Did my previous post come off as me saying ''Bad decisions/characters = bad writing"?? Let me know🙏🏾

I knew exactly what you meant because I wonder about that all the time, too 😅

Nah. Maybe I am just a Frank simp but nah, I didn't feel it that way

I don't think it came off that way at all, but buckle up, because I have an actual crazy-board theory of why this happens and it connects many things: So, I think the challenge is a generational by-product of the many ways that narrative started shifting in the 80s with the advent of those "Choose your own adventure" books, where the story got shaped by the reader's decisions. "If you would do this one thing, go to page 136. If you would do this other thing, go to page 98." This fostered a generation of readers who saw narrative as collaborative, and not as a decoding/learning activity. Which is not bad, mind you!! But it shifted the focus from "what is this story trying to say to me?" to "what would I do if I was in the circumstances of the story?". From then, we have more and more prevalence of collaborative narratives, like roleplaying games and videogames, where the reader/participant not only chooses options, but basically shapes where the story goes and what decisions get made afterwards. That creates a sense of shared authorship, where people have a sense that they should be able to move the story where they want it to go, and resent how traditional narratives don't let them do that. We also have the way a lot of people think characters are independently sentient and how many *authors* actually talk about them this way, as if the characters were making decisions, and not the authors! I always feel weird when I hear authors say things like "the characters just showed up fully formed in my head and refused to go" or "then this character did something I had never planned it to do! and the character took the story somewhere I hadn't even thought about!" Like, no. No. You *thought* of something unexpected, and realized it could be interesting to write that instead of what you originally planned, but the author is the one making deliberate decisions!! 😩 That reinforces the idea that characters are independent beings. Then there's also the recent disappearance of "bad" as an acceptable character trait. Villains have become misunderstood heroes in hundreds of retellings and alternate-perspective stories, like Cruella or Maleficent or Wicked. Or even the whole "Thanos was actually right" reframing. And while I welcome complexity in characters, and I think it is genuinely important to understand that in real life terrible people are not blatantly identifiable and always awful to everyone and everyone knows they're evil, and most of the time horrible people think they're doing good things... At the same time, I think we've lost something when we don't have clear cut villains anymore. (And even many straight-up villains get misinterpreted as cool alarmingly often, like the Wolf of Wall Street, or Fight Club and the like.) I don't remember where I was talking about this, but basically children need to understand what makes you a "bad person" in society. They need to see what behaviours make people not like you! And we've lost something when we're not allowed to happily dislike characters anymore. Add to it that the way we teach reading and engagement with stories has also fundamentally changed: Symbolism, allegory, and meaning have taken a backseat to plot, accuracy and references. Which I despair about often, seriously. I'm not advocating a return to "the author intended this" prescriptivism, but I notice a lot of **meaning** and interpretation has been completely abandoned for "is this plausible?" "is this consistent?" and not "what does it mean that this happens?" "why did this get included in the story, what is it trying to say?". And lastly, there are these terrifying trends where young readers who claim to love books say they don't read anything in the third person because they want to feel like they're the main character, and then they also say that they stop reading when the character does something that they personally wouldn't do (which 😩😩😩😩). They skip prologues, they skip descriptions, they only understand trope tags ("it's an enemies to lovers story" could be anything from Romeo and Juliet to Shrek to The Ugly Truth, what are we doing???) They read for identification and not for perspective or for widening their horizons. All of this mess results in people identifying character's behaviours as something they have to approve or reject as if it was personal, rather than approaching it as a story they can have a detached analysis or some opinions about. Excuse the awfully long rant, but I swear I've been thinking about this for a long time, because it really interests me why it happens. And I really think the way we teach how to approach stories has changed a lot in the last decade or so.

It did seem odd from you so I thought it was like asking a broad question ? Idk how to explain it 😆

Lol the phrasing did make it sound like it but I figured you wouldn’t say something that silly

I think examples would have helped, because I’m honestly still not sure exactly what you mean (which is why I didn’t comment on your last post). Maybe I just don’t watch enough media with what I consider bad writing.

Yes a bit but I wouldnt consider it a major crime, I saw it as you casually sharing a passning thought and probably not spending too much time and effort in the wording. I dont know you personally of course but you are very introspective and thoughful in analysing characters and writing intentions in your videos so thats probably why I thought the post wasnt meant entirely as the wording made it sound, you know?

Honestly, I was a bit confused by it. It did seem like you were conflating the two a bit. So yeah, I was thinking well written characters should make you feel strongly about them either way. But bad writing is just bad writing and in that case I get annoyed at writers/directors 🙂

I think they way you phrased it, it did, but I took it at face value and assumed you meant 'why do people get angry with characters and not the authors themselves'.

I think because "bad" can be interpreted in a moral register, and there IS a discourse around readers'/viewers' inability to understand that portrayal does not equal endorsement, and hardly anybody reads anything carefully anymore ever at any time...yeah lol a few people probably did interpret you this way

I read it as “why hate the character when you should criticize the writing instead” An example is Korra from the Legend of Korra. Her character is OVERLY hated and it’s rooted in misogyny. Meanwhile the true criticisms should lay with the creators, Michael and Bryan. But no one gets on their back for writing the scenarios in which Korra is required to be hardened—they just blame her because it’s easy to hate a young woman in media

At first glance yes but when I read the whole spiel realised that’s not what you meant but to be fair didn’t really seem like something you’d usually say anyway 🤷‍♀️