Character is King
Character
Character more than anything else drives story, at least as far as I’m concerned. I have invariably started with a great idea of a character, and then tried to figure out what story they want to tell me (not literally). I will even admit to making a character before making a world for them to live within.
That last line is very important. If you read my previous Worldbuilding Articles (FIRST, SECOND, THIRD) you know that one of my rules of world building is that the world informs on the character and the character informs on the world. Which leads to a chicken and the egg scenario. Which should you do first? The answer to this really depends on you as a writer, what works for me might not work for you.
BUT you can start with either and still achieve the same goal. You just need to remember that choices effect both sides of the equation. If you create a character who is a salty sea pirate ala Captain Jack and the make a desert setting, you better have an ocean somewhere off screen that supports the traits of your Pirate, and also have a good reason why he’s in a landbound setting.
Importance and Weight:
While both World (Setting) and Character carry equal weight (to me), Character is always going to be more important than setting. While I have read books, or watched shows based purely on the Setting (Genre/ World-building) have FINISHED reading/watching those medias because I was interested in the story of the character.
I can rattle off a list right now of shows and books where I was interested in the premise and while viewing them, I quickly didn’t like the characters, or didn’t like how the premise was exploited. I am a person who has a list of tropes/ genres/ and “story-bits” [highly scientific that last term] that I DO NOT LIKE, and I have gotten to the point where I just won’t deal with that media at all. So, if I’m into a story and things I don’t like start to add up, or tropes I hate start coming in, I might just quit right there and move on to a new story.
Now the ONE thing that will stop me closing the book or turning the channel is Character. If I really love some of the characters, I will look past the story issues, I will put up with thing I dislike, to get more story about the characters I DO like.
Example:
I have a pretty good example, I recently started watching a show on Netflix and about 7 episodes in it introduced a trope I don’t like, so I paused and started a different show with the intent I would come back. Now the second show started out interesting and then started to have a ton of thin easy to figure out writing. Like it was so obvious where things were going, and it was loaded with things I don’t care for in stories.
So, what did I do next? Did I pause the second show and return to the first? Did I just quit both? Did I finish both?
I finished the second story, because I loved the characters and even though there was ton of lazy writing and I really don’t care for the ending… I could watch the characters all day and the actors were amazing. The plot might have been week and had issues but the characters! They were affected by everything, the story even revolved around their upbringing. As I write this post I have not returned to the first show and I think it had so much potential that I’m kind of angry with the writers.
The Order and The Umbrella Academy are the two shows I’m talking about.
The Order:
So, the premise I love, I mean I am a role player and I have a LONG history with the World of Darkness from White Wolf Games. [I should add that to the Gaming page on the site]
Basically, you have a kid who is going to a college that has a secret society hidden on campus who are all mages. There are also werewolves that apparently hunt “dark magic” (but in the show ALL magic is evil to them, despite their who thing also being magic, and they just attack blindly).
Criticism leaks in Sorry:
Now the main character wants to get into the society because his mother died at the hands of his father? (Maybe, it’s not clear and somehow this father doesn’t even know he has this son, so the timeline is very unclear.) I want to like all of the characters, but many of them are super thin. You have a female werewolf that has hints of a deeper character but 90% of the time she just wants to murder people for fun and because it’s the easy way. It gets to a point were her constantly yelling (whining) about wanting to kill things just grates on your nerves.
You have intelligent characters that are rendered stupid, because “hey magic.” You have the main characters grandfather who is so driven by vengeance that sometimes its awesome and sometimes he’s just jerk and he’s used to quickly throw obstacles in the story and make problems. He is basically cardboard that doesn’t change from frothing single minded pursuit of the man he blames for his daughter’s death, until around the 7th episode where suddenly he thinks that fact that he weaponized his grandson and put him into a deadly conflict might be an issue.
Then there are the issues with the Order itself, it should be an organization filled with mighty mages and awesome lore and history, and yet… 90% of it is just these students who are supreme assholes (there are more branches around the world and this IS just recruiting school, but the few upper-level mages are also assholes). The whole thing is just a big pyramid scheme, to the point where in one episode they get called out as such.
Not all Bad:
Now again, this is not all bad, I do like some of the characters but the majority of them are just too thin, and even the main character (Jake Manley) doesn’t feel fully fleshed. But he does grow and adapt, to bad the world he’s growing into isn’t that well crafted around him.
The relationships between the characters does grow and the actors pull that off well. But then we come to our main villain (Max Martini) who is a powerful mage, and is so obviously pulling some bad things, and yet none of the other mages seem to hold him to account. The ONE person (Katharine Isabelle) who does suspect him is easily manipulated… despite the fact that she warned other female characters that the villain has “a weird affect on women.” No $H^!
The show starts with Katharine breaking rules and making it so that Jake gets accepted into the college in the first place, but after 7 episodes there is no reveal why she wanted him in there in the first place, nor is there any mention why these other mages didn’t want him getting into the college. (Nor are their repercussions for the one person going against the council to get him in!) What was the point of the first 10 minutes of the show?
The stopping point:
It finally hit a trope that I didn’t like, that also felt like just padding to a story that already wasn’t paying off adequately. I understand the need add in more conflict and hurdles to a story, I get that, but you NEED to be paying off the main story, you need to have forward movement to the main arc.
Introducing another villain when we have no clue what is going on with the rest of the story, also it being a side arc that only tangentially affects the main character. If I force myself to go back and finish the series, I’m sure there is a reason we needed this arc, but it feels like a side bloat, a filler episode and I’m not happy with because I hate the trope.
The trope by the way is one of the werewolves gets captured by some “Doctor” who wants to experiment to create his own werewolves… #1 this doesn’t work in the setting at all… and #2 we don’t even understand the BACK story that is motivating Jake and his Grandfather to kill Martini… NOR do we have a clue what Martini is even up to. (or if he even killed the mother in the first place). With only 3 episodes left in the show we’re introducing more problems and NO answers to anything!
Umbrella Academy:
I resisted starting this show because I knew it was about a totally dysfunctional group of people, and I knew that there would be moments where I would not enjoy that at all. But I also knew they were quirky superheroes trying to stop an apocalypse.
The show is really good, the actors are GREAT, the Characters are BETTER, the story is alright… there are moments that are super transparent. I will say now a little bit of SPOILERS are coming. [in the Order section I did everything by Actor name, here I’m going to go with character name, so that will be nice and confusing, but considering the heroes all go by a number it’s just easier.]
So, the fact that number 7 would have powers and totally be the weakest link of the group, figured that out pretty much in episode 1, and it just got reinforced in every episode. The fact that #1 would make things worse by predictability choosing the exact worse way to handle 7, and that 7 would be the most emotionally stunted, and therefore unable to think for a couple seconds, understand other peoples’ motives/ problems, and be completely in her own issues and oblivious was pretty much going to be the whole show.
Predictable but Awesome:
I freely admit that as soon as the “boyfriend” character started to talk to 7 I knew he was a scumbag out for no good. Now… is that because it was poor writing and so obvious? OR was it because the actor was really good and 7 (Vanya) is such an emotionally broken person she can’t read it, and thus the ACTING is amazing? If we look at that second one, it becomes a case where it was deliberately written so that I would be sitting in bed yelling that the guy is scum.
It gets further reinforced when 3 easily reads that the boyfriend is scummy and tries to warn 7. But all of the characters in the story have been affected by the strange circumstances of their birth and the fact that they were raised by a strange man who didn’t exactly provide them with a nurturing environment.
This is where Character can shine. The storyline jumps back and forth between past and the present and even the future. And all the characters are affected by their upbringing and the horrors they faced as child super heroes.
One character, 5 jumped into the future apocalypse and lived for over 30 years alone. Driven pretty insane he talked to a mannequin for that entire time. When he makes it back to the past to warn his family, he is shoved back into his 13-year-old body despite being in a timeline where his siblings are 30, and where he is chronologically 53. The actor is amazing showcasing the lethal skills he developed and still talking to a mannequin.
Character is King:
There is easy to spot tropes, heck I even called how it might end, and the plot has a few holes in it. And if I weren’t analyzing the whole thing, I would be more critical, but my criticism is slowly beginning to switch to “it was meant to be that way.”
I blazed through all 10 episodes in two days without a thought that it was a chore because I loved the characters. I mean I could probably do a whole post on the characters of the show and how interesting they are. If this were an RPG and I lined up these characters before my friends I could pick who would play or have created each one. Point blank I am most likely to have been #2 though I could also be niched as #4. If you want to read up on the characters as they were in the comic you can check HERE.
Great characters will always carry over a weak setting, though again the best characters reflect their setting and mesh with it. Character and World should be integrated, after all map-making is NOT world building… Setting and Character IS world-building.
Wrapping Up:
Now I had intended to talk about creating characters a little at the end of this post, and I do have a bit to say on that topic, but I seem to have gone a little longer than intended with my show reviews. So next week we’ll pick up with talking about methods for bringing your characters to life… specifically, notes and dossiers and methods that can be employed to craft the character.