100 Quotes That Caught My Eye: #2

[upupa_epops]

Ok, I'm not done with the intelligent stuff yet. So sue me. Today comes a quote I've actually hanged on my wall, because sometimes I have this desire to shove it down some people's throats.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the

Comments

[snickfic]

This is tangent to what you're saying, I think, but to me learning to empathize and appreciate characters whom one wouldn't like in real life is actually a good exercise in being more empathetic to the people who are in one's life. I have seen most of the key moments in Dean Winchester's life, I know how much more complex he is than just his crude, brutish, PUA exterior, and that reminds me that a person's exterior isn't all there is to them. Quite possibly most of the guys I meet in RL with Dean's exterior are not going to have his interior, which I think is an important point for me to remember, but they're still complicated, flawed individuals with tons of screwed-up history (because we all have screwed-up history) who have value and are worth treating as human - even if I heartily dislike them personally.

And then there are characters like Buffy, who gets tons of flak because, I think, people don't empathize with her enough. How can a person look at everything she's gone through, all the sacrifices she's made, the severe depression she suffered from for a while, and then just dismiss her as whiny? IDEK.

Possibly more closely related to what you're saying, I think, is that there's a huge difference to me between liking a character because they're interesting and liking them because you find them admirable or would like to spend the day with them. For example, I think Willow is an absolutely fascinating character (through mid-S6, anyway), but I dislike her personally from S4 on. OTOH, Tara's a sweetheart and I expect I'd enjoy spending the day with her, but I find her pretty boring in canon because canon did not give her any characteristics or possibilities that I find interesting.

Fundamentally, though, I think I disagree with you about judging characters as people? It's a lot harder to do when dealing with supernatural worlds, souls being lost and found, people getting turned non-human and so on. There aren't any real-world equivalents. Still, I guess I don't see why I can't at least try. A lot of my favorite characters are exactly those whose personhood and sense of self (and therefore ethics, etc) don't have real-world equivalents, like Spike, Illyria, the Cylons in BSG, Sam in S6 of SPN, etc. The way they straddle the understood boundaries of 'person' or stand all the way outside them fascinates me, and is a lot of why I keep coming back to them.

Um. I'm not sure this comment had a point. Your post just got me thinking. If we do disagree on one or more of these points, I hope you don't mind?

[pocochina]

Quite possibly most of the guys I meet in RL with Dean's exterior are not going to have his interior, which I think is an important point for me to remember, but they're still complicated, flawed individuals with tons of screwed-up history (because we all have screwed-up history)

Yeah. idk, it's tough for me to talk Dean now, because I've just accepted that he's hit three strikes on my triggers and I'm done. (Even if at least two out of those three instances were fantastic storytelling! Separate issues!) But a big part of his value for me as a character in those early seasons is exactly that. I could see how his fucked-up relationship to gender and women came in part from this basis that I did find really sympathetic. It's kind of a safe way to try to understand how sexist dudes think, without actually taking the emotional risk that getting close to them entails.

A lot of my favorite characters are exactly those whose personhood and sense of self (and therefore ethics, etc) don't have real-world equivalents, like Spike, Illyria, the Cylons in BSG, Sam in S6 of SPN, etc.

I always enjoy these characters too, and for a lot of the same reasons. I feel like they make it a lot easier to deal with ethical concerns, if they're that other. Nobody could possibly be like them, so there's no need for me to wonder about if there's a should of it all.