I have a problem with characters. Or rather I’m simply picky about them. I’ve written about token characters on here before. I’ve always been drawn to character driven stories more so than to other stories.
We live in a society that revers individualism and unique personalities, at least in fictional characters. You can see this attempts in many movies and televisions shows now. I believe it started with the indie films which developed the conventional “indie girl.” There was Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a woman full of quirks. She was a great character but she wasn’t the exception. The new television show The New Girl also has an abnormally quirky female lead. Numerous other currently popular shows have this same thing, shows like Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock and Community thrive on extreme versions of stereotypes. Some of these shows realize they’re doing it and create a sort of parody of themselves in the acknowledgement but others try to still be taken seriously as a show, pretending the universe they exist in is completely normal. Often the leads are exaggeratedly quirky while the minor characters are normal.
I have a hard time with characters like these because it ruins the verisimilitude of the story for me. I sit there during the whole show thinking that no one could be like this and still functional and I can’t get into the show. Fortunately this is a lot less common in literature. Television shows and movies are stories too though and they deal with characters. They should be dealt with properly instead of taking the easy way out when writing them.
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