The character's core - Sam Sykes

[Jo Zebedee]

Good post this. Do we need more rounded characters?

http://www.samsykes.com/2015/09/unshaken-not-unstirred/

 

[Toby Frost]

My feeling is that, especially in fantasy, we need to move away from the character who Does The Nice Thing and the character who Does The Nasty Thing, and towards characters who actively wrestle with the problems they face in order to try to solve them. And not just to prove some crass point that "Hey, the world's really difficult and complicated, you know". Once you take away "Kill the dark lord" as the solution to everything, then the response isn't just to throw up your hands and cry "Oh no, it's all really awful!". At least, that shouldn't be the response of a good character. And I think that struggle towards doing the right thing, the active attempt to work out what the good option is and do it, is much more heroic than just gathering all your minions and slaughtering the orcs.

It's worth pointing out that other genres - the hardboiled crime novel springs to mind - this has been standard procedure for a long, long time.

 

[Idoru]

In fantasy we tend to get characters that are All Bad or All Good, and very little explanation why. People are generally a lot more complex than that. We have reasons for what we do, even if other people don't agree with or understand those reasons. It's also true that people often do the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons. The stories we read would be much more nuanced and relevant to us if they reflected this.

 

[Toby Frost]

I once read a review of a fantasy series where the reviewer said that, if you took away the fact that the hero was prophesied to be the hero, and that the story was from his point of view, it was almost impossible to tell who had the moral high ground. Unless that's the intention (which is itself a tired point), the story probably needs something more than that.