Only tangentially about writing, character

I want to talk a bit about sympathetic villains. Or characters. Let me start again.

There is a school of thought among readers or viewers that appears to go like this: If I understand the reasons why someone has done something bad, they can't be bad people.

I find this enormously, enormously frustrating, for two reasons.

The first: It implies strongly that there are "evil" or "bad" people--and those people have to be so foreign, so Other, that they cannot have emotional complexity or reasoning.

The second: that somehow, those evil people are just doing bad things because... actually, I'm not sure why. Because they're sadistic? Because they enjoy causing pain? Because they're monumentally selfish? Somehow they're not ... people?

There's an old saying: everyone is the hero of their own story. To expand on this, everyone has reasons for doing what they do. They are not gleefully rubbing their hands and sitting on their huge piles of money. They believe what they're doing is necessary. In some cases, they believe it's the only right thing to do.

But what they believe, how they feel, is subjective. What they do should be--imho--evaluated objectively. And a lot of people don't do this. If they understand the motivation or the loss of control, it's almost as if the actions taken don't matter. By having clear and understandable reasons for doing whatever bad thing they've done, the action itself comes under the rubric of sympathetic.

Right and Wrong are culturally contained and defined. There are time periods in which Right is... not our version--or my version--of right. At the time when certain views held sway, people believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do. They had reasons. They caused pain. But they didn't cause pain for its own sake or because they enjoyed it; they believed the pain they caused was necessary to avert things they considered worse.

So: Right and Wrong are judgement calls. The key word here is judgement.

***

I've been thinking a lot about but I understand why he did that! As if, in making things believable or in showing the "bad" person's motivations clearly and even emotionally consistently, I am somehow creating an environment in which whatever that character did can't somehow be the Wrong thing to do.

That's never been my intent. It's just that in writing viewpoints or characters, I'm...focused on writing those characters. I'm never consciously judging who they are at that point.

Let me take Haerrad as an example. I personally want to push him off a cliff for some of the things he's done in his attempt to gather support for his bid for the Terafin seat. But... at the end of WAR, what was he doing? He was gathering the guards who were personally loyal to him--most of those House Guards--and he was heading out to fight. This wasn't written as an act of personal redemption for Haerrad. It's part and parcel of who Haerrad is. Was he fighting on our side? On the right side?

Yes.

But the key point with Haerrad is: he was fighting. He is not a man to cower behind anyone in battle. He has never done that, and will never do that. It's what draws (some) people to him: they view this as strength. They believe the house must be strong, and Haerrad--in their view--is the strongest candidate. He bows to no one.

***

I think judgement is a double-edged sword. Used excessively, used without nuance, it's just another weapon in an arsenal of unpleasant things.

Human beings, however, judge. I think a certain sense of judgement is almost necessary. Laws lead to judgement, the theory being that courts are or can be impartial. It's a lovely theory, but as with most theories, it somehow assumes that people can be involved without causing trouble or muddying the waters.

I have a sense of what I consider Right and what I consider Wrong. I try to live within the boundaries that sense circumscribes. I judge myself, and any sense of self respect I have grows out of that. I have a clear sense of what I should, or should not, do. Do I have bad days? Yes. But I've been lucky in that those bad days, the possible loss of temper, did not have dire consequences.

I try not to judge others. I don't know their circumstances. I don't know what their lives have been like--not in the way I know my own.

But again, the concepts of Right and Wrong are a product of judgement.

***

Sympathy and understanding are important; I think the development of empathy is the start of the road by which we eventually realize that other people did not have our lives or our experiences; we have a brief window into their lives or their experiences.

But I don't think it's an either/or situation. You can empathize, even sympathize, with someone while at the same timeevaluating what they've done. You can think that they've made a horrible choice, a terrible decision--say, in the heat of anger--while understanding the why of it. The why is explanation. The understanding of the why is often a there but for the grace of god, go I moment. It's a realization that human beings sometimes make terrible choices in the heat of the moment, and... this is a choice you didn't make, but maybe - in a terrible moment - you might have.

The why is never meant to excuse that horrible decision. It might stop you from the righteous anger or hatred you would otherwise feel, but it doesn't mean that what was done wasn't, or isn't, wrong.

I think sympathy decreases the prevalence of the harsher, pile-on, acts of judgement. So in one sense, sympathetic characters are good.

Maybe I spend too much time reading comment sections, but when sympathy becomes "he did nothing wrong!" becausethe motivations are clear, I think it's gone too far.

Way, way too far.

And yes, in case the motivation for this small post isn't clear, I have seen the way too far a bit too much recently.

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This post is mirrored from https://michellewest.ca/

I find it hard to have a conversation on Patreon, and have created a WordPress Patreon only blog to make it easier for me to find new comments and respond to them, sometimes at length.

This post is https://michellewest.ca/2022/03/02/only-tangentially-about-writing-character/; you should be able to hit Login with Patreon, and should be able to read posts there at the same levels you can read them here.

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