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I've been trying for some time to figure out how to phrase this, how to rationalise it into something coherent, when most of what I'm trying to talk about are things which hit me in the id. In short, things that are difficult to talk about rationally. So ... this is an attempt, and no better?
I was just trying to pull out common traits from characters I loved. The traits characters have that ping me in the happy place. And, okay, I actually like a fairly wide variety of them, but there are some traits that sort of grab me by the heart and make me pay attention. I'm trying to narrow them down.
And I think the short list basically comes to the following: Honour. Cunning. Compassion. Resilience. Pragmatism. Courage.
I was just trying to pull out common traits from characters I loved. The traits characters have that ping me in the happy place. And, okay, I actually like a fairly wide variety of them, but there are some traits that sort of grab me by the heart and make me pay attention. I'm trying to narrow them down.
And I think the short list basically comes to the following: Honour. Cunning. Compassion. Resilience. Pragmatism. Courage.
All of them are complicated traits. None of them are necessarily good on their own merits, not automatically. All of them can go too far, all of them can be flawed and damaged and corrupt and painful. Sometimes that makes them more fascinating to watch, sometimes it actually does go too far for me and I fall away. But all of them are pretty much guaranteed to at least make me look at a character.
And many of them are in conflict with each other: honour vs pragmatism, compassion vs pragmatism, compassion vs cunning, honour vs cunning, compassion vs resilience. (Oddly, courage isn't often in conflict, though it can go over into recklessness and run up against things like pragmatism). And that's ... that's better, that's as fascinating again. What characters prioritise per situation, whether it works or not, the development of traits over the course of the narrative. The ways those traits interact, both within a person or within a cast, are fascinating, and the more of them are in operation in the same narrative (provided they're not becoming cluttered or polarised around each other) the more likely it is that I'll be hooked in.
Just individually ...
Honour, honour is such a thing for me. It comes with a bundle of interlinked attributes, loyalty, integrity and ethics among them. Honour is an adherence to ideal, whatever that individual character's ideals happen to be. And the struggles therefore inherent in it, in the face of the world, in the face of conflicting ideals, utterly fascinate me. Characters of high honour are often as tragic as they are admirable, and sometimes they're terrible too. Honour can become monomania, become an uncompromising ediface that shatters people around it. (What was it Victor Hugo said? "The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance." Virtues with one vice, that of error). Sometimes terrible, but always fascinating.
Cunning is a complicated one. I initially said 'cleverness', but I don't necessarily mean ... Genius characters actually do very little for me on their own merits, though I like genius linked to wonder very much. I mean more ... The ability to trick situations to your benefit, to think around what's happening and find a way through. 'Sneakiness' also comes close. This is the trickster thing, people. I just really, really enjoy watching characters tug situations around, sidestep them, take the third option, cut the gordian knot. It can become cheap, just a constant way to avoid facing up to things, and it can become cruel, but yet I value so much the ability. It's the use you put it to that becomes complicated.
Compassion is a much more explicable one. I simply like characters who value other beings. Not necessarily love, love is a complicated thing depending on depiction. Not necessarily empathy, I have troubles with empathy myself. But compassion. The basic understanding that every being you meet has its own life and viewpoint and value. Compassion, though, can go too far as well, be rendered down to a character who does nothing but bleed uselessly for other people's pain. I prefer compassion tempered, yes. But still. It is ... something fundamental.
Resilience. Looking at so many of my favourites, they're survivors. They're the people who keep going. There may be many reasons, it may be courage or spite or stubbornness or longing or loyalty or a simple desire for life, but I am desperately attached to the survivors of fiction, the people who found means to keep going. Again, like any trait, it can be corrupted, become an overriding concern to the point of damaging other people, become a form of cowardice. But the sheer capacity to endure is something I've always admired and been drawn to.
Pragmatism. I like pragmatism primarily as a tempering agent for all the others. Pragmatism on its own, particularly lacking compassion, can veer into clinical aloofness and sometimes a ... a surrendering to fate, a cheap acceptance of things as 'unchangeable'. But without pragmatism, all the others climb and break and founder. Without some grounded realisation of the surrounding situation and the consequences of action, all the honour and compassion and courage in the world will break upon reality's back. Pragmatism is the difference between a qualified hope and a useless illusion. I prefer characters who are operating with some recognition of facts and truth and the limits they put on a situation.
Then courage. Courage is an oft-lauded attribute, I know. And it can go too far, veer into recklessness as I said. But ... courage is the thing that lets people endure. Courage is the thing that lets people act. Courage is the quality within someone that lets them hold through pain, through fear, through despair. Courage is linked strongly to resilience and to honour for me, the thing that allows integrity. Courage is a thing that calls to me, yes. Lauded, but for a reason.
And of all of them ... compassion and cunning are the ones I'm least able to tolerate seeing corrupted. Honour fascinates in all its forms, and is sometimes more fascinating the worse it connects to the world around it, a tragic and lurid trainwreck that yet draws your eye and your sympathy (Londo Mollari, oh my gods, also James Norrington). Pragmatism even in its coldest, most uncaring extremes has an odd sort of integrity to it, though the clinical reduction of people to statistics ... okay, actually pragmatism is difficult to watch corrupted too, now that I think about it (I just have a lot of sympathy/attraction to AI or remote characters). Resilience I tend to find attractive no matter the relative morality of the situation, but I think that's more a personal id-thing (survival is a thing for me, the capacity to survive). Courage the same.
But compassion corrupted is as bad as compassion absent, a destruction of self and sometimes a destruction of others (... so it runs against 'resilience' and possibly 'integrity' in my head, actually that explains a lot). And cunning corrupted just seems sneering, a constant delight in being untouchable that repels (I have a high tolerance before it becomes unwatchable, otherwise Q would never have been my favourite character, but there are points too far. Usually when compassion is just utterly absent).
And yes, I realise that this is reflective of my priorities and id-places, not necessarily other people's. That's maybe the point? *smiles faintly* These are the things that get me in the id.
Overall ... Honour and cunning will be the things that initially attract me to a character, the 'unghy!' factor, with courage and resilience coming close behind them. Compassion and pragmatism will be the ones that keep me attracted to them, the tempering attributes that keep all the others in check. (Not that all of them have to be present at once, though many of them go together quite well, and many of them serve to temper others better).
Hmm. Actually, for a single fandom/series, Star Trek actually illustrates this quite well. Across the five series, my favourites are Spock & McCoy from TOS, Q from TNG, Garak from DS9, the Doctor from VOY, and Shran from ENT.
McCoy is essentially compassion/cunning/pragmatism, balanced against Spock's honour/cunning/pragmatism, both of them with a hefty dose of courage on top. Q is cunning to the limit, with surprising elements of honour, resilience and courage sneaking in. Garak is cunning/pragmatism/resilience, with again surprising flashes of honour and courage. The Doctor is compassion/pragmatism, with no small amounts of cunning and courage. And Shran is honour to the limits, with cunning and courage behind it. (We'll leave aside that four of six are aliens and one of the remaining two is an AI, that's a different thing - I have a tendency towards outside perspectives, yes?)
In Dresden Files, my three favourites are John Marcone, Donald Morgan, and Waldo Butters. Marcone is cunning/pragmatism/honour/courage/resilience in a fabulous bundle, though with only very well masked flashes of compassion. Morgan was such a perfect, tragic example of what happens when honour is stretched untempered to its logical conclusion, carried through to the extremes by sheer courage and lacking in compassion (see also Inspector Javert of Les Miserables). And Butters is just sheer, gamey courage and resilience, with a hefty dose of compassion with it, and actually a fair amount of cunning/on-the-spot thinking.
In Avengers, Tony is a fascinating study of courage/cunning slowly being tempered by growing compassion and resilience. Though actually, the character that quietly pings most of those buttons for me is Natasha, who is cunning and pragmatism and courage and resilience and shocking compassion, and I don't write her much but I madly adore her. Nick Fury actually pings a lot of the buttons too, pragmatism and cunning and honour. Most of the cast ping at least a few of them, though.
In Once Upon A Time, Rumple caught my eye first for the trickster thing, more or less played to its utter limits, with glimmers of compassion towards Belle, a touch towards Charming, to hold him just in check. Charming vs David is actually a perfect example of what happens to a character once you remove what made him good, taking his courage and the balance it made to his compassion to make a spineless man who hurt the people he loved more for trying not to hurt them. Snow is awesome for cunning/pragmatism/compassion. Emma is a wonderful study of resilience and courage trying to deal with growing compassion and honour. And Regina is a mad train-wreck of cunning and courage and spiteful resilience desperately trying to learn compassion in time not to lose everything.
In Good Omens, Crowley is honour/cunning/courage/sneaking-compassion, to Aziraphale's honour and courage and hidden cunning, and a strange, absent-minded (and occasionally almost cruel) compassion. And their mutual pragmatism in the face of vast theological questions is possibly about the best thing about them. Heh.
In Discworld Vetinari hits all the same buttons as Marcone above, but dialled up further again, into a character whose honour and courage and ruthless pragmatism have goaded him into trying to do better than gods (not that that's necessarily as impressive as it sounds, with Discworld gods, but Vetinari is on record as saying it's humanity's duty to be morally superior to the Creator). Rincewind pings many of the same buttons as Butters (the two series are rather linked in my head, actually). Sybil, on the other hand, is pure compassion/courage/pragmatism, while Nanny Ogg is a marvellous example of the kind of cunning I want to see school tricksters across fandoms (I would pay to see Nanny boss Q around like he was a daughter-in-law), tempered with honour and pragmatism.
*shrugs carefully* I mean, it's not foolproof. But overall, tricksters/cunning characters will attract me like a moth to a flame, however morally questionable they may be. Characters whose arcs deal heavily with themes of honour, its majesty and failings, also hit me right in the heart place. Courage and resilience are components of almost all characters I love, the characters that find the means to keep standing, even if that's all, even if all they manage is to hold on to their own sense of self. And compassion and pragmatism, though more variable, are the things that elevate my love of the characters from the fascination with a beautiful but tragic trainwreck to something more enduring.
I suppose in some ways, fiction is about archetypes and ideals as much as it's about people. What we want and see and love in fiction are explorations, sometimes exaggerations, of the things we search for in real life.
If that's true ... I wonder what it says about me that those are the things I'm looking for in my fictional people. Heh.
And many of them are in conflict with each other: honour vs pragmatism, compassion vs pragmatism, compassion vs cunning, honour vs cunning, compassion vs resilience. (Oddly, courage isn't often in conflict, though it can go over into recklessness and run up against things like pragmatism). And that's ... that's better, that's as fascinating again. What characters prioritise per situation, whether it works or not, the development of traits over the course of the narrative. The ways those traits interact, both within a person or within a cast, are fascinating, and the more of them are in operation in the same narrative (provided they're not becoming cluttered or polarised around each other) the more likely it is that I'll be hooked in.
Just individually ...
Honour, honour is such a thing for me. It comes with a bundle of interlinked attributes, loyalty, integrity and ethics among them. Honour is an adherence to ideal, whatever that individual character's ideals happen to be. And the struggles therefore inherent in it, in the face of the world, in the face of conflicting ideals, utterly fascinate me. Characters of high honour are often as tragic as they are admirable, and sometimes they're terrible too. Honour can become monomania, become an uncompromising ediface that shatters people around it. (What was it Victor Hugo said? "The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance." Virtues with one vice, that of error). Sometimes terrible, but always fascinating.
Cunning is a complicated one. I initially said 'cleverness', but I don't necessarily mean ... Genius characters actually do very little for me on their own merits, though I like genius linked to wonder very much. I mean more ... The ability to trick situations to your benefit, to think around what's happening and find a way through. 'Sneakiness' also comes close. This is the trickster thing, people. I just really, really enjoy watching characters tug situations around, sidestep them, take the third option, cut the gordian knot. It can become cheap, just a constant way to avoid facing up to things, and it can become cruel, but yet I value so much the ability. It's the use you put it to that becomes complicated.
Compassion is a much more explicable one. I simply like characters who value other beings. Not necessarily love, love is a complicated thing depending on depiction. Not necessarily empathy, I have troubles with empathy myself. But compassion. The basic understanding that every being you meet has its own life and viewpoint and value. Compassion, though, can go too far as well, be rendered down to a character who does nothing but bleed uselessly for other people's pain. I prefer compassion tempered, yes. But still. It is ... something fundamental.
Resilience. Looking at so many of my favourites, they're survivors. They're the people who keep going. There may be many reasons, it may be courage or spite or stubbornness or longing or loyalty or a simple desire for life, but I am desperately attached to the survivors of fiction, the people who found means to keep going. Again, like any trait, it can be corrupted, become an overriding concern to the point of damaging other people, become a form of cowardice. But the sheer capacity to endure is something I've always admired and been drawn to.
Pragmatism. I like pragmatism primarily as a tempering agent for all the others. Pragmatism on its own, particularly lacking compassion, can veer into clinical aloofness and sometimes a ... a surrendering to fate, a cheap acceptance of things as 'unchangeable'. But without pragmatism, all the others climb and break and founder. Without some grounded realisation of the surrounding situation and the consequences of action, all the honour and compassion and courage in the world will break upon reality's back. Pragmatism is the difference between a qualified hope and a useless illusion. I prefer characters who are operating with some recognition of facts and truth and the limits they put on a situation.
Then courage. Courage is an oft-lauded attribute, I know. And it can go too far, veer into recklessness as I said. But ... courage is the thing that lets people endure. Courage is the thing that lets people act. Courage is the quality within someone that lets them hold through pain, through fear, through despair. Courage is linked strongly to resilience and to honour for me, the thing that allows integrity. Courage is a thing that calls to me, yes. Lauded, but for a reason.
And of all of them ... compassion and cunning are the ones I'm least able to tolerate seeing corrupted. Honour fascinates in all its forms, and is sometimes more fascinating the worse it connects to the world around it, a tragic and lurid trainwreck that yet draws your eye and your sympathy (Londo Mollari, oh my gods, also James Norrington). Pragmatism even in its coldest, most uncaring extremes has an odd sort of integrity to it, though the clinical reduction of people to statistics ... okay, actually pragmatism is difficult to watch corrupted too, now that I think about it (I just have a lot of sympathy/attraction to AI or remote characters). Resilience I tend to find attractive no matter the relative morality of the situation, but I think that's more a personal id-thing (survival is a thing for me, the capacity to survive). Courage the same.
But compassion corrupted is as bad as compassion absent, a destruction of self and sometimes a destruction of others (... so it runs against 'resilience' and possibly 'integrity' in my head, actually that explains a lot). And cunning corrupted just seems sneering, a constant delight in being untouchable that repels (I have a high tolerance before it becomes unwatchable, otherwise Q would never have been my favourite character, but there are points too far. Usually when compassion is just utterly absent).
And yes, I realise that this is reflective of my priorities and id-places, not necessarily other people's. That's maybe the point? *smiles faintly* These are the things that get me in the id.
Overall ... Honour and cunning will be the things that initially attract me to a character, the 'unghy!' factor, with courage and resilience coming close behind them. Compassion and pragmatism will be the ones that keep me attracted to them, the tempering attributes that keep all the others in check. (Not that all of them have to be present at once, though many of them go together quite well, and many of them serve to temper others better).
Hmm. Actually, for a single fandom/series, Star Trek actually illustrates this quite well. Across the five series, my favourites are Spock & McCoy from TOS, Q from TNG, Garak from DS9, the Doctor from VOY, and Shran from ENT.
McCoy is essentially compassion/cunning/pragmatism, balanced against Spock's honour/cunning/pragmatism, both of them with a hefty dose of courage on top. Q is cunning to the limit, with surprising elements of honour, resilience and courage sneaking in. Garak is cunning/pragmatism/resilience, with again surprising flashes of honour and courage. The Doctor is compassion/pragmatism, with no small amounts of cunning and courage. And Shran is honour to the limits, with cunning and courage behind it. (We'll leave aside that four of six are aliens and one of the remaining two is an AI, that's a different thing - I have a tendency towards outside perspectives, yes?)
In Dresden Files, my three favourites are John Marcone, Donald Morgan, and Waldo Butters. Marcone is cunning/pragmatism/honour/courage/resilience in a fabulous bundle, though with only very well masked flashes of compassion. Morgan was such a perfect, tragic example of what happens when honour is stretched untempered to its logical conclusion, carried through to the extremes by sheer courage and lacking in compassion (see also Inspector Javert of Les Miserables). And Butters is just sheer, gamey courage and resilience, with a hefty dose of compassion with it, and actually a fair amount of cunning/on-the-spot thinking.
In Avengers, Tony is a fascinating study of courage/cunning slowly being tempered by growing compassion and resilience. Though actually, the character that quietly pings most of those buttons for me is Natasha, who is cunning and pragmatism and courage and resilience and shocking compassion, and I don't write her much but I madly adore her. Nick Fury actually pings a lot of the buttons too, pragmatism and cunning and honour. Most of the cast ping at least a few of them, though.
In Once Upon A Time, Rumple caught my eye first for the trickster thing, more or less played to its utter limits, with glimmers of compassion towards Belle, a touch towards Charming, to hold him just in check. Charming vs David is actually a perfect example of what happens to a character once you remove what made him good, taking his courage and the balance it made to his compassion to make a spineless man who hurt the people he loved more for trying not to hurt them. Snow is awesome for cunning/pragmatism/compassion. Emma is a wonderful study of resilience and courage trying to deal with growing compassion and honour. And Regina is a mad train-wreck of cunning and courage and spiteful resilience desperately trying to learn compassion in time not to lose everything.
In Good Omens, Crowley is honour/cunning/courage/sneaking-compassion, to Aziraphale's honour and courage and hidden cunning, and a strange, absent-minded (and occasionally almost cruel) compassion. And their mutual pragmatism in the face of vast theological questions is possibly about the best thing about them. Heh.
In Discworld Vetinari hits all the same buttons as Marcone above, but dialled up further again, into a character whose honour and courage and ruthless pragmatism have goaded him into trying to do better than gods (not that that's necessarily as impressive as it sounds, with Discworld gods, but Vetinari is on record as saying it's humanity's duty to be morally superior to the Creator). Rincewind pings many of the same buttons as Butters (the two series are rather linked in my head, actually). Sybil, on the other hand, is pure compassion/courage/pragmatism, while Nanny Ogg is a marvellous example of the kind of cunning I want to see school tricksters across fandoms (I would pay to see Nanny boss Q around like he was a daughter-in-law), tempered with honour and pragmatism.
*shrugs carefully* I mean, it's not foolproof. But overall, tricksters/cunning characters will attract me like a moth to a flame, however morally questionable they may be. Characters whose arcs deal heavily with themes of honour, its majesty and failings, also hit me right in the heart place. Courage and resilience are components of almost all characters I love, the characters that find the means to keep standing, even if that's all, even if all they manage is to hold on to their own sense of self. And compassion and pragmatism, though more variable, are the things that elevate my love of the characters from the fascination with a beautiful but tragic trainwreck to something more enduring.
I suppose in some ways, fiction is about archetypes and ideals as much as it's about people. What we want and see and love in fiction are explorations, sometimes exaggerations, of the things we search for in real life.
If that's true ... I wonder what it says about me that those are the things I'm looking for in my fictional people. Heh.
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