I have heard, or rather read, about people being irritated by unbelievable characters and for reasons I'm not comfortable sharing right now, I was thinking about it a lot today. People think characters who are entirely good or unbelievably good, have to have some sort of awful flaw or something to rehumanise them, because there is nothing in us that believes that people can be that good. When we hear of someone who is, we have to think there's something wrong with them or there must be something wrong with the person that is telling you that the person is that good. They have to be too easily pleased or too quick to praise someone. They're ignorant or naive. Either that or we have to find something that would colour their view of the person - they're family, they have a crush on them, all those sorts of reasons.
When it comes to characters, it's easier if someone smokes or swears or eats babies in between saving the world. It's better if they struggle and they fail for a little while and they have to find some way to grow. They cannot be perfect from start to finish, because it just does not work. That hamartia has to be there, because otherwise, we cannot accept them. And if they never have to struggle, there's no story there.
One of the cool things is, we can accept characters that develop in the same way that the Japanese use Kintsugi to fix pottery. When something breaks or chips, the pottery is fixed with gold so that it fills in the damage, making it right, but without covering the damage and making it more beautiful because of the break rather than in spite of the break. When we see a character's trauma and see them overcome it, we see the beauty in it. When their trauma informs what they do with their lives, like a doctor who became a doctor because they lost someone that they loved right in front of them, we find them inspirational, because we see the gold veins running through their cracks. If we saw a live version of The Trolley Problem where a hero had to choose between saving the life of their partner, the person that they loved, someone like that, and a group of innocent people, we would judge them for compromising their moral standards for the person that they loved even if we loved that love, but we would remember their trauma if they chose to lose the person that they loved in order to save the innocent people. I think that is probably pretty natural though.
Personally, I know it's possible to think the world of someone and later find out they're not so great, or there were flaws that kind of tarnished their armour so that it didn't shine so brightly. It happens a lot with the figures we admire in childhood, because we're not looking for the flaws. Children don't see that everything being perfect is a little suspicious. A great example is my grandpa. He was my entire world and I honestly thought that he was perfect, but as I've got older I realise that he had some choice opinions on certain people that "weren't great".
I know it's something pretty common for people of his generation, and it's pretty common for my generation to look up to our war hero grandpas and love them unconditionally. It is pretty uncomfortable to have to reconcile the love we have for them and the way we look up to them with the things that we have to find problematic about them, even if they have been a product of their environment.
It's hard because we know that there are people out there that might feel the same about literal Nazis, and if there was a sliding scale, it's not like I have to deal with that, but particularly his opinions about people who are in my friendship group, or groups of people who I might work with in my work as a mental health and safeguarding lead. He might not have been the sort of person to say man up, but he was the stoic silent type that just got on with things and didn't really know how to slow down. We have a photo on the living room wall of when I was six weeks old and my mum dressed me up to go and see him in the hospital after his second bypass operation. My nana went to go and see if he was up to teeny tiny visitors and my mum waited in the room at the end of the ward, and the next thing she knew he had come trundling down the ward to come and see his granddaughter. He was as tough as old boot leather, but I wonder how he would have dealt with me having a breakdown in university and I wonder how he would have dealt with my continuous struggles with mental health, let alone the fact that the majority of my friends and people he would hold choice opinions on, and I have grown up to be a bit too loud and a bit too feisty in my defence of them. My parents think being older should give my grandparents a pass and I really disagree. I can't say for certain that he wouldn't have supported me, because I just don't know how he would have reacted. I don't know how he would have reacted if one of his own family had come out to him, but his opinions on gay people in general, like I said, not great, which I know makes the idea of coming out pretty petrifying. He died about sixteen years ago, so maybe as society changed, he would have to, but it's impossible to know.
If I ever wrote a character like my grandpa though, his flaws wouldn't be the views that he held in life, partly because they don't fit with my own beliefs and partly because they don't fit with a lot of society these days, but I'd write his flaws to be his heart; his physical, blood pumping heart. Doctors suggest a bypass operation should last for ten years. His lasted for just over eleven, his second one, and then he had no more veins lefts to be bypassed or whatever (Cardiology is not my strong point in medicine). That operation gave me every day that I had with him, but he still wasn't a well man, and he still suffered from crippling chest pains, and other issues related to his heart and his lungs. We have heart problems in our genes, but then he also smoked roll-ups during the war when he was in the Navy, so he told me once there were probably times when he and his friends smoked a hundred cigarettes a day. His sister and his niece lost legs because of their heart conditions and smoking, so we were really lucky that that didn't happen to him, but it did mean he died sooner than we were really ready for because his heart just couldn't do it anymore and his body was giving up on him. To me, that is, well, was, his worst flaw, and maybe it's naive to think that life would have changed his mind about the other things, but I do believe it. Maybe I have to believe it.
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