feuervogel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feuervogel) wrote2010-03-23 11:10 am
feuervogel) wrote2010-03-23 11:10 am
Things I don't like in books
1. Characters whose life history is basically trauma after trauma after trauma.
2. Plots that exist mainly to further traumatize the characters.
These are not what I look for in my fiction. I do not enjoy reading about people's misery. Yet I also understand that sunshine and bunnies and kumbayah make for rather dull stories, so of course there should be problems and bad things happening. Balance. It's a good thing.
2. Plots that exist mainly to further traumatize the characters.
These are not what I look for in my fiction. I do not enjoy reading about people's misery. Yet I also understand that sunshine and bunnies and kumbayah make for rather dull stories, so of course there should be problems and bad things happening. Balance. It's a good thing.
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I am a big fan of non-ambiguous happy endings.
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I can't write a romance story to save my life, though. (At least, not one defined by the genre conventions. I'm not exactly wired that way.)
It seems, though, that a large subset of genre readers are looking for that type of story, with broken characters and misery. Sure, my characters have a couple issues (who doesn't?), but they're not broken.
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There are two real reasons for trauma kiddies in White Wolf games. The obvious one is the flaw system, which rewarded you for being fucked up in the older system. The new one offers no such boon (you only get extra points when your -single- flaw directly impairs your character from achieving an important objective, so being a one eyed nightmare-prone poster child for neglect and abuse gets you jack), so it's fairly moot.
The other reason, which overlaps a fair bit with fiction, is that it lets your character take a moral high ground while doing horribly immoral things. "My character was treated horribly, so pity and sympathize with me while I go on a bloody vendetta." It's way easier than actually building a realistic character and for games where people love being total bastards it's a wonderfully simple backstory element.
My biggest irk with traumafests in fiction comes from the fact that it's often done by an author who simply doesn't know how to design deep characters. It's often used as a fridge trope to give someone a reason to be pitied and to make whatever they accomplish seem significant. Maybe I'm callous, but I really don't give a fuck about the fact that Shinji Ikari finally decided it was okay to talk to other people. This is probably why I enjoy Gurren Lagann.
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(sarcasm)
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It's one of those things that can be done well by a mature player in a mature story for a mature group. But it's almost always attempted by players who want what you mention in the third paragraph - they want to justify being psychotic and irrational, and having your whole family raped to death before your eyes by vampires (for some ill-defined reason) is a great excuse to be nuts without having to justify anything to anybody. Then you can act however you want, and tell people it's "perfectly in character".
I mainly saw it in large games, either LARPs or online, where STs couldn't devote too much time to individual characters, and people could slip things through that they wouldn't have pulled in a small TT group. Many's the time I've had to say "Yes, that's perfectly in character for what you described, and that's why we need to get more in-depth writeups for new characters, and consider them a lot more carefully."
The old flaw system, on the other hand, while eminently abuse-prone, didn't really force this kind of thing. I was one of those players who could always squeak a few more points from the system, but just use those flaws to actually build a character. I created plenty of evil bastards with interesting backgrounds and exploitable weaknesses, but they were clever and deep evil bastards without having any excessive childhood trauma or deep quests for revenge.
The main crux is the crutch factor. It shows up in books, in anime, in comics, in television - "This character needs Depth, let's give her (and it's more often her than him) a Dark Secret Trauma, or better yet, an Onstage Trauma that we can pretend is character development!"
It's just damn lazy, 90% of the time, on top of being insulting. Most often, the writers have no idea how the sorts of trauma they write about affect a real psyche, so they just half-ass it to send the character whatever way they want.
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