Saturday, October 29, 2022

On Skeptic Characters

 There are a lot of things I considered writing about, especially considering that National Novel Writing Month is next week, and I’m slightly freaking out about it. Do I want to try doing something for it? I feel if I want to call myself a writer I should at least make an effort, but I am increasingly convinced that I don’t really have any writing skills. I do have part of an outline I had started working on last year, and I think it might be worthwhile to try to work on that one story because it has dragons and swords and stuff, and that’d be cool. But I don’t know! You tell me.


There were a couple of other topics I thought about, but many of those were either too short, or too heavy. I don’t know that you want a Note about why you should have a Plot idea when you make a story pitch, or how religion and secular thought differ on their views of the nature of evil and how to address it.


Anyhow, that’s not the topic of today’s Note. Inspired by Father Brown stories.




On Skeptic Characters


Something you’ll notice if you ever watch movies or television that in many stories, especially those that deal with the supernatural (whether it’s real or faked in the story), there’s a character who is The Skeptic. That is the one character who exists to tell everyone that the supernatural isn’t real and that it’s scientifically impossible. Sometimes this is the main character, in a story like Sherlock (or other adaptations of the Holmes stories) and it’s meant to be an extension of the character’s intelligence.


The thing you’ll notice is that usually, this person is an atheist and/or scientist. Which makes it obvious for the audience to understand the reasoning here: obviously the atheist doesn’t believe what’s going on is supernatural, he doesn’t believe in it! The more superstitious characters (in Hollywood speak: the religious ones) don’t realize that they’re being deceived because they’re more likely to be gullible.


…so earlier this year I read Chesterton’s “Father Brown” stories.


Something I noticed with Father Brown is that the man is never fooled by Scooby-Doo shenanigans. Whenever someone shows up claiming that this occurrence or crime is supernatural, he immediately disbelieves it as nonsense. Which it always is. And this is a bit odd in mystery fiction, because usually the priest is the one first to believe in, or push the idea that something paranormal is going on.


[Side note: mainstream fiction, in general, is very very bad at depicting authentic religious belief.]


 Father Brown, on the other hand, is the skeptic of these stories. And neither he nor the narrative treat this as particularly noteworthy. And I thought this was a very interesting and odd touch. After all, Father Brown does believe in the supernatural–it’s part of this job to do so, in fact. But as a Catholic priest, it’s that he’s intimately familiar with the supernatural, so he knows what to expect. In simple terms, when someone shows up saying something paranormal is going on, Father Brown can quickly respond with, “I know what the paranormal looks like, and this isn’t it.”


I’m also vaguely reminded of the episode of Batman Beyond with a supposed haunting in Terry’s high school, and Bruce recounts supposed cases of hauntings and witchcraft he’s encountered in his own career as Batman. Terry says something like, “And none of it was real, right?” To which Bruce replies, “Oh no, all that stuff is out there. But this? This is so… high school.”


There’s also a scene towards the end of the novel Sherlock Holmes and the Breath of God (not one of Doyle’s originals, obviously), in which after being the skeptic the entire novel, Holmes accepts the possibility of the supernatural, but goes on to point out that even if the supernatural is real, there’s something very fishy going on and that has much more mundane explanation than what they’ve been given.


I am not suggesting that your skeptic character in your mystery, or your paranormal story, absolutely cannot be an atheist. But I am suggesting that he or she doesn’t need to be. This notion that only the atheist can be un-gullible enough to realize he (or she, though in my experience it seems to usually be a he) is being played by someone impersonating a supernatural figure. Because yes, they’re already set up not to believe in the supernatural, but in a sense, people who have a belief system regarding the supernatural also have a framework that it’s supposed to fit into, and if something doesn’t fit into that system it might easily be dismissed. There was a long time through history in which the official Christian stance on witchcraft was not “Don’t do it,” as much as “This isn’t a real thing you can do.”


It’d be fun to see a story with something like a Wiccan practitioner who doesn’t believe the stupid witchcraft and haunting shenanigans she’s seeing because it’s built more on Hollywood tropes of the ideas than anything she believes. Or a Native American believer of traditional religion that faces much the same thing. Instead of buying into the haunting or whatever, dismissing it because it’s a cheap knockoff.


Part of this is born out of my desire to see religions written better in fiction, but it’s also to see more character types out there. We don’t need to see the same character type over and over again done in the exact same way–we can do better than that.


No comments:

Post a Comment