/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11127783]

Reminder that "consistent characterization" is a meme. In real like people are extremely inconsistent, and frequently act in ways that directly contradict their beliefs and past actions.

[Anonymous No.11127807]

wrong

[Anonymous No.11127822]

storytelling is supposed to be more real than real life because real life isn't realistic enough

[Anonymous No.11127824]

>>11127822
Thanks, Oscar.

[Anonymous No.11127834]

sure but when you're trying to drive home a point and the characters are representations or means to an end it serves no purpose to write them like actual human beings

[Anonymous No.11127850]

>>11127783
But not what they present

[Anonymous No.11127880]

wouldn't the meme be character development? sounds like someone called you a flake IRL bro and you're trying to take it out on literature by erasing the bildungsroman genre

[Anonymous No.11128163]

>fiction is supposed to approximate "real life"

No.

[Anonymous No.11128223]

>>11127783
Great example of this (eschewing consistency) is Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Faulkner’s Quentin comes to mind as well.

[Anonymous No.11128228]

>>11127834
Dostoyevsky was a mistake

[Anonymous No.11128236]

>>11128223
or Hamlet, or every hero to ever undergo a peripeteia since Aristotle was writing Poetics. It's harder to think of a text where the character stays exactly the same throughout the work. There's no such meme.

[Anonymous No.11128240]

>>11127783
Furthermore, you'd need to know a human being in its totality to discern wheter or not the character is inconsistent and that's impossible

[Anonymous No.11128252]

He's basically right guys, stop being contrarians.

[Anonymous No.11128264]

>>11128236
Eh, I’m gonna assume you mean hero/protagonist and I’ll let that slide. Plenty examples of static minor characters.

[Anonymous No.11128265]

>>11128252
He sounds like a BPD chic who thinks fiction is like reality and that's why life is as shit as in a 19th C Russian serial

[Anonymous No.11128278]

>>11127783
>>11128252
They really don't, you're just dumb or autistic. Ever heard of something called "Whole Object Relations"? People aren't ruled by anything resembling reason or belief, they're ruled basically by habits and their internal sense of moral and hierarchical balance.

[Anonymous No.11128287]

>>11128264
>static minor characters
If you're reading a lot of Wodehouse you can have static major characters, but usually there's at least one foil to the main character who undergoes the opposite reversal. Most authors try not to include characters that don't develop because then there's no real point to them being characters. Once you get to Chekov, even putting in _objects_ that you don't intend to fire off in or just after the reversal is a no no, if we ignore characters altogether.

[Anonymous No.11128290]

>>11128236
outside of characters on the periphery, i agree.

[Anonymous No.11128626]

>>11127783
faggot. I stand behind every single thing I have ever said or done, including every single one of the thousands of posts on this board.

[Anonymous No.11128631]

>>11127783
I agree with what you said about real like

[Anonymous No.11128762]

>>11127783
>frequently act in ways that directly contradict their beliefs and past actions.
If somebody contradicts one of their beliefs did they even truly believe it?

[Anonymous No.11129153]

You need to read Freud and Jung, OP. Maybe then you'll stop making such brainlet threads.

[Anonymous No.11129157]

>>11127783
Realism is more of a meme.

[Anonymous No.11129226]

You're all fucking retarded and OP is right, you simply don't know yourselves. Kys

[Anonymous No.11129294]

>>11129226
No. People are self-consistent. It is your imperfect understanding of their motivations and drives, both conscious and unconscious, which produce an illusion of inconsistency.

The same is true of words such as "randomness" or "luck." These are terms used merely to designate the moment at which our understanding is too deprived to describe the interconnectedness of precipitous events.

[Anonymous No.11129307]

>>11129294
People are more complex than having complete consistency. While consistency does exist in people it is not always present.

[Anonymous No.11129317]

>>11128264
he means tragic hero, numbnuts

[Anonymous No.11129749]

>this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. but people are not like that. there may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour.

[Anonymous No.11129777]

>>11127783
I want to get with a skinny, well-mannered girl and encourage her to overfeed and lose control until she's a fat slut that smokes a pack of high strength cigarettes every day. Then I want to dump her. That would make ME the one who is powerful and rejects people >:(

[Anonymous No.11129782]

>>11129777
>on earth there is only one lasting intoxication: absolute certainty in the possession of another creature. i am seeking this intoxication

[Anonymous No.11129813]

>>11127783
>"consistent characterization"

As long as you remember the basic wesen of your character, then they're always consistent. Consistency and consistent characterization is a venn diagram, not a circle. You do this by giving them an conflict and a want and a worry, etc, that never even have to be mentioned in the story itself.

For example:
>Adam wants to get Alice's attention.
>Adam used to be beaten by his father, so he doesn't like seeing people get hurt.
>Adam is worried that he won't find a job when he graduates at the end of the year.
Now you've got a pretty stable character, that even if he contradicts himself in dialog or action, as long as it's a result of one of these facts, is still consistent characterization.

[Anonymous No.11129821]

>>11129813
This

[Anonymous No.11129827]

i dont care

[Anonymous No.11129829]

>>11127783
Just because you have no principles doesn't mean no one does.

[Anonymous No.11129836]

>>11129813
>a character is a simulated person driven by virtual "interiority"
this is how cowards write

[Anonymous No.11129840]

>>11129836
okay, tell me how you write a character

[Anonymous No.11129849]

>>11129836
More like that is how people who aren't retarded write.

[Anonymous No.11129863]

>>11129813
If a person is beaten by their father in childhood they usually grow up into a more violent person, or develop anxiety, etc. Don't think that they grow into some superhero with straight-arrow morals and values.
But yeah you're absolutely right with your point.

[Anonymous No.11129876]

>>11129863
Key word "usually". Some of the abused people I know are very kind and are pacifists.

[Anonymous No.11129926]

>>11129863
yeah, you're right, but having anxiety or trauma doesn't negate that, and not wanting to see people get hurt doesn't mean you have good morals, or have the motivation to actually make life better for people. It runs the gamut from "becoming a superhero" to "covering a woman's face with a pillow before you stab her to death, so you don't have to watch her cry."

But it was just an example. I don't know why I picked that of all things.

[Anonymous No.11130959]

>>11129782
The most based manlet to have every lived, y/n?

[Anonymous No.11130964]

>>11127783
>In real like people are extremely inconsistent,

kek as if, you're probably just too stupid to determine their nature

[Anonymous No.11130997]

>>11128264
>Eh, I’m gonna assume you mean hero/protagonist and I’ll let that slide.
Anon, he literally told you the book you can read to learn about Aristotle's idea of tragic reversal in the tragic hero and how literature works in the Greek mind. You're not letting anything "slide", >>11128236 gave you a high school English lesson and your ignorant ass thought that qualified you to consider Hamlet not the protagonist of Hamlet. I wouldn't be surprised if some nigger beat you to death with a copy of Isocrates before you got the first syllable of Polonius out of your mouth, you're so fucking dumb.
>>11129829
This. If you want to write some BEE edgy shit about how everyone's immoral, you got to take the hit of being known for vapid characters. Moral struggle's what makes it a tragedy instead of a satire.

[Anonymous No.11131010]

>>11127783
maybe the underlying motivations for contradicting past behavior are what is consistent.

[Anonymous No.11131024]

>>11129153
>You need to read Freud
Do you want to ruin the man and turn him into a pseud once and for all? The opposite of knowledge isn't ignorance, it's false knowledge that'll lead you into a completely erroneous interpretation of facts, and OP is just on the edge of abandoning false past beliefs for a fertile void. If OP were to read works based on neuroscience and falsifiable science in general like CBT, he'd start on the right path.

[Anonymous No.11131042]

>>11127783
Characters have to be consistent otherwise they will lack definition. Literature does not equal life. If you want an inconsistent character they need to be consistently inconsistent.

If a character acts in contradiction to a prior action or belief it is only a product of internal conflict. Readers are given a character who believes A, B, and C. And who does E, F, and G, in response to H, I, and J. This establishes reader expectation. You introduce the main action to test reader expectation. But there is no "testing" if the reader is not made familiar with a well-defined and consistent character.