Subject: Check your characters
Author:
Posted on: 2010-10-13 03:12:00 UTC
You all seemed like the types who may appreciate this bit of internet flotsam. If I wasn't supposed to start a new thread for this, forgive my newbie-ish mistake.
I'm really bothered by this end result: "Happy Single Teenage Mom". Now, there's a question that gets you to that result, which is "Does she get an abortion?". However, it offers no other than choice than "Ha ha. Of course she doesn't." This single choice happens to bring you to the end result that I had mentioned early.
Now, I'm bugged by this because it seems that it assumes that just because a teenage girl gets pregnant, then she will be atomatically happy with the baby and refuse the abortion. I know that they'll get in trouble either way, but why isn't there a "no" choice or something? After all, not all teens are gonna be happy with being a parent.
I'm also bugged by this question: "Is she a teenager", because if we answer the question, then the female doesn't get a choice either way: Either she's a teen and this leads to the things I've mentioned before, or she's a woman and thus gets forced to get together with a man all of a sudden.
Sorry if I'm rambling like this, but this chart bugs me a lot, especially with it's instructions about how to create a strong female character.
is either an "Action Girlfriend" or a "Vanilla Action Girl", depending on whether you argue whether she's love interest or not...
Interesting flowchart, the problems that others have mentioned notwithstanding.
Elcalion
Very elaborite considering there's only one path to strong female characterness. Besides, some of these categories (Lady McBeth? Hello?) could be strong characters in the sense that they're well-developed and meaningful to the story.
Also, only 2009!Uhura is useless. Original Series!Uhura was competent, despite not being an Action Girl.
...that instead of "strong" they should have used "realistic." No one can say Zoe (Firefly) isn't strong, or Lady MacBeth isn't strong, or...(insert countless other characters I've ran through)
Apparantly she is a cutesy badass.
I may have to grumble quietly about the lack of branches under 'rogue', and how Lt. Uhura is apparently a useless girl. It generalizes a lot, I think.
But overall it's a very interesting little flowchart. Thanks for showing it.
Basically, she was just eye candy there to run the radio. But eventually, she did get her own plot lines and took on a more active role. If you get into the novels, she tends to be the person who can get a message through when no one else can... at one point I think she even uses semaphore. (Was that her, or was that Scotty? Hmm... I can't remember now, it's been ten years since I read those books...)
But characters evolve and change, especially over the course of the show, and she totally did. ^_^
I was actually thinking of the episode Mirror, Mirror -- her distracting the alternate Sulu? It was a small thing, I guess, but necessary.
That is pretty cool. I find it very amusing.
This pisses me off a bit. Probably because there is only one way to get your character to be a "Strong Female Character". I refuse to believe that just because a character represents an idea of any kind, this immediately disqualifies her from the category of actually being a good character. Also that a sexy, sane villain is nothing but an underling.
*sigh*
Really, really unsure why being any of the things marked on the flowchart is mutually exclusive with being an awesome character. Also unsure why male characters are apparently not held to the same standards.
Partly because of the feminist in me-- why are there charts like this for female characters and yes, I know there's male characters out there, too. But why is it that for female characters, there's... gah, I'm not sure how to word this.
I guess what bothers me is that male characters get to be Special, or Awesome, or the like, without being categorized like this (except on TV Tropes). For example, following the arrows that get you to "Psycho Feminist Lesbian Amazon" would be likely to get you any number of different "reasonable" male characters.
That, and I dislike formulas applied to writing, as though it were some kind of machine-- enter -these- coordinates, and you'll get X. Enter this instead, and you'll get Y. Writing is a fluid thing, and reducing something as huge as a character to a flow-chart just bothers me.
There is literally an infinite number of ways for a character to be good, to be real. Character check flow-charts and their ilk generate the false impression that there is only one, single way.
When an aspiring writer, high on promise but low on self-confidence, sees something like that, it could serve as a deathblow (or, at best, a serious impediment) to their creativity, so to speak.
...not without a darn good reason. Just like female characters, actually.
Gary Stu is just as annoying as Mary Sue. In some cases, more so, depending on exactly what he does to the canons.
Characters are allowed to do amazing stuff; they just have to be realistic characters doing it.
At least, not in my book, and definitely not here. Or in the more intelligent parts of fandom. But out in the media world? Girl characters are held to a much higher standard, and how classically attractive they are is a much bigger part of their characterisation-- a girl who's tall, slender, and has smooth skin gets a different character base than a girl who's short, pudgy, and has acne, even if they have identical personalities-- with a guy, far less attention is paid to the appearance.
Same goes for powers. Imagine a witch in Harry Dresden's place-- you'd get a lot more accusations of Mary Sueism, even if absolutely nothing else was changed. It's just frustrating, is all. I know that's not the standard here, but it seems to be most other places.
I wouldn't put him at Stu-level. His major Stuish trait is his sheer power; I can't really think of anything else about him that'd be a problem. Even the power level isn't an issue because everything out there in the world is just as powerful as he is, or more. I think he'd be different if he were female, though. I wonder if there are any good gender-switch fics for him? His gender does affect his personality a good deal, what with his "got to help the female in distress" syndrome and his relationships with the various female characters.
He's not a Stu, not at all! And most people don't say he is-- but if he had been gender-switched? A Badass Longcoat witch with awesome levels of sheer power, with Murphy as the guy cop who trusts him despite the rest of the CPD's raised eyebrows...
Somehow, I think there'd be a lot more people jumping on the Sue! bandwagon. *shrug* It's just a pet peeve, and this chart happened to trigger it.
Though, I wasn't so much annoyed my the "idea" aspect as by the fact that a strong female character can't be a soldier, a police woman that deals with an armed and dangerous criminal in the first act or someone who has picked up murder as a profession. Those are all likely to kill someone by the third act.
From the looks of the chart, where it says, "strong female character", it should have said, "no one writes a character like this". At least, why aren't any mug shots attached to the SFC as there are to most other types of female character.
I think I might be misunderstanding, here, but it doesn't say "Kills someone else by the third act." It says "is killed" - you know, dies herself - by the third act.
But, yeah. Especially in a cast with other women in it, a character who dies before the third act isn't necessarily fridge-stuffed.
They all ended up as "strong female character". (Unless they died before adulthood, anyway.)
If by "strong" they mean "realistic", then...
I don't think a character has to be a "strong female character" to be a useful female character. Your basic bit character or Generic doesn't have to be any more than a few words slapped together into a general category of character. If every female character were a fully realistic person, we couldn't fit them all into the story. The main characters, yeah, but not every single other character.
If your character is based on an idea and is a minor character, then you don't have to go beyond the idea. But if they're a major character then the only choice is to have them go beyond just the personification of some idea (for example--Cosette in "Les Miserables" is practically the personification of femininity). Otherwise, if they stick with just being the personification of an idea instead of a character that happens to be closely associated with an idea, they won't have a lot of depth to them.
I think maybe that was what the chart's author was trying to get at--the way a character has to have more than just one theme, how people aren't just defined by one major trait.
Well, I'm clueless and apparently don't know how to use the preview button.
Yes, there's a picture. A very big one at that.