Questions of Character
Character has been coming up a lot lately in the various fannish playgrounds I've been hanging out in. Discussions of female characters at gabolange's (flocked, or I'd link) and surrealis's ( here), discussions of characters of color at sugargroupie's (most relevant bits flocked), a chat with some RL friends about J. K. Rowling's efforts to control the interpretation of her characters through ex cathedra statements of authorial intent. And also in the background of my thoughts is all that flailing around about Sam Carter going to Atlantis: the Sam-haters and the Sam-defenders and everyone in between.
I've got some basic questions. I can't really answer most of them, though I can poke a bit at the ways that I think and talk about character. At one time I thought I might pull out my English professor-in-training credentials, re-read some narrative theory, give an overview of what the people who think and talk about character for a living have to say. I've decided against it for several reasons, most importantly because what I want to do here is just throw some ideas out informally and get people talking about them (hopefully).
What attracts us to certain characters? Why do we like different characters in different ways? There are characters we identify with, characters we admire, characters we lust after, characters we love to hate, characters we hate to love, characters who bore us, characters who terrify us: why?
To what extent do we think of characters as someone's creation, versus as some kind of separate entity? How does our relationship with a character change (or does it?) when we write about her or him in fanfic? Where does a character "live"? (i.e., in canonical texts only, in fanfic as well, in our imaginations, etc.) We love characters, we grieve for and with them, we hate them fiercely, we want to knock some sense into their heads when they make bad decisions: does this mean we think of them as "real"?
Obviously there are a lot of different answers to these questions--possibly completely individual ones for each reader/viewer, multiplied by infinite numbers of characters. I can talk about some of my own answers, but they're not going to be everyone's answers, nor should they be. But hopefully they'll at least clarify some of what I tend to take for granted when I talk about characters and illuminate some of the ways I think about them when I go about writing fic. (And it's quite likely, really, that I'm the only person who will care about my own clarifications, but hey, it's my journal!) For the sake of keeping everyone as much on the same page as possible, I'll draw all my examples from the media fandoms that most of us are familiar with, but I could throw any number of other novels, plays, films, and TV shows into the mix; my tastes are similar across the board.
I'm a character girl. I enjoy a good story, I get particularly turned on if the story is told in a unique or especially beautiful way, but if you really want to make me happy, give me well-written, complex characters. Specifically, give me well-written, complex female characters. Of all the different ways to be compelled by a character, the one that most often and most forcefully grabs me is some variation on "oh, I want to be her when I grow up!" This response is usually elicited by witty, brainy, eminently capable women: Dana Scully (my first love), Laura Roslin, C. J. Cregg, Sam Carter, Janet Fraiser, Elizabeth Weir. Aeryn Sun, Teyla Emmagen, and Kara Thrace are variations on a theme. And really, the only male character to make the very best beloved list, Toby Ziegler, I love for the same reasons: brilliant, eloquent, idealistic, principled Toby, whom I would also love to resemble someday.
But mostly, my favorite characters are women. As a child I was taught that I could do anything I wanted to do, but, because I lived in a traditionally conservative community, I was 21 years old before I found an actual, real life role model, a woman who made me say, "I want to be like you" and even more, "I'm so glad I've found you because I wasn't entirely sure there were people like you in my world." She is one of the relatively few female professors at my (small, conservative, evangelical Christian) undergrad institution, whose art history class I took on a whim because I needed an extra elective senior year. Before that, all my role models were fictional, and I've hung onto the fictional ones even as I've acquired more of the flesh and blood sort.
I don't need my fictional role models to be perfect or uniform. I've also got a deep love of moral ambiguity, and this gives me an extra love for people who are flawed, who are left to make difficult choices and inevitably screw some of them up. I love Laura Roslin, but she scares the shit out of me; I certainly wouldn't want her as my president. Aeryn scares me, too, but for different reasons. I like characters who are a bit larger than life, just that much more capable than an ordinary person, and possibly just that much more flawed.
(And of course I also love characters who don't really fit that model, characters who compel me for different reasons. Chiana and Vala, who wear toughness over some deep scarring. Cameron Mitchell and Chief Tyrol, who are just such good guys. Teal'c, who is wise and strong and gentle and deadly, and absolutely the guy you want on your side and by your side. John Crichton, for oh so many reasons.)
The more interesting set of questions, really, is the second: what exactly am I talking about when I talk about Laura Roslin, or Janet Fraiser, or Aeryn Sun? And this is the part where my thinking gets complicated, where I'm constantly flipping back and forth between analyzing the construction of the character on one hand and thinking of her as more than the sum of her parts on the other.
Characters are composite constructs. A television character, in particular, is the product of the creator(s), every screenwriter who has written her, the actor who plays her, every director who has said, "hmm, no, I don't think she'd do that, would she?" Characters are comprised of these decisions, and technically speaking, the words spoken, the actions portrayed, are all there is to a character.
I tie my head in knots every time I try to think about Aeryn in season 4: she just seems so out of character. Yet it's absurd, technically speaking, to think of Aeryn being "out of character" in canon; canon is what determines her character. It's also absurd to blame Sam Carter-the fictional character-for going to Atlantis, as if it were her fault. On the other hand, I'm not watching Atlantis this season for a variety of reasons, but partly because I don't want to see them "ruin Sam," as I fear they'll do-another absurd position. They're fictional characters. They exist only in the texts from which they originate. They're comprised of what they do on screen, and what they do on screen constitutes who they are.
And yet… I suspect that we would all agree that thinking about characters only in terms of what is actually on the screen is reductive. Language is suggestive. Acting is suggestive. Characters loom larger than the nuts and bolts of their on-screen existence, and consequently, we spend hours (oh yes, many hours) mulling Aeryn's frame of mind in "Promises," or we get genuinely hurt and angry when people hate our beloved Sam (or, I suppose, when Sam comes waltzing into our show; it's a position I'm far less sympathetic to, but it's rooted in the same kind of impulses, for the most part).
There are a couple of layers to a character, and they've got an interactive relationship in my mind. There is the character as presented in canon: the words she says, the decisions she makes, the way she looks and behaves. And there is the character who sort of transcends the form she takes in the medium itself: the essence of the character, if you will, her potential and possibilities, all the things that enable us to write fic that fills in gaps. The former creates the latter, but the latter is sort of what really counts.
It's this relationship that allows me to say that Teyla Emmagen is really poorly presented in canon, but that she's still a terrific character. It's this relationship that gives me headaches about Aeryn in season 4: I know some character presentation reasons for what happens there (too many guest writers, Kemper's tendency to see everyone else as an accessory to John, etc.), but I still struggle with how "Aeryn herself" can act so "out of character." And I can pretty quickly bounce back and forth between the two levels, sort of constructing and tearing down the fourth wall at will, depending on how well it suits me. Just yesterday and today on the danandjan list we were talking about a line in "Ripple Effect" that makes no canonical sense. People have been proposing elaborate explanations for it, but my solution is just to assume that some writer screwed up. At other times, however, my powers of projection are great: I can read seasons' worth of Daniel/Janet ship into a few touches and shared glances.
This leads me to my final point, which is character development in fanfic. Characters I'm fannish about take on other pieces of development, especially as I read fic about them. dm_lunsford's Janet Fraiser drinks tea. synecdochic's Cam Mitchell knows how to knit. runawaynun's Tory Foster has a crush on her boss. And these aspects become part of the characters for me, particularly when they don't contradict canon (and occasionally even when I perceive them as doing so; I'll take mylittleredgirl's John Sheppard over the canon one any day of the week).
Sometimes fic writing-at least for me-is an extremely analytical process of trying to figure out a character through writing her, and I usually find it feels more like this when the character is very well-developed canonically. Writing a Laura Roslin point of view in "The Signs that the Signmakers Made" felt almost like writing an analytical essay, because Roslin is just astoundingly well-developed, and she's got all these contradictions that are part of who she is, and she's damned difficult to write.
Sometimes, though, we get characters who aren't fleshed out so well in canon, and writing them is a little more like discovery. I feel like I've half invented Xhalax Sun, at least for myself, and I was picking up as much from where Kerlin, another fan, left off as I was from where the show itself did. (Although Farscape does give us enough to work with for Xhalax; she's actually quite well-developed for a character with so little screen time.) The Janet Fraiser who lives in my head is also heavily fan-created.
At any rate, those are just some ideas I've had bouncing around and that I wanted to sort out for myself. I'm really curious about whether this tends to ring true for y'all or not, whether you've got entirely different frameworks for thinking about characters, or whether we're talking about the same things but in different language, or whatever else.
I've got some basic questions. I can't really answer most of them, though I can poke a bit at the ways that I think and talk about character. At one time I thought I might pull out my English professor-in-training credentials, re-read some narrative theory, give an overview of what the people who think and talk about character for a living have to say. I've decided against it for several reasons, most importantly because what I want to do here is just throw some ideas out informally and get people talking about them (hopefully).
What attracts us to certain characters? Why do we like different characters in different ways? There are characters we identify with, characters we admire, characters we lust after, characters we love to hate, characters we hate to love, characters who bore us, characters who terrify us: why?
To what extent do we think of characters as someone's creation, versus as some kind of separate entity? How does our relationship with a character change (or does it?) when we write about her or him in fanfic? Where does a character "live"? (i.e., in canonical texts only, in fanfic as well, in our imaginations, etc.) We love characters, we grieve for and with them, we hate them fiercely, we want to knock some sense into their heads when they make bad decisions: does this mean we think of them as "real"?
Obviously there are a lot of different answers to these questions--possibly completely individual ones for each reader/viewer, multiplied by infinite numbers of characters. I can talk about some of my own answers, but they're not going to be everyone's answers, nor should they be. But hopefully they'll at least clarify some of what I tend to take for granted when I talk about characters and illuminate some of the ways I think about them when I go about writing fic. (And it's quite likely, really, that I'm the only person who will care about my own clarifications, but hey, it's my journal!) For the sake of keeping everyone as much on the same page as possible, I'll draw all my examples from the media fandoms that most of us are familiar with, but I could throw any number of other novels, plays, films, and TV shows into the mix; my tastes are similar across the board.
I'm a character girl. I enjoy a good story, I get particularly turned on if the story is told in a unique or especially beautiful way, but if you really want to make me happy, give me well-written, complex characters. Specifically, give me well-written, complex female characters. Of all the different ways to be compelled by a character, the one that most often and most forcefully grabs me is some variation on "oh, I want to be her when I grow up!" This response is usually elicited by witty, brainy, eminently capable women: Dana Scully (my first love), Laura Roslin, C. J. Cregg, Sam Carter, Janet Fraiser, Elizabeth Weir. Aeryn Sun, Teyla Emmagen, and Kara Thrace are variations on a theme. And really, the only male character to make the very best beloved list, Toby Ziegler, I love for the same reasons: brilliant, eloquent, idealistic, principled Toby, whom I would also love to resemble someday.
But mostly, my favorite characters are women. As a child I was taught that I could do anything I wanted to do, but, because I lived in a traditionally conservative community, I was 21 years old before I found an actual, real life role model, a woman who made me say, "I want to be like you" and even more, "I'm so glad I've found you because I wasn't entirely sure there were people like you in my world." She is one of the relatively few female professors at my (small, conservative, evangelical Christian) undergrad institution, whose art history class I took on a whim because I needed an extra elective senior year. Before that, all my role models were fictional, and I've hung onto the fictional ones even as I've acquired more of the flesh and blood sort.
I don't need my fictional role models to be perfect or uniform. I've also got a deep love of moral ambiguity, and this gives me an extra love for people who are flawed, who are left to make difficult choices and inevitably screw some of them up. I love Laura Roslin, but she scares the shit out of me; I certainly wouldn't want her as my president. Aeryn scares me, too, but for different reasons. I like characters who are a bit larger than life, just that much more capable than an ordinary person, and possibly just that much more flawed.
(And of course I also love characters who don't really fit that model, characters who compel me for different reasons. Chiana and Vala, who wear toughness over some deep scarring. Cameron Mitchell and Chief Tyrol, who are just such good guys. Teal'c, who is wise and strong and gentle and deadly, and absolutely the guy you want on your side and by your side. John Crichton, for oh so many reasons.)
The more interesting set of questions, really, is the second: what exactly am I talking about when I talk about Laura Roslin, or Janet Fraiser, or Aeryn Sun? And this is the part where my thinking gets complicated, where I'm constantly flipping back and forth between analyzing the construction of the character on one hand and thinking of her as more than the sum of her parts on the other.
Characters are composite constructs. A television character, in particular, is the product of the creator(s), every screenwriter who has written her, the actor who plays her, every director who has said, "hmm, no, I don't think she'd do that, would she?" Characters are comprised of these decisions, and technically speaking, the words spoken, the actions portrayed, are all there is to a character.
I tie my head in knots every time I try to think about Aeryn in season 4: she just seems so out of character. Yet it's absurd, technically speaking, to think of Aeryn being "out of character" in canon; canon is what determines her character. It's also absurd to blame Sam Carter-the fictional character-for going to Atlantis, as if it were her fault. On the other hand, I'm not watching Atlantis this season for a variety of reasons, but partly because I don't want to see them "ruin Sam," as I fear they'll do-another absurd position. They're fictional characters. They exist only in the texts from which they originate. They're comprised of what they do on screen, and what they do on screen constitutes who they are.
And yet… I suspect that we would all agree that thinking about characters only in terms of what is actually on the screen is reductive. Language is suggestive. Acting is suggestive. Characters loom larger than the nuts and bolts of their on-screen existence, and consequently, we spend hours (oh yes, many hours) mulling Aeryn's frame of mind in "Promises," or we get genuinely hurt and angry when people hate our beloved Sam (or, I suppose, when Sam comes waltzing into our show; it's a position I'm far less sympathetic to, but it's rooted in the same kind of impulses, for the most part).
There are a couple of layers to a character, and they've got an interactive relationship in my mind. There is the character as presented in canon: the words she says, the decisions she makes, the way she looks and behaves. And there is the character who sort of transcends the form she takes in the medium itself: the essence of the character, if you will, her potential and possibilities, all the things that enable us to write fic that fills in gaps. The former creates the latter, but the latter is sort of what really counts.
It's this relationship that allows me to say that Teyla Emmagen is really poorly presented in canon, but that she's still a terrific character. It's this relationship that gives me headaches about Aeryn in season 4: I know some character presentation reasons for what happens there (too many guest writers, Kemper's tendency to see everyone else as an accessory to John, etc.), but I still struggle with how "Aeryn herself" can act so "out of character." And I can pretty quickly bounce back and forth between the two levels, sort of constructing and tearing down the fourth wall at will, depending on how well it suits me. Just yesterday and today on the danandjan list we were talking about a line in "Ripple Effect" that makes no canonical sense. People have been proposing elaborate explanations for it, but my solution is just to assume that some writer screwed up. At other times, however, my powers of projection are great: I can read seasons' worth of Daniel/Janet ship into a few touches and shared glances.
This leads me to my final point, which is character development in fanfic. Characters I'm fannish about take on other pieces of development, especially as I read fic about them. dm_lunsford's Janet Fraiser drinks tea. synecdochic's Cam Mitchell knows how to knit. runawaynun's Tory Foster has a crush on her boss. And these aspects become part of the characters for me, particularly when they don't contradict canon (and occasionally even when I perceive them as doing so; I'll take mylittleredgirl's John Sheppard over the canon one any day of the week).
Sometimes fic writing-at least for me-is an extremely analytical process of trying to figure out a character through writing her, and I usually find it feels more like this when the character is very well-developed canonically. Writing a Laura Roslin point of view in "The Signs that the Signmakers Made" felt almost like writing an analytical essay, because Roslin is just astoundingly well-developed, and she's got all these contradictions that are part of who she is, and she's damned difficult to write.
Sometimes, though, we get characters who aren't fleshed out so well in canon, and writing them is a little more like discovery. I feel like I've half invented Xhalax Sun, at least for myself, and I was picking up as much from where Kerlin, another fan, left off as I was from where the show itself did. (Although Farscape does give us enough to work with for Xhalax; she's actually quite well-developed for a character with so little screen time.) The Janet Fraiser who lives in my head is also heavily fan-created.
At any rate, those are just some ideas I've had bouncing around and that I wanted to sort out for myself. I'm really curious about whether this tends to ring true for y'all or not, whether you've got entirely different frameworks for thinking about characters, or whether we're talking about the same things but in different language, or whatever else.