Saturday, September 9, 2023

Immortals & Long-Lived Characters

 Well, we’re back on the “Can’t Sleep One Night a Week” Train, which is a bummer to say the least. I feel like I’m just a horrible mess.

But! I’m doing Discovery Tour on Assassin’s Creed: Origins, learning about ancient Egypt and shiz. And I’m trying to take up painting again! I’m reading all kinds of new books, too! And, if we’re lucky, I can start outline something and have a plan for National Novel Writing Month.


This was inspired by (I think?) a random comment I saw on BIONICLE. Maybe it was on TV Tropes? It seemed like the kind of thing that would be on TV Tropes.



Immortals & Long-Lived Characters


Something that many speculative writers have to deal with is that it is difficult to imagine the life and psychology of an immortal being. Our lives have constant reminders of our own mortality. It’s hard to guess how someone who doesn’t have as brief or delicate of a life would view the world. I am frustrated because so many authors and writers don’t even try, boiling down this complex idea to a character saying, “Living forever sucks! I want to die.” This is old. 


But you know what’s worse? It’s when the story introduces an incredibly old character (by human standards), to whom their extreme age apparently makes no difference in the character’s actions or development. These characters could have an age in quadruple digits, and yet you wouldn’t know it by their performance or dialogue.


Take BIONICLE–in 2004, the story casually revealed that all of the villagers on Mata Nui were over a thousand years old. Sure, they’re biomechanical creatures, so I guess there’s no reason that the characters have to have something like human lifespans. However, it’s not like you’d know that anyone was that old from the way they think or interact with each other. It becomes absolutely ridiculous when more backstory reveals some of the characters are tens of thousands of years old.


I want to emphasize that these years don’t mean anything–you can’t show one character as older than another, because they’re all really freaking old. We’re told that some things or people are ancient, but when characters are tens of thousands of years old, what does that even mean? None of them act any differently because of their age. It could have been shortened considerably without making any meaningful changes to the story.


“This character is fifteen thousand years old, but it doesn’t make a difference because so is everyone else!” Then why make the characters fifteen thousand years old?


Mind you, it’s miles ahead of Atticus O’Sullivan of The Iron Druid Chronicles, who constantly reminds the reader that he’s over two thousand years old but acts like he’s an unforgivably arrogant twenty-first century frat guy, with flirting, pop culture references, and modern slang. Some fans try to defend this as the character is trying way too hard to fit into modern society, but his internal monologue is like this. The guy is horribly distracted by the sight of an attractive woman; you’d think he would have gotten over it by his one thousandth birthday.


[Also, he becomes unkillable in the second chapter of the first book, which is inexcusably horrible writing.]


Immortality, or living beyond the normal lifespan, should have some effect on the characters. A random touch I liked in The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel is that Gilgamesh is over ten thousand years old, and it’s driving him insane because his brain isn’t built to hold that much memory in it. He’s living as a homeless man in London.


Or a really good example is the elves in the Obsidian Trilogy. The elves live for about a thousand years (if not more!). It’s explained that because they live so long, their culture is a bit perfectionist–when you’ve got that long to figure out how to do things, you always try to do those things the best that you can. They’ve turned everything into an art–from painting and making clothes, to fencing, crafting armor, and having tea. They’re also never in a rush for anything, to the point that they don’t even ask questions except in wartime, because it’s considered a rude thing to do.


If a character is immortal, or lives a really long time, there should be something done with that, other than as a way to add in oodles of backstory. Think of Highlander, where Connor McLeod’s immortality is a key part of his character. That he’s been alive for five hundred years informs everything about him, and he wouldn’t make sense if you took that out of the story; that’s not so when it’s a badly written aspect of the character.


There are interesting ways to write these sorts of characters in fantasy and science fiction! So it makes the bad ones stick out.


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