The Downfall of Bhaalspawn (contains possible SJW discussions)

Anonymous asked:
Is it just me, or does SU’s audience actively WANT the characters to suck?

lily-peet answered:

I don’t think anyone really wants characters to suck. What actually ends up happening is that there’s this absurd demand for characters to be “relatable” which means “has the same experiences/traits that I do.” And that naturally leads characters to start out bad, never grow, and only get worse.

Interesting stories require interesting characters and that requires having dynamics that doesn’t mesh with your average viewer’s life.

This goes double for an “underdog.” Everyone believes they’re an underdog but in most cases that isn’t necessarily true, and simply being an underdog doesn’t make a character compelling. This goes triple for the “everyman.”

The problem with relatability (aside from the fact that no word processor actually recognizes it as a word) is that it’s this weird, nebulous, up in the air concept. You can’t really quantify it like you can with any other character trait. What’s relatable to one person isn’t necessarily relatable to another. And oftentimes people think a character is relatable when he clearly isn’t.

To use a famous example: Luke Skywalker is considered a very relatable character with his murdered family, parent who was a fascist and finding out he’s the last of a near-extinct line of demigods who’s destined to save the world and who manages to pull off an impossible shot with little to no experience by abusing his divinely granted chosen one powers.

Anyone who considers Luke to be relatable must have a pretty fucking massive view of themselves. Ditto for Kingdom Hearts 1′s Sora, back when the series was still banging that “Chosen One” drum.

What these characters actually are is an escapist fantasy of being the hero. But because most of these people believe they would totally be that kind of person, they latch onto these stories as “relatable.” Kind of like how these same people love to think about what they would do in a zombie acpoalypse (rot, because they’re dead, because they’re on the internet fantasizing rather than learning how to make a lean-to).

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism. - The New Yorker 

A lot of people like Steven Universe’s characters because they showcase traits like self-worth issues, paranoia, anxiety, and PTSD. But one of the big problems with this attitude is that you can’t do anything with these traits without destroying that feeling of being relatable. Because these are not actually traits. They’re conflicts that must be resolved. If someone in real life let self-worth issues, paranoia, anxiety, or PTSD go untreated as long as the characters in SU have, that would constitute a massive health risk.

The fact that so many people are comfortable with that is extremely alarming. It’s the whole “Twilight Sparkle autism headcanon” thing where people romanticize the thing they find relatable into something not indicative of reality. Except this has far worse consequences.

Korra was pretty shit, SU is not very good