Dancing on Strings - Characters in a Story · 2:55am Sep 19th, 2014
Hi guys. It's time for Obs thoughts. Boy I sure hope you like those, because I think often. It's part of being a sapient being, y'know.
So, stop me if you've heard this one before: There's a bit of a story that just doesn't gel with you. Somehow, something the characters did doesn't entirely make logical sense. Feasibly, within this strange and infinite universe that contains our fragile meatshells, it's something that could've happened, but in the context of this one narrative you read... It just doesn't seem like it's plausible. Maybe it's Rarity finding that the guards just randomly left the door unlocked. Maybe it's Rainbow Dash suddenly falling in love with Big Macintosh for no particular reason. Maybe you really want Taco Bell at this particular moment. I dunno.
So you comment. You critique. You mention that this bit doesn't make much sense. Worse, it damages the story. It's a bit that shattered your suspension of disbelief at a crucial moment, and the impact of the narrative as a whole feels cheaper for it. If you're lucky, the author will go "Ah, thanks for mentioning this to me, friend. I shall have to think on this and consider if it ought to be fixed." Or, at the very least they'll tell you they're not in the business of fixing it, for whatever reason, but will thank you for your time spent reading and pointing that out.
If you're unlucky, you'll get a Puppetmaster.
Puppet like it's hot
The Puppetmaster's premise is simple. In their mind, they are speaking to you a Biblical truth. A genuine telling of what actually happened when these fictional concepts collided. In their imagined world, a guard really could have just left the door unlocked, and Rainbow Dash really could just have an inexplicable burning need in her loins for Big Macintosh (Don't we all). Applejack really would've reacted that way if forced into those specific circumstances, which just so happened to appear. It really, feasibly, possibly, could have happened that way.
Why are you upset with it?
Now, before I go any further, let me get one thing straight: any good storyteller is going to contrive certain events to make things happen. This is why the hero always stops the countdown with one second left. It's why the volcano over which they hang perilously just happens to be active instead of long-dormant. It's why they never get shot fatally while jumping off a bridge into the water. Authors need to fudge some details in order to make the narrative interesting. It just isn't interesting to read everything the way it probably would've happened in real life. It's more dramatic when the bomb stops with one second left instead of five hours.
The difference is that the good storyteller knows this. They'll admit to it up front. They place their pieces carefully, and they'll admit to the fault if they placed those pieces in just such a way that you didn't believe it'd happen like that. They're setting everything up, to be sure, but they're trying to do it in the most believable ways possible. So that you'll go "Aaaah, yes, okay, I'll buy that," when the improbable happens.
The Puppetmaster, on the other hand, will insist to you that the show is real. The improbable happened because it wasn't impossible. They didn't manipulate it to happen. Rainbow Dash really would love Big Macintosh because she looked once at his lean, muscled flank, and said "Hot damn!" Or maybe because he saved her from a nerd once. Or whatever. The point is that they're not just bad at placing the setpieces, they'll try to argue that the placement of the setpieces was out of their hands.
Consider the following example:
-Applejack refuses to punch Diamond Tiara for being a snot.
-All of her friends yell at her for this.
-Applejack becomes increasingly reclusive and starts to dislike her friends.
-Says you: "I'm not sure this sequence of events concludes logically."
-Says the Puppetmaster: "Well, but of course Applejack would act like that. Her friends have just berated her and made her feel terrible for not doing what she thought was the right thing. No wonder she feels like an outcast."
Nah. Just... nah. This is not merely an author, ladies and gents. It's an author who's denying their power over the story. Applejack lived, breathed, and spoke exactly how the author wanted her to. Her friends acted the way they did because the author told them to. The reasons everyone did everything were all designed by the author. Maybe Applejack would act in X way given Y circumstance, but it's always going to be the author who designed Y circumstance.
It is never out of their hands. It is never out of YOUR hands, authors (unless you were paid to write on commission, in which case, God help you). Remember that. Remember that as a reader, too. The author controls everything. Never believe they don't.
I'll point you to an extremely common example of this issue in modern media: Female Superhero Costume Design.
I wear this because I am a strong independent woman.
Implicitly, everyone knows why Invisible Girl's costume prominently displays her cleavage: Sex Sells. But every once in a while, you'll meet the suggestion that "It's just part of her character. She prefers to wear clothes that show off more bare skin because [God I don't even know why, just imagine a reason here]."
This totally justifies the costume's structural concerns. It's clearly not about appealing to teenage boys. It's because a fictional character decided they preferred to wear a costume that reveals more than it shows. Entirely on their own, evidently.
And, sure, maybe that is part of her character. But never forget what a character is: they're a puppet for the author to dangle on a string. Everything they do, think, and believe is because somewhere an author wrote them to do, think, and believe those things. The best characters are the ones that make you forget there's a string above them--but keep in mind, when push comes to shove, that's really all they ever were.
That's all I have to say. Have a nice day, guys.
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Agreed. I'm amazed how many people don't understand this, though I come across it more in artists denying that they wanted to draw a sexy thing than anything else. "It's not my fault she has cameltoe front and center—I'm just drawing what would be there!" they say.
That said, it's not an understanding that everyone starts with. I actually remember very clearly the moment I really understood that a street lamp is placed to highlight a door not because it's where a streetlamp should be, but for the sake of the message of the piece.
Actually, the most interesting thing to me is that you did choose a similarly visual explanation. I'm constantly surprised how well my artistic background can be applied to writing, but it's not something I see often from others.
...Actually, that sequence of events concludes perfectly logically. It's the premise that's absurd.
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Technically speaking, you would be hard-pressed to derive a logical conclusion from an absurd premise.
But yes, that's right. :<
Good to keep these sorts of things in perspective. There's always a temptation to follow whatever the muse desires and write whatever comes to mind or feels right at that moment, and then get defensive if the reader doesn't accept the new head-canon.
I like the way you put it, that the author's job is not to cut the strings and tie them up how they see fit, but make the reader feel good about the suspension of disbelief, should they ever stop and reflect on it.
Now we can usher in an era of puppet-based clopfics, and it's all thanks to you.
s6.postimg.org/511j6t6e9/Worst_Fanfic_Ever.jpg
Dude, Reid Richards made the costume for his wife. "Yes, dear. The unstable molecules have to be structured in this fashion in order to show off your brea-- I mean, I ran out of fabric. Yeah, that's it."
Really now, Obs? Really? I gotta say, I am disappointed... in the Invisible Woman image you used. There's literally dozens, DOZENS, of more slutty Invisible Woman costumes to use as an example. And from the 80's? Low blow, bro, low blow.
I expected better. :V
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I tried looking, but couldn't find them. It's almost like they were invisible.
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DAMN YOUR PUNS! DAMN THEM TO HELL!
Heh, funny. Everyone knows real intelligences let their impressions filter through their subconscious to attain higher realms of self-awareness than simple thinking.
And now you've created a strawman for a thousand half-forgotten little niggles of "this author's being stupid." Thank you?
To be fair, not everything in real life happens the way it most likely could have.
I know it's entirely missing the point, but I can't help but honestly think that the world would be a better place if a few decades ago there had been superhero comics that thoughtlessly appealed to teenage girls.
Goodnight, my little ponies!
All very well said. And the whole female superhero costume stuff drives me crazy. Their outfits could at least be somewhat practical.
I agree, although I'd suggest that the puppetmaster you describe is just the extreme end of a range of author mindsets. For some authors the characters are just props to be posed and forced to speak, for others its more of an internal give and take. Ray Bradbury (I think it was him anyway, do your own fact checking) discussed in an interview about the mental conversations he'd have with his own characters. Sure the author is in control, but they might feel constrained by how they perceive the characters rather than molding the character's actions and words to fit the story exactly how they've laid it out. It's all in the author's head either way.
What matters, as you said, is how the reader reacts to what was written, and how the author reacts to the reader:
Well, there are many ways of thinking about it.
Another point of view I've seen: We, as writers, are focusing on places where the are interesting stories. There are lots of uninteresting stories in the world - we focus on the heroes because they are the ones who are involved in interesting things. Thus, we see things which are interesting more frequently because if we didn't, we wouldn't be focusing on that character and instead would be focusing on someone else. Indeed, that's a good reason to argue for plot shields - if you have a group of ten soldiers, and only the ones we most focused on survive, that's not illegitimate, becasue we focused on those soldiers precisely because their stories were interesting and they didn't die in the opening sequence. We could have focused on someone else, but we didn't, because they didn't survive and thus weren't interesting to focus on.
It is really the same thing, but taken from a different perspective - we only tell the stories of people who are worth telling stories about, which is why we focus on them and not some other random folks.
Clearly you haven't seen Goldfinger recently.
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Of course not. All of the ways of thinking about these things are just tools to help us write; in the end, we're creating everything. When we say our characters tell us to do something or want something to happen in a certain way, that's really just us realizing that the way we have written something, it wants to be some other way.
Though in all fairness, in fanfiction, the characters aren't only ours, which is why having them behave wildly out of character is problematic - because they are not wholly ours. That doesn't mean that they're not doing what we told them to in our story, but it does mean we can be, in some sense, "wrong". Though of course one can argue that this is universal and that people acting out of character in other works occurs as well - people not acting like people, but automotons or forces for the plot or the author's intent. And when that happens brazenly people get annoyed with the writer.
2466347
Frankly I think it is just moronic to begin with. Superheroes are supposed to be cool. The problem is that it is mixing incorrect types of power fantasies. If I want to see porn, the internet is right there.
I'm convinced that a lot of people get 'writer's block' from not realizing this, honestly. What a lot of people seem to call writer's block is their own unwillingness to pick a direction for the story and run with it; an inability to direct, controll the narrative. Once they get past the assumed guidelines they don't realize they're using, they feel lost and unable to continue, because they never really 'owned' the story.
One of the hardest parts of writing a story(in my opinion) is characters behaving logically and consistently with themselves. When we know what they will do, and they do something different, we do a double take
.
Its one of the biggest things that makes me throw stories in the trash(my own, mostly). Nothing is worse then an action having a nonsensical reaction that exists solely for the next scene to occur.(it's right up there next to over inflated responses.)
"I did the right thing!"
"We all hate you now!"
"Why? None of you were involved in the first place, some of you even benefited from-"
"Because raisins!"
I'm reminded of the perennial cry of the people playing disruptive jerks in RPGs: "It's how my character would act!"
Well, yes. But it's you who decided to play, and continue to play, a character who's a disruptive jerk. It's not an excuse, it's a deflection of blame.
Obs, just get over the vase already, okay
When a plot's gonna feature bro
Drop it like it's hot
Drop it like it's hot
Drop it like it's hot
When the comments start to get to ya
'Lete it like it's hot
'Lete it like it's hot
'Lete it like it's hot
And if a pony get a attitude
Puppet like it's hot
Puppet like it's hot
Puppet like it's hot
I got the views rollin' in like a Ponyfic Don
So I write the shit fics, gonna keep it goin' on.
What's always been unclear to me: is the Puppetmaster just saying this as a deflection of any possible critique? Because that's just them being a troll.
Or, are they genuinely unable to realize that their headcanon is merely a headcanon, and that there is a clear difference between "I ship MacDash" and "MacDash is canon"? Even I realize that my ships are not canon
even if they should be, and that I need to introduce in-fic justifications for why these two are an item now.Or, in the middle between these options, is it some sort of gradual self-deception, where the author gets so wrapped up in their story's universe that it's all that matters? By which I mean, yes, canon Applejack wouldn't act in that way in your Diamond Tiara example, but my fic's Applejack has lower self-esteem and confidence, and my fic's Fluttershy is permanently PMS'ing (bitches be crazy, rite!?), etc etc, so yes in my fic's universe this outcome was entirely logical, given the new premises. The sticky wicket here is that, good storytelling (kinda) does this. There's innumerable good stories on this site that take a canon character, evolve them over time, and lead a plausible path to a different yet believable character. The fault then is not in trying to change Applejack, or building a setup where her friends might lash out at her, but simply that the author didn't do enough work to make their many premises believable.
What worries me is that all three of these are feasible explanations—troll, delusionist, and greenhorn—yet we want to lump them all under one umbrella. Given that those call for three very different emotional responses, it's not clear how useful the umbrella term is... unless there's an easy way to tell them apart?
Well said, Obs, well said.
Great points.
I've actually stopped reading stories before (outside of fanfiction, too) because I just didn't agree with the way the author saw the world. Perhaps I should clarify - seeing the world in a different way is just fine, but the way in which you see the world bleeds over into your writing, and for some authors that's more obvious than with others. Some stories are so blatant that it feels like the author is writing philosophical propaganda, and saying "YOU SHOULD AGREE WITH THE WAY I SEE THINGS!!!"
So for me, that's another thing to be constantly aware of - it's perfectly fine to learn things from stories, but always beware that the "moral of the story" is just the author's opinion.
2466856
I prefer to think of the term as descriptive of phenomenon, though admittedly not descriptive of intent. In the same sort of way that thief describes someone who steals, whether or not they're stealing with noble intentions. Your emotional response to encountering the issue is going to be fairly specific to the situation, sure.
In general I see the Puppetmaster problem as a combination of two occurrences:
1. The author has failed to establish the scene in such a way that everything is believable to the reader. Like you said, good authors do take characters and evolve them over time. But doing it in such a way that the reader doesn't feel confused, weirded out, or betrayed is in the wrist.
2. The author, for whatever reason, denies their culpability in the situation/character responses they designed. If the set-pieces were poorly placed, it's an insistence that the set-pieces were supposed to be poorly placed, and that anything following from that is simply natural.
"My OC is SUPPOSED to be really depressed, whiny, and sort of unlikable. You would be too if your parents were murdered in front of you and you had to eat them."
"But you have control over how the hero acts and responds to their past. The character, as a fictional construct, isn't inherently unlikable. You wrote them. You could have written a character that was likable even with their past tragedies... or alternatively have given them a past that was slightly less cripplingly traumatic."
I think it's important for both readers and authors to understand that the author's in charge of what happened. Even if characters have specific predesigned responses to certain stresses (as is common when you're using someone else's characters, like in fanfiction), the author still has a lot of control over the situations they place those characters in, and to a lesser extent the specific interpretation of the character they're using.
I guess the main point here is realizing that when a story has poor/unconvincing plot occurrences or character interactions, it's not because that's simply how the Real-Life events occurred. You can accept a stupid uncharacteristic random error in judgment if that's literally what happened in actual events... but fiction isn't telling actual events. The author can manipulate all the strings to which the story is tied.
The whole thing is a puppet. The job is just to move it convincingly.
2466440 Indeed. There's a place for everything.
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Actually that pic is from the 90s. Prior to that, Susan wore surprisingly conservative costumes, and does again in the modern day.
2466527
I think this article about characters in RPGs might be of interest to you, as it talks about this very issue.
2466440
It's not so much that the characters aren't yours, it's that they already have a life of their own. Granted that such a life, to a degree, exists only in the mind of the reader. It's like writing a substantial series about an OC and then coming back and rewriting their entire existence as another story. No one will buy that it is the same character, because it isn't.
The moment you make, say, Twilight Sparkle act out of character you are either expanding the character or your character has ceased to be Twilight Sparkle and has simply become
'unnamed OC purple unicorn/alicorn'.
What's wrong for a character has nothing to do with who 'owns' it and a lot to do with it's prior existence. What bothers most people is when you flat out tell them that it's Twilight Sparkle, but then go ahead and use 'unnamed OC purple unicorn/alicorn' instead as though they were the same character.
Well, my take on it is that authors should strive to give their characters an independent personality, a spark of life. Characters that don't receive this are going to feel flat, inconsistent, or both — which might be acceptable for background characters, but really harms the story when it happens to more prominent characters.
And, with that amount of independence, there will be times where the author finds that his character would likely not follow the script. This whole issue of turning the characters into puppets is related to how the author chooses to deal with those moments.
The author could let the character do whatever would be appropriate, and adjust what comes after in the script. With well written, interesting characters this can result in really good stories, and a character that is easier for the audience to understand and relate to.
The author could change what came before so the unlikely action the script calls for actually becomes likely. A guard would be very unlikely to forget to lock the door, but pile enough distractions, perhaps have him reacting to an emergency at the time, and it becomes far more likely. This seems to be the basis of most good shipping; start with an unlikely event (Rainbow Dash falling for Big Mac), change the past to justify it happening, and there is (hopefully) believable romance.
Lastly, the author can just plod on, forcing the character to behave in the unlikely way. Sometimes it might even be necessary, a last resort effort to save a story where no other way presents itself, but do this enough and the story will fall at the (now clearly visible) seams.
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Try chain mail bikinis
2474599
Well, even then it's important to remember the power the author holds over everything. A character who's taken on "a life of their own" still attributes most of their basic aspects to the author's imagination. So parts of them that're particularly iffy to the readers are still ultimately on the author.
It's like programing a robot to destroy all humans. Sure, you're not directly responsible for any particularly creative methods it invents to murder people, but you're still the one who gave it the base desire to slay everyone.
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Yes, and no. To achieve a greater rapport with the audience the author needs to, in a way, give it some measure of power by allowing them to understand and predict, in limited ways, what is going to happen. So, while the author could bend everything in the story to his will, he shouldn't do it.
Thus, establishing how a coherent character thinks and acts is both using the author's power, and giving a measure of it away, since after the author established the character he is limited in how he should make the character act.
It's akin to how Death (the personification of the concept) is often depicted; while he or she could potentially kill any living being in existence, Death is bound to not take that path. The same with an author: there are things that the author could do, but is bound to not do in order to end with a work that better achieves his objectives.
2474599 Yeahhhh, I think the vital organs are somewhat more important than what that covers.
For the most part... When I see stuff like that in games it generally makes it feel fake and unreal, when most video games are all about immersion and, variously, some sort of realism.
Love these.
Seriously; these posts breathe logic and sense. And they're the kind of things that distinguish a good author from a bad one. Knowing these tips helps me with coming up with logical plot elements in my own stories, because now I'm considering so much more when I make them. Also, this whole thing ties into characters staying in character, which I'm guessing I'll struggle with when I write my stories. (eventually...)
I bet I'm a puppetmaster without knowing it. I hate that. I WANT to be a good author. I just have to remember to listen to criticism and realize that I'm certainly not good yet.
Thanks for the words of wisdom Obselescence! Pleasure as always!
AIP§
Yeah, there have been a few stories that I've stopped reading because I just couldn't stomach the plot twist.