Characters Have to Have Good Wants

 Hello! I’ve been feeling pretty good this week, physically, though this week at work has both dragged on and gone by very fast. Don’t know how that works. I started reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (‘twas a birthday present) which is fun. Reminds me a bit of what you’d get if you crossed Inheritance Cycle with The Expanse.

I need to work on the review of The Witcher III as well...and a review of The Muppets, I think.

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Characters Have to Have Good Wants

This sounds like a “duh” but characters have to want something, and we have to care about it. I said this a lot in my Hounded sporking, but the biggest problem (or rather, the root of the biggest problem) with Kevin Hearne’s Hounded is that the protagonist of the novel, Atticus O’Sullivan, doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t want wealth, he doesn’t want to protect anyone, he doesn’t want to save anyone, he doesn’t want power, or world peace, or stability, or anything. One could make the argument that he just wants to be left alone in peace, but he doesn’t do anything in pursuit of that other than go about his business as if nothing’s wrong. It’s not until the villains kidnap his dog that he actually goes to confront the antagonist, which is in the last fifth or so of the novel. Otherwise, he does his darndest to ignore everything.

This book was written by an English teacher.

I’m also playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla right now, which I will note is a good game, but its story is somewhat lacking, especially in regards to past games. For starters, the main character’s motivation is essentially that he wants to help his brother conquer England. Which isn’t in and of itself a bad sort of motivation for an audience to attach to a villainous protagonist (conquest), but the game tries to paint this goal as a lot more wholesome than it really is.  It doesn’t act like there might be something slightly villainous about trying to violently conquer a country where there are already people living there. So it’s hard to care about his motivation, since among Eivor, the characters around him, and the narrative itself, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla doesn’t seem to know what it’s talking about.

I want to be clear, a character’s want doesn’t have to be complex. It doesn’t have to be simple. It doesn’t have to be good. It certainly doesn’t have to be something we identify with (although those are also good). But it has to be consistent, and we have to be made to care about it, even if it’s something that we personally don’t want. The key is to make the motivation important to the character, and make sure that it makes sense within the context of the story, so the audience can care.

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is about Roland Deschain trying to find the titular Dark Tower. What exactly he’ll find when he gets there isn’t clear. Yes, there’s this whole thing about how the Tower is what’s holding up reality, and there are forces trying to destroy it, but that’s not clear from the beginning of the story. All we’re told is that Roland wants it. Now maybe it doesn’t make sense in realistic novel fashion, but The Dark Tower is attempting to be an epic fantasy story with Western trappings (and also there’s a lot of science fiction and vampires and an immortal sorcerer IT’S JUST WEIRD OKAY?!). And so it’s a classic knightly quest--heck, the inspiration for the book was Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. In light of that, an impossible quest to the edge of reality makes perfect sense. And by the end, the characters care so much about it that you care about it too, if you’ve stuck around to the end.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has its lead Edward Kenway want, essentially, to get rich quick. And he’s a dick about it. But the narrative and his fellow characters call him out on this all the time, and we’re shown pretty early on that he’s got a wife back home that he’s hoping to get back to, and that he wants to make a better life for his family--which he only thinks he can do with these get-rich-quick schemes. So even if we don’t sympathize with his goal, we understand his motivations. We care because he cares, and because we’re hoping that he works out that maybe his friends are right and that there’s more to life than riches. And thankfully he does.

You can make us care about quite a lot of things for epic stories, even if they don’t seem very big! A couple of years back, someone released a video game about a widower traveling to a mountain with his son to pay respects to his deceased wife. That game was God of War. For a story that complex, it didn’t need a complex motivation, or even a big one, other than that the heroes want to do A Thing, and there are forces getting in the way because Reasons. We care about the motivation because we like the characters and want to see them succeed, and we hope to see the two of them bond over the course of the journey.

Or how about this: a woman is stuck in a science lab and is trying to get out. Bam--that’s Portal. Again, the motivation is simple, but the execution is where it shines. And of course, we want Chell to succeed because from first-person perspective, we’re her. We want to get out of this massive lab where there’s an evil AI trying to murder us.

[I was going to use John Wick as an example, but I feel as if using only the examples of widowers with dead wives maybe set a bad precedent.]

Some other motivations from stories off the top of my head that are brilliantly executed:

-To save her brother and home (The Wee Free Men)

-To be out from under his father’s thumb (a large chunk of Outstretched Shadow)

-To clear his name (The Lightning Thief)

-To regain godhood (Trials of Apollo)

-To make it through a school year (Year of the Griffin)

-To become a knight (The Seeing Stone)

-To not get caught for criminal activities (Going Postal)

-To not die (Jurassic Park)

-To be put in charge of her family (Darksiders III)

-To find the truth of her birth (Horizon Zero Dawn)

You can probably tell that I’m looking at my shelves as I type this.

Some of these are big, some of them are small. Some of them are selfish, some of them are epic quests. A good motivation for a character can be anything. You don’t have to have something high-minded or noble for the story and character to work. But it has to be something, and it has to be something that we can be made to care about. 

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