"Relatable"

[This Post cleaned up from its original form by ChuckFinley. Thanks, darling!]

I want to revisit something I bought up off-hand in my last post, especially after watching this explicit argument against "relatable" being the standard for good characters.

I’m not sure if Jerry and I agree on the subject of characters never needing to be “relatable” in order to be good, but I definitely agree that relatability as in "the viewer sees the character as an avatar of themselves" is impossible to achieve. Usually writers attempt to hit this magic "relatable to everyone" point by toning down anything distinct or memorable about their characters, which ironically prevents anyone from relating to these strange, blank slates. The big issue here is the creation of audience avatars. “Anon” is the easiest example within this fandom, and one of the reasons that good human in Equestria stories are about as rare as people willing to admit that Gurren Lagann isn't the best mecha series.*

Either way, Jerry seems to use the word "relatable" in a very specific way- referring to this nebulous quality of being like the average audience member. I'd argue that isn't what relatability really stems from though, because it is almost impossible to relate to a character exactly like yourself because seeing an exact representation of yourself on screen or in print doesn't usually happen outside of an autobiography. There is no such “relatable” character on those grounds outside of sheer accident.

Instead, I want to build a concept of "relatability" being something that comes from fleshing out a character's defining attributes. It's hard to completely identify with a blank slate because there's just nothing there. By contrast, if a character expresses emotions or feelings we can understand, it becomes very easy to "relate" to them even if we're not the same type of person that they are. I'll see Jerry's idolization of Captain Janeway and raise him my previous example: how much of myself I see in Rin Okumura. I may have made a mistake in my last post by saying "he's me" because that's misleading. For one thing, I'm not a horny adolescent anymore, and I've grown up quite a bit since I first watched the show so even things that we used to have in common we don't anymore. What I relate to about Rin is actually specific elements of his personality that I'm able to connect with and empathize with because they're powerful enough to resonate with experiences in my own life.

Or let's take a more interesting example. How many of you guys have read Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks?

If you haven't read that book, just... stop. Stop everything you are doing and go read that book. Read it. Read every word. No, seriously, read every word, it is really hard to talk about without accidental potential spoilers. I'm going to try to keep this spoiler-free, but don't blame me if you keep reading and figure some things out before you could've or should've because you read what I was saying about it. You have been warned. You could also skip the next two paragraphs, but let's be honest: Nobody who's read this far down into my blog is going to do that.
Use of Weapons is basically a story told entirely through the eyes of Cheradenine Zakalwe, a secret agent who works for a powerful, (mostly) benevolent society called The Culture. The book follows him in two ways- moving forwards in time as he attempts to complete his latest assignment, and backwards in time as he has flashbacks to previous assignments and encounters. Zakalwe is a hard character to "relate" to in a traditional sense, or even to look up to in the sense that Jerry describes looking up to Captain Janeway in the above video. He does horrible things and has them boomerang back on him, he's arrogant, he lies, and he's near-compelled to do almost cartoonishly violent bullshit—at one point he tries to back out of the whole "being a secret agent" thing and spend some time writing poetry, finds he sucks at it, and ends up venting his frustration by murdering the village asshole on his way out.

So how does this make for a great character? Well, Zakalwe is also a bit of a dork. He's frustrated by the shiny new tech his Culture handlers want him to use, his plans get completely thrown off course, and he ends up feeling relatable in the sense of being a human and subject to the human condition. He feels human emotions and they register as human because rather than being a blank slate power fantasy for the reader to project onto, he's a complex individual who's done and seen a lot of shit and who is burnt out and just wants to reconcile with one of the many people he’s fucked over. You don't need to be a space secret agent to identify with a character's depth of feeling. You just have to be able to understand what's happened to them and why they want it and who they are. The identification follows from that point. That's what it really means to be "relatable". Your character doesn't have to share all their experiences in a one to one ratio with the reader. The reader just has to accept them as a person.

And you know what else? It's perfectly easy to love characters you don't personally identify with except on the most abstract level possible. Jokes at TTGL's expense a moment ago aside, just because I am not a macho man in the habit of running around barechested and piloting giant robots with my metaphorical penis doesn't mean that I don't like Kamina. I don't really relate to him, but his goal isn't to be relatable: It's to be inspirational, and funny, and to make a lasting impression so that when (spoilers) he makes his exit from the show, the audience understands exactly why that exit is such a big deal.

Anyway, I'm finished piggybacking off a much more entertaining person's thoughts. The few of you who regularly read these blogs may once again go about your day.

Next Time, if I get back to it: How the hell do you get characterization right in a show with a deliberately weak plot? And how do you sell things to fans?

Anime 2: Electric Gundam Build Fighter Boogaloo, coming soon.

*Come fight me, bro.