Characters Who Are Bad at Their Jobs

 I am currently trying out a couple of new shows on streaming, since I finished watching season four of The Expanse and rewatching Justice League Unlimited. We’ll see how it goes!

I realized that I had talked a lot about character competence a couple of weeks ago in that Saturday Note, but I have already worked some notes for this one, so I had to rework this to make it something different.

Fictional Characters Who Tend to be Bad at Their Jobs

In the novel Angelopolis (I’m not kidding, one of these days I’m going to do a “WOW this was bad!” Note on this novel), the main character is Verlaine, a guy who hunts evil angels for a living as part of a secret society. We’re told that he’s in peak athletic shape, that he can identify angelic creatures easily, that he’s a natural leader, and one of the society’s best agents. Except none of these things are true; he loses every fight he gets in, he’s frequently duped or outsmarted, and he often goes off from the group to do his own thing without telling anyone where he’s going, only to have to be rescued by his coworkers.

This is the most egregious example of what I’m talking about, but it’s far from the only example. Part of what makes this example bad is because the author has different characters keep tell us how good he is. But a lot of times it’s only done a couple of times, or it’s implied by a character’s job or rank that he or she is meant to be good at the job. And they’re not. Very often they’re not.

I understand why, of course, it’s to heighten the drama. If everyone is remarkably good at their jobs, then there’s less chance for screw-ups, and so the characters have nothing to do or fix. Sometimes it’s to show how clever our heroes are by outdoing the people who are established to their jobs. But in these cases, it sometimes comes across that the writers don’t understand the field they’re writing about.

There is, also, the idea that it’s part of the Plot–figuring out that they’re a fake, or if the person got the job because they had connections, or whatever. There’s a Father Brown story, for instance, in which Father Brown works out that another priest is actually an imposter because his theology is garbage. That’s not bad writing, that’s well-written Plot and character.

So, I made a short list of three common types of fictional characters who are, very often, bad at their jobs.

-Priests Dear Lord, priests and preachers in fiction tend to be terrible at their jobs. I’ve talked about how pop culture tends to be terrible with religion, because those writers often don’t understand it, especially when it comes to theology. So expect preachers to be fundamentalist stereotypes that want you dead or vaguely supportive types with barely-defined beliefs to make you feel better about yourself. If someone argues with them, they will lose, because they don’t understand reason, just blind faith. That these people are educated in theology apparently doesn’t occur to a lot of writers–they assume that these types have never even encountered someone who believes differently than themselves in a serious context. This is usually so that the writer can present a different viewpoint as superior or better reasoned.

To be fair, this happens in religious works, too, by the way–usually of the religion that the author isn’t supportive  of.

There’s a lovely subversion in an episode of The Chosen, actually. There’s a scene in the first season where one Pharisee is arguing against Jesus’s teachings, and the show makes a point that he’s not just being a fuddy-duddy. He can cite Scripture to counter what he’s being told. We’re meant to understand that he’s wrong, but not because he’s a stupid fundamentalist, merely that he’s looking at the answers in the incorrect way.

-Military Officers If you see a character in uniform in fiction, especially movies and television, you can be sure that they’re not very good at tactics. “Brilliant strategists” in fiction have a nasty habit of throwing a butt ton of troops at the heroes and leave it at that. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll see more complex thinking, but often that’s terrible too. The Last Jedi has a military officer who is absolutely terrible at her job, having a mutiny against her and getting almost all of the people under her command killed–and we’re supposed to see her as a capable career navy officer teaching our hero to respect the chain of command.

Okay, sometimes you get  complex strategists, but sadly those are sometimes written in a way that the only way their plans work is because the Plot demands it. So many things can go wrong, but the Plot needs them not to so it works.

Fun counterpoint! Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven. There’s a scene in which one of his advisors pushes him to fighting a battle at Kerak. After all, they had superior numbers. Saladin counters that while they did, the Crusaders had a much better position, and while the could have won, they would have lost a large chunk of their army doing it.

-Spies The entire point of being a spy is that they don’t draw attention themselves, that they can blend in, while also do whatever needs to be done to complete the mission. Fiction tells us this a lot, but for the sake of drama they tend to forget their skills and get emotional, or trust people they really shouldn’t trust. This makes for very high stakes storytelling, but at the same time it means that people who should be able to put up a front… don’t. For some reason.

I don’t watch enough spy fiction to have a good counter-example, I’m sorry (unless we count villains, but that’s usually saved for a big reveal). But they shouldn’t be doing this! A couple of reviews I’ve seen for Secret Invasion–which is now on Hulu if you guys care–bring up that the characters are meant to be spies and yet they suck at intelligence gathering and infiltration, trusting people they shouldn’t and being really obvious with their motivations.

I don’t know; The Count of Monte Cristo, maybe? The Count’s not a spy, but in the book he’s really good at not being caught by the bad guys.

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