> a believable character has to be grounded somewhat from reality.
Yeah, I think there's basically a few classes of characters that authors tend to use:
- Based on somebody they know (or a synthesis of a few people). These are easiest to give reasonable approximations of normal psychologies to. Or at least a good surface description of their behavior seems to be enough for people to fill in the mind of the character.
- A completely artificial character, but constructed on a profile so as to seem real. A bit like how modern artists start drawing characters from a basic frame to give a realistic movement or position, then fill in the details. This I think is harder in literature since you really have to build a detailed profile of the character as a model so that they provide a consistent and believable behavior. But I think this is also limited by what the author understands about people's psychology and behavior. If the author can't figure what motivates a certain kind of behavior, then they can't really build the psych model of the character and you end up with weird, unmotivated characters without agency. Lots of the more painful Literary Fiction I had to suffer through in school is like this. I think this is also dangerous for readers as it conditions them to expect real people to think and behave like this.
- A flat archetype or stereotype for a character the author needs in the story but doesn't know well enough to write about well. So they become part of the background fabric of the story, providing part of the framework for the better defined characters to work within, but never really coming into their own. Even main characters suffer from this.
> And the not-so-good children in Renaissance paintings doesn't affect the quality of Mona Lisa at all.
It's funny you brought up the Mona Lisa, a painting with an expression so strange there's little agreement about what emotion it's conveying at all.
My point was that literary character doesn't have to be an absolutely accurate depiction of the real people for it to (potentially) have the effect mentioned in the study. If each character is just a representation of the author's perception of other people, it's still something new that the reader couldn't have known otherwise.
>It's funny you brought up the Mona Lisa, a painting with an expression so strange there's little agreement about what emotion it's conveying at all.
It was brought up to say that the quality (or lack thereof) of a subset of all the works has no bearing on the quality of the better works in an area. Of course, you won't gain any new insight on psychology of vampire nor people in love from Twilight. And on incomprehensibleness, well let's say that if people learn that human's emotion might in fact be a giant mess, that we're not particularly (ir)rational nor simple, that would still be some understanding, isn't it? :-)
Sorry, I wasn't disagreeing with you per se, just writing down some thoughts.
> well let's say that if people learn that human's emotion might in fact be a giant mess, that we're not particularly irrational nor simple, that would still be some understanding, isn't it? :-)
Yeah, I think so. But I have to say that I think character's behavior should be relatively consistent and that Irrational incomprehensibility can be a consistent behavior ;)
Yeah, I think there's basically a few classes of characters that authors tend to use:
- Based on somebody they know (or a synthesis of a few people). These are easiest to give reasonable approximations of normal psychologies to. Or at least a good surface description of their behavior seems to be enough for people to fill in the mind of the character.
- A completely artificial character, but constructed on a profile so as to seem real. A bit like how modern artists start drawing characters from a basic frame to give a realistic movement or position, then fill in the details. This I think is harder in literature since you really have to build a detailed profile of the character as a model so that they provide a consistent and believable behavior. But I think this is also limited by what the author understands about people's psychology and behavior. If the author can't figure what motivates a certain kind of behavior, then they can't really build the psych model of the character and you end up with weird, unmotivated characters without agency. Lots of the more painful Literary Fiction I had to suffer through in school is like this. I think this is also dangerous for readers as it conditions them to expect real people to think and behave like this.
- A flat archetype or stereotype for a character the author needs in the story but doesn't know well enough to write about well. So they become part of the background fabric of the story, providing part of the framework for the better defined characters to work within, but never really coming into their own. Even main characters suffer from this.
> And the not-so-good children in Renaissance paintings doesn't affect the quality of Mona Lisa at all.
It's funny you brought up the Mona Lisa, a painting with an expression so strange there's little agreement about what emotion it's conveying at all.