Oh. That's not what I want in a story.
So I was reading this fanfic and I could not get over how perfect the lead character was. Flawless. Did not make mistakes, told every other character their mistakes, who then saw their mistakes and suddenly course-corrected and realized everything was right because of the lead character of the fanfic. I just can't even finish a story like that.
This is...not what I'm looking for out of a lead character. I want someone gloriously flawed, basically a not-quite-disaster of an imperfect character who's clawing their way to fake adulting (look, I only fake it too) and who has beautiful complexities (sometimes that means a trash fire, sometimes that means someone who's just wrong about things). I want a character who's great at a lot of stuff, and is terrible at some things too, and sometimes someone who's deeply, deeply wrong and has a huge thing to fix, and maybe they do tell some of the other characters how it is, but also the lead needs to course-correct and gets told off by secondary characters too. I want a dynamic character who changes over the course of a fic.
Like, okay. As examples of characters I adore, I have written a hell of a lot about Elizabeth Weir, a gloriously brilliant diplomat (if you disagree, please stop, I think we all know she was sabotaged by the writing as she was meant to be an obstacle to the Teamy Goodness*, who were meant to ignore her and Do The Thing Anyway), but also a terribly emotionally unavailable woman, or Sophie Devereaux, who was absolutely amazing at being ten different people, but whose flaw was, for some goddamn unknown reason, putting up with Nate goddamn Ford (????), who was a walking asshole (I'm sorry, I'm not that big on Nate, and every time I rewatch Leverage, I'm even less into him). But she spends five years working on knowing herself!
Or, in Legends of Tomorrow, either of the Zaris, who have very different takes on life, but one of whom is a sarcastic cynic with a wall of emotional unavailability who is secretly a squooshy goober who just wants to belong, and the other Zari, who is a brilliant social manipulator who is devastated at being underestimated and thought of as shallow when she's a keen, incisive mind, but she's awfully insecure in some ways - both of the Zaris are amazingly complex characters. (Not to mention Sara, Ava, Nora, all of them.)
My favorite characters are the ones who have deep, deep flaws to balance out their strengths, not the ones who are perfect. So every time I see a fanfic that's someone writing about a character as gloriously perfect, I just don't get it. (Okay, that's not true, I get it, I know why it happens, but I just don't want it.)
*I love the SGA Team characters too, this is not an insult to those characters either. The writing was just not always the best expression of leadership on the show. Everyone did the best with what they had on what was, ah, sometimes kind of a flawed presentation of a chain of command on the writers' behalf. This entry has been cross-posted to Dreamwidth (
comments). Comments are welcome on either post.
This is...not what I'm looking for out of a lead character. I want someone gloriously flawed, basically a not-quite-disaster of an imperfect character who's clawing their way to fake adulting (look, I only fake it too) and who has beautiful complexities (sometimes that means a trash fire, sometimes that means someone who's just wrong about things). I want a character who's great at a lot of stuff, and is terrible at some things too, and sometimes someone who's deeply, deeply wrong and has a huge thing to fix, and maybe they do tell some of the other characters how it is, but also the lead needs to course-correct and gets told off by secondary characters too. I want a dynamic character who changes over the course of a fic.
Like, okay. As examples of characters I adore, I have written a hell of a lot about Elizabeth Weir, a gloriously brilliant diplomat (if you disagree, please stop, I think we all know she was sabotaged by the writing as she was meant to be an obstacle to the Teamy Goodness*, who were meant to ignore her and Do The Thing Anyway), but also a terribly emotionally unavailable woman, or Sophie Devereaux, who was absolutely amazing at being ten different people, but whose flaw was, for some goddamn unknown reason, putting up with Nate goddamn Ford (????), who was a walking asshole (I'm sorry, I'm not that big on Nate, and every time I rewatch Leverage, I'm even less into him). But she spends five years working on knowing herself!
Or, in Legends of Tomorrow, either of the Zaris, who have very different takes on life, but one of whom is a sarcastic cynic with a wall of emotional unavailability who is secretly a squooshy goober who just wants to belong, and the other Zari, who is a brilliant social manipulator who is devastated at being underestimated and thought of as shallow when she's a keen, incisive mind, but she's awfully insecure in some ways - both of the Zaris are amazingly complex characters. (Not to mention Sara, Ava, Nora, all of them.)
My favorite characters are the ones who have deep, deep flaws to balance out their strengths, not the ones who are perfect. So every time I see a fanfic that's someone writing about a character as gloriously perfect, I just don't get it. (Okay, that's not true, I get it, I know why it happens, but I just don't want it.)
*I love the SGA Team characters too, this is not an insult to those characters either. The writing was just not always the best expression of leadership on the show. Everyone did the best with what they had on what was, ah, sometimes kind of a flawed presentation of a chain of command on the writers' behalf. This entry has been cross-posted to Dreamwidth (
comments). Comments are welcome on either post.