a big difference in whether the character comes across as despicable, pitiful or sympathetic.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I don't in particular read to identify with characters. I read to be exposed to people very different from me, the more complicated, the better. I can love some truly reprehensible people as characters (lj user="truepenny">'s Felix, frex) if they are well-drawn, complex, and layered.

However, I wouldn't want to *be* Felix. Or be trapped in an elevator with him.

There are other characters, however, who are equally reprehensible people, who I cannot stand. Thomas Covenant, for example, needed to be drowned in a bucket.

Like real people, good characters should surprise me in consistent ways, if that makes any sense?

And when it comes down to it, character is *the* reason I read. And *the* reason I write.

[wychwood]

I need to engage positively with the characters if I'm going to enjoy something. See also: why I don't get on so well with old school science fiction where the characters are far less important than the goshwow of whatever idea is explored.

The most important element of identity I've found is mindset. I adore geek characters, and can get on with them much better than most others - gender, nationality, species, whatever, all falls before the Geek *g*.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Identifying with characters is nice, but I don't have to look at a character and think "Hey, I'm like that!" to find them interesting. Rather the opposite, really.

That said, I tend to identify/like characters based on their personality, competence, and how believable they are, more or less in that order. To use examples from A Game of Thrones: Arya? Awesome. Tyrion? Awesome. Sansa? Totally annoying, and I don't care how believable she is, because she's a naive, spoiled little princess. She gets a little better by A Feast For Crows, but still.

I suspect that my obsession with competence was pretty heavily influenced by tabletop RPGs, given that incompetent characters tend to be boring, annoying, or dead, unless they're specifically positioned as comic relief. As for modeling characters on people... all of my characters are bits of me or people I've known. Mostly me. If you're "in" one of my books, the character has probably been distorted to the point where you wouldn't even recognize yourself.

spoilers for Melusine

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

Possible spoilers for Melusine, by Sarah Monette, aka truepenny; which I highly recommend.
Do you really see Felix as reprehensible in Melusine, or does he do something in The Virtu? If the former, why? (If the latter, don't tell me what.) I see him as a crazy victim, and when mostly recovered from that, sarcastic and unwilling to make himself remember enough about being crazy to be sufficiently grateful to the person who helped him. These are flaws, but I don't think they make him reprehensible. I mean, sure, he doesn't come off very well in comparison to Mildmay, but who would? I adore Mildmay to the point that I do resent Felix for the insufficient gratitude, and find it hard to remember that Mildmay is the one who actually steals and kills people for a living.

Re: spoilers for Melusine

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

...get back to me after you've read The Virtu. They're one book in my head at this point, so it's hard for me to remember what happens in which one, but yeah, Felix is badly in need of redemption. And a clue bat. And how.

It's sort of a running gag with Sarah and I that we're both writing people who would be the villains of a more traditional fantasy as protagonists, her with Felix and myself with Elaine.

And yeah, it seems to me as well that Mildmay is not quite the nice fellow we tend to think of him as. He projects that, though; pleasantness and plausibility.

[shawn-scarber.livejournal.com]

I care more about a character based on the character's relationships. I would rather the character traits become apparent through their actions and their relationships with other characters.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

Characters are important for me. I may enjoy something else, as for example Ombria in Shadow - where I love the story even if I don't remember anything about the characters. But usually I need to care about the characters. I don't need to love them - just recently I have read a book where a protagonist grew into very unpleasant person by the end, and I wished to kick him or kill him - but when he was dying I still cared for him.

Beside caring, I need to understand why happens what happens - all the changes need to be believable.

As for identification - it depends. it is not necessary, and I don't remember over-identifying with someone, but I like finding parallels between myself and the characters. One of the reasons I love Buffy: I can understand her looking at myself, and I can undersand myself looking at her - but I cannot say I undentify with her that much.

what I don't like at all - when people who read my stories (or poems) identify me with my characters. but that's a different question.

when there is a romantic involvement in a story - I need to like the participants together, otherwise I get annoyed. ;)

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Question 1: The clarification here is that, in addition to having the characters' motivations make sense to me (even if they make sense in a negative way, i.e. chars I don't like), at LEAST one character must be sympathetic to me. Making sense is not the same as sympathetic. You can explain to me why it is internally consistent for a particular character to be a relentless asshole, what his motivations for assholedom are - and I hope you do explain - but that doesn't make him sympathetic, it just makes him understandable. And if your whole script/book is full of unsympathetic chars, I leave. (Canonical example: Being John Malkovich, one of the only two films I've walked out on in my life.)

Also, if you only do have the one sympathetic character, you had better let that character come out basically all right in the end, because he's the one who's getting me through the book.

Question 2: I primarily identify with a character based on their personality and background. Notably, the cue for me tends to be a character who had a childhood of being ostracized, socially inept, etc - I tend to love a lot of what a friend of mine calls Lonely Girl Finds Her Place books. Physical appearance, not so much, although my usual gender bias makes me find female characters more approachable than male ones.

[zunger.livejournal.com]

I find myself identifying with characters most on the basis of mindset and of circumstance: characters who have found themselves in positions with which I feel a connection, or characters who approach situations in ways which make some sort of deep sense to me.

And like swan_tower, I don't need to identify with all of the characters, but when I can't feel sympathy for any of them, I feel an urge to burn the book. Charles Palliser's The Quincunx is probably the worst offender in this regard in my memory.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

I'm somewhat likely to identify with characters based on their class status. Genteel poverty is particularly likely to make me perk up and identify.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think some people read different nuances into the word "identify." But ultimately I'd echo avrelia, below; I need to care about them, whether they're reprehensible or not. Reading Death of a Salesman, I just wanted to drop them all off a very high tower. Identification, I'd say, is a slightly different issue from caring -- though they often go together.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's part of why I posted this: I'm not entirely sure what it means, either, but lots of people seem to find it a good deal more important than I do.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I dunno; a lot of tabletop RPGs emphasize competence, sure, but so does geek culture at large, in my opinion.

And yes, bits of me all over, sometimes with bits of other known people mixed in and sometimes just other stuff completely. Some people were convinced they'd spotted scottjames in one of my books because of a superficial physical similarity; they'd spotted the character who got most of my "identification" at that point. And very few people confuse the two of us.

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

I like characters with rich psychology, who have inner thoughts and issues that have little to do with The Plot at hand.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Not so much, "I don't care about characters," and, "I don't _only_ care about characters."

Other things won't trump bad character stuff, but it may well carry a work for me where the character stuff is a neutral.

(I think of voice as overlapping with but not necessarily identical to characterization, for some reason.)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Just so.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I prefer something else about characters and/or identification therewith, which I will explain in comments.

I can, depending on the surrounding work of fiction, appreciate and/or relate to characters in just about all the ways you list; however, I have a violently aversive reaction to some characters' personalities. It is one of the very few things that will make me throw a book across the room and never pick it up again. To quote myself from way back when (http://www.panix.com/~zackw/exbib/2002/June/18#1945):

There's a certain category of fictional works, which are populated entirely with characters that I hate. I mean, these people are scum. They have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. If I were to be in the same room with them in real life I would be forced to blow their heads off with a machine pistol. Fortunately I can avoid this sort of person easily in real life. I can also avoid these people in fiction, by not reading the books, but sometimes I get suckered in and don't realize until it's too late to do anything but hurl the book out the window and scrub my brain out with lye.

The question here is, why do people write these books? How can they stand to have these scum living in their heads? To have made them up and be personally responsible for every last bit of their scumminess? Why did they not blow their characters' heads off with a machine pistol in chapter one, then find a story to write that has at least one person who is worth knowing?

Perhaps the most prominent and readily accessible example of a fictional work that triggers this reaction is the webcomic Something Positive, whose enduring popularity is completely incomprehensible to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes there's a compulsive aspect to creating fictional characters.

For me, though, it tends to go the other way around: no matter how annoying or obnoxious or even evil a character is, as the author I can (at least hypothetically) know all about him/her, so eventually a good bit or two, or at least an understandable bit or two, comes to light.

On the other hand, I hate the school of villain-creation that insists that they all must have troubled childhoods or sad thwarted loves or whatever. Some people really do know that what they're doing is not right, and they do it anyway. Most of us don't like to think about that on the grand scale, but it's there.