I had an idea to write about how I’m not good at writing Plot, but that’s not much of an essay. More of a paragraph. Basically, I know how a story begins (sometimes), and I have an idea for how it ends, and I have great ideas for in-between scenes. But the Plot that connects it all? Karzanhi if I know how to make it work.
The air conditioning at work broke halfway through Thursday, so that was fun.
The urge to write a Socratic dialogue strikes once again. It probably won’t get done, because I’m… bad at doing those. I’m bad at writing anything that isn’t scheduled.
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Ahsoka Tano and the Trashing of Female Characters
You know what I hate?
There’s this thing that I see a lot in television dramas. Mostly supernatural television dramas, but aside from superhero shows that’s kind of mostly what I watch when it comes to live-action television shows. A female character (and it’s ALWAYS a female character that this happens to) is introduced, often as a love interest to one of the leads, but not necessarily. But it turns out that a vocal part of the audience doesn’t like her; straight up hates this character. Maybe it’s because she’s written in a way that’s annoying. Maybe it’s because she feels like an awkwardly-inserted wish fulfillment character. Maybe it’s because she breaks up a favorite ship of the fandom. Who knows! So the writers, getting the hint, unceremoniously have this character get violently killed to make the fans happy.
This isn’t good writing guys.
There is a school of thinking that any criticism or dislike of a female character in fiction makes you a terrible person. That’s stupid. It doesn’t. Feel free to do both. But the idea that you don’t like these characters (who aren’t villains, to be clear), so they should die violently, is a bad thing. Sometimes the narrative tries to warp things to make this try to feel justified, by revealing that the female character is in fact someone else in disguise, or she goes evil for no discernible reason.
I would say this happens to Juliet in Grimm, but I didn’t watch long enough to see--but I do recall that she was starting to lean towards evil, and fans hated her for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. It definitely happened to Katrina on Sleepy Hollow, in which fans despised Katrina because… Reasons? The writing wasn’t kind to her, but it made a lot of the characters dumb, so I don’t quite get why she was singled out. So she’s awkwardly turned evil and tries to kill everyone, and has to be killed before she destroys the world, or something.
Supernatural, unsurprisingly, has this a lot. Anna Milton had the audacity to be a minor love interest for Dean, and she reappears in the fifth season trying to kill Sam, and when that fails, goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean’s parents before Sam can be conceived. It also killed Charlie Bradbury, who was kind of a ridiculous wish fulfillment character, but it did so in the stupidest way possible, getting her to act like an idiot to make it work.
I don’t like it when characters are killed off for the sole reason of “We don’t know what else to do.” I’ve written stuff about it. If you wrote a character who has no more story left, nothing left to do but die, then I think it’s your job to think of something else. Likewise, if you write a character, and the audience doesn’t like her, it’s not your job to pander to the audience’s every wish. Their wants are not unimportant, but them demanding that a character be violently murdered for sexism’s sake is not a wish you need to cater to! And if there are legitimate criticisms about how this character is written, you should fix them!
I was thinking about this and thinking about The Clone Wars and Ahsoka Tano. Do you remember how all of us reacted upon her debut in the pilot movie? She wasn’t very popular. And that was kind of fair. She was very annoying at times. Ahsoka was a character awkwardly sandwiched into a canon for making a character for small children to identify with. She had “Precocious Child” written all over her. She had cutesy nicknames for the other characters (remember “Artooey”?? Or “Skyguy”??) and recklessly jumped into adventures that were way over her head and survived things that would have been instant death for other characters, like fighting (though admittedly not coming anywhere close to defeating) General Grievous. She had “Terrible Wish Fulfillment Character” written in neon letters all over her.
Except… now she’s one of the most beloved parts of Star Wars, and one of the best characters the story has introduced in the past few years (more than a decade ago now holy pope I feel old). Her appearances on Rebels were among the show’s highlights, and we’re all still holding our breaths, hoping that she’ll appear in further adventures soon. Ahsoka’s reception with fans has completely turned around. Because guess what? The show’s writers invested in this character and made an effort to give this character development. They saw that fans didn’t like her, and instead of giving up, they showed us how this character can be likable.
[TV Tropes calls this ‘Saved from the Scrappy Heap’ in case you’re curious.]
Imagine all the cool stuff we’d have missed if the makers of The Clone Wars saw fan reaction to Ahsoka and said, “Fans don’t like her, so let’s have Grievous stab her in season two.” We’d have missed out!
It’s fine to kill characters in fiction; sometimes, I think it works fine to kill them off abruptly, especially if that’s the kind of story you’re trying to tell. But if at any point, you think the only thing you can do with a (non-antagonist) character in a story is kill them off, I think you’ve failed as a writer (in that particular instance; not for all time). If you think you have to kill off a female character because fans hate her, maybe… don’t do that? Consider that maybe you just need to work on making the character more developed? And wonder why this doesn’t happen to anywhere near as many male characters.
The solution should never be, “Violently kill off this character to satisfy the fan’s misogyny.” I’d like to think TV writers are starting to realize this, as there was an outcry a few years back about several prominent female characters on television getting pointlessly killed off, but I also haven’t watched as many television dramas in the past few months. But please--don’t do this. Not every female character needs to be a warrior type like Ahsoka, but they at least deserve a chance to be as well-developed and complex as her.
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