A wise man once said that a character can only be as smart as the person writing that character.
The modern fiction market is a vast wasteland of idiotic, morally objectionable characters who make the worst possible decisions at the worst possible times.
These characters either don’t communicate when they should or they communicate so badly that they make their situations worse than they need to be.
These characters’ behavior, decisions, and the situations they end up in as a result are so wildly unrealistic that they could never occur in real life because no one could possibly be that stupid.
This is the definition of bad writing.
The writers are so bad at their craft that they don’t know how to create realistic conflict, either internal or external.
The writer then falls back on the device of having the characters make the stupidest possible decisions.
The characters get themselves into situations that are totally avoidable and unnecessary.
The writer tries to pass this off as conflict when it isn’t. It’s just the reader watching the character flounder in a cesspool of their own idiocy.
We could explain this away by saying that these writers are learning from others who are as moronic as themselves.
New writers come along and copy the tropes and conventions of the brainless writers who went before them.
The new writers see everyone else doing it and think this is the way it’s supposed to be done.
The other possible explanation is that our society is so morally degenerate that the lion’s share of these writers are wallowing in the same intellectual and moral sewer as the rest of the population.
If ninety percent of the population is low intelligence, then it follows that ninety percent of the writers will be the same. Their characters will all be low intelligence, too, and they’ll act accordingly.
The same goes for the moral aspect of fiction.
If ninety percent of the population thinks it’s okay to engage in morally reprehensible behavior, then ninety percent of the writers will think it’s okay, too.
They won’t have a problem making their characters act the same way—which will lead to ninety percent of the fiction on the market displaying this kind of behavior as normal—which is exactly the state of affairs we find ourselves in right now.
Case in point: the movie Arrival (2016) directed by Denis Villeneuve and screenwritten by Eric Heisserer.
***Spoiler alert***
We won’t address the question of whether this movie was well directed, well shot, and well scripted. This post will focus on one aspect of the story that illustrates the point I’m making about idiotic and morally reprehensible characters.
The movie’s main character Louise learns an alien language that allows her to experience time in a non-linear fashion. This allows her to see events in her future that have not yet happened.
She sees that she will marry her future husband, Ian, and that they will have a daughter who will die of cancer.
Louise decides to keep their daughter’s impending death a secret from Ian. Louise foresees that he will leave both her and their daughter when he finds out that Louise kept the secret from him.
The movie raises the question of whether any individual would make the same life choices if they knew in advance what would happen.
Note that it doesn’t raise the question of whether she should have kept the secret from him.
The movie only raises the question of whether she would choose to give birth to her daughter knowing that the girl would die too soon.
We’re also going to put aside the obvious plot hole here that Ian would have known about his daughter’s death in advance, too.
The movie suggests that Louise taught the aliens’ language to everyone on Earth so everyone experienced time the way they do.
The question here is why the writers and directors made Louise do something so cruel to her husband and daughter.
This device serves absolutely no function in the story at all except to make Louise into a villain instead of a hero. This woman is a selfish, sadistic narcissist who deliberately inflicts unforgivable damage on the two people she supposedly loves so much.
It would have taken Louise a fraction of a second to sit Ian down and tell him the truth before they conceived.
Then the story could have proceeded exactly the same way. This problem could have been solved by removing a single line of dialogue from the entire movie.
Ian could have made the same choice to father a child and enjoy his daughter’s company for a few years before both he and Louise lost her.
The movie tries to make Louise come off as heroic for raising this girl on her own, but it doesn’t come off that way at all.
It just makes her look selfish and the movie makes Ian look like a shallow, selfish bastard, too.
The movie tries to make the ending seem all romantic and heart-warming. Exactly the opposite happens.
We can actually see the moment in Louise’s eyes when she makes the decision to leave Ian in the dark even when she knows it will drag him through the most torturous ordeal of his life.
This scene should be taught in the schools as a textbook example of narcissistic behavior. She knows exactly what keeping this secret will do to him and she does it anyway.
I honestly cannot imagine why the writers and directors think this is okay. I can only think of one possible explanation.
The entire production staff must be so morally degenerate that they actually think it would be okay to keep a secret like this from your spouse and the future co-parent of your child.
These people actually think it would be okay for a father to abandon his child and never see her again just because the mother was a selfish witch who destroyed his life by keeping an important secret from him.
Maybe the writers were trying to portray Ian as the bad guy here because he isn’t even present for his daughter’s death.
If the writers were trying to do that, they only succeeded in making Louise look even worse for driving him away.
She manipulated him into caring about a child he could never have—all to serve her own selfish whims.
She tricked him into getting her pregnant under false pretenses so she could play house.
The movie even implies that she shouldn’t have told him at all and that she should have kept the secret from him forever. She says the only mistake she made was telling him something she shouldn’t have.
Art has the potential to elevate humanity, teach us new things, and bring us closer together.
The modern fiction market seems to be deliberately designed to do the opposite.
It teaches an entire generation to engage in the worst, most toxic relational strategies, make the stupidest decisions for the stupidest reasons, communicate in a way most likely designed to destroy relationships and drive people apart, and drag all of us through the moral gutter along with it.
This is the picture we’re painting for the next generation of what’s normal.
We’re painting romance as a series of selfish, degenerate, toxic acts deliberately intended to make all relationships seem as destructive and hurtful as possible. This is what we’re teaching the younger generation to look for in romantic relationships.
We can look past the obvious social implications and see how this process actually works against us as fiction writers.
Portraying our characters making bone-headed decisions only serves one purpose—it makes the characters less relatable. This is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish as writers.
We want the reader to love the character and root for them. The reader can only do that if the character is smart and morally strong as well as resilient and forward-thinking.
The character has to face overwhelming odds or crippling life conflict and still make the right decision.
In many cases, there is no right decision. This is how life works.
We’re faced with an endless parade of Kobayashi-Maru scenarios. We just have to make a choice and live with the consequences.
This is how a writer creates compelling characters.
The question is then left in the reader’s mind whether things would have played out differently if the character made a different choice—or if the reader would make the same choice in the same situation.
The reader should never point to a character and say they were stupid, selfish, or just plain badly written. That’s a sign of artistic failure on the writer’s part.
The reader should never be able to find fault with the character’s decisions or at least be able to identify with why the character made the decision they did make.
Even in the case of the villain or antagonist, it’s still better to make them smart, insightful, and always strong both physically and mentally.
Making them anything else weakens the hero and paints them as pathetic, selfish, and unheroic by comparison. The better the villain, the better the hero appears by overcoming them.
Every character is a portrait of the writer.
What we’re seeing on display in the modern fiction market is an entire population of morons with access to computers.
These aren’t artists. They’re monkeys punching the buttons of their keyboards and churning out whatever random bullshit happens to pop into their heads.
This gives us a clear window into exactly what is going on inside their heads and it isn’t pretty.
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