CA: Making a Character Wrong

Another addition to the Cumulative Advice blog I've been writing; this one focuses on misconceptions as a core idea. The most fundamental misconception in all of literature occurs when the reader assumes that if a character believes (or says) a thing, then that thing must be true. This assumption undermines the very concept of characters as people, since it goes against the first rule of humanity:

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Whether implicit or explicit, intentional or accidental, to themselves or others, everybody lies.

That statement had a lot of vocabulary words I took some time to address a few in Narrative as Communication, so let's instead focus on the consequence of this fact, as well as a big no-no when working with misdirection and deception.

When dealing with the correctness of a character, we're also dealing with their motivations, as the assumptions they make lead to the actions they take. A large, reoccurring theme in MLP:FiM is that there are few characters who are flat-out malicious, and instead the show puts an emphasis on being misguided (guided by misinformation).

Already you can see where this might be going for some examples: Iron Will's approach to assertiveness, Ponyville's reaction to Zecora, et cetera. But, these are only some of the overt cases of operating on false assumptions, where the false assumption was readily made clear to the viewer before the characters.

The subtler version of this, discussed more in What We Don't Know, is such that both the characters and the audience don't know that the character is operating under false assumptions. With the third case being when a character knows that they're intentionally misdirecting another character, but the audience is never informed.

The subtler form of false assumptions is also used extensively in MLP:FIM, from Nightmare Moon, to Trixie, and back again to Sunset Shimmer. How this works, and why we might choose to do it, is the topic of this discussion/post, while some of the consequences for doing this are discussed in the the linked post.

When we talk about wanting to misdirect, or mislead the audience, we are doing so with a purpose. That purpose usually is central to the narrative or theme, and can frequently be housed in one of two boxes. The first is that the false assumption is such that it may seem painfully obvious to the reader that the character is wrong, and that his or her actions based on this wrong assumption are stupid, even if they were logically thought out based on the information at hand. The second is some big reveal, generally focusing on the character's assumptions being wrong, and not that character being maligned.

Let's look again to Sunset Shimmer for an example of this idea. A lot of the information required for making Sunset Shimmer's eventual redemption make sense, is given to us in implications, indirect, and otherwise non-dialogue exposition. These types of communication are further discussed in the Narrative as Communication post.

Example Box - Totally spoils Equestria Girls 1
The first Equestria Girls movie opens, from Sunset Shimmer's perspective, with her explicitly stealing the Element of Magic. Of all the treasures of the Crystal Empire (the Crystal Heart included) this object was singled out. This tells us, the audience, that Sunset Shimmer should have at least some idea of its importance, of its power, and maybe even a general idea of how it works.

Immediately thereafter, we are given an info dump from Princess Exposition, telling us that Sunset Shimmer is a former student of hers. A statement that holds merit in and of itself, but that merit is compounded when Sunset Shimmer is compared directly against Twilight Sparkle. Sunset is said to have abandoned her own studies, to pursue her own path of harshness and cruelty, by comparison to Twilight Sparkle's embracing of the teachings of Friendship and Harmony.

In this scene we're told that Sunset Shimmer had come to a different understanding than Celestia and Twilight about how best to grow. We're later shown that she has an obsession with power, and are asked to make the association: that cruelty leads power. In the end, she is defeated by the power of harmony, and she immediately understands her error and rectifies this misunderstanding.

What does this example tell us? Well, for those who didn't put it together just by watching the movie, Hasbro even had a comic put together to explain it to us. That this is a demonstration of how her understanding of power differed from the reality of power in Equestria. Power that comes with the added perks present when one is not malevolent or maligned.

We can tell by the events in the movie, or by those explained in the comic for who couldn't, that the character's motivations and actions were founded on fundamentally flawed assumptions, but given those assumptions, and the assumption that they are correct, the character's behavior makes reasonable sense. In this case the character's understanding of the world, of herself, were with-held but not absent.

The Big No-No.
It is extremely important to note how different this is from the audience being led to believe that these false assumptions are correct, and that can be a pretty challenging line to tow when dealing with characters who are wrong. Ultimately, we never want the audience to feel lied to. We can make them feel the truth has been subverted, or even mislead, or misdirected, but out-right lying to the audience creates a form of dissonance that is quite difficult to rectify.

When working with "wrong" characters who are to have some revelation later, it is important to set up that revelation by focusing on how the character interprets the information they've been given, or had initially as true, rather than to outright represent those "wrong" things as unquestioningly "right". This is so that our readers can keep up. That once the false assumption is addressed, all that immediately follows does so as a matter of consequence, and not dictation by another.