Dramatic Heaux

You’re all covered with her. The narrative hints at Spike’s feelings towards Buffy.

The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.

Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.

Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.

But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.

Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.

A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.

But when you critique the story you need to stop suspending that disbelief and look at the story through another lens, just like @queeranarchism says.

And you can be critical of stories. They are reflective of the values of the author. But you can only see those values clearly when you look at the story as a story.

Example: J.K. Rowling really shows her fatphobia in the Harry Potter books by portraying a lot of unlikable characters as fat, and emphasizing their fatness at the exact moments when she wants you to dislike them. Aunt Marge is the obvious example. Aunt Marge ‘sausage fingers’ get described as she is abusing Harry in order to amplify the sense of disgust that you have for her. It’s clear that J.K. Rowling is using ‘fat’ as a stand in for ‘bad’. Fuck JKR.

That’s a valid critique of a story.

When you do not suspend disbelief, what you get is discourse between people who go “Harry Potter is a fatphobe because he is clearly judging Aunt Marge for her fat. Everyone who defends Harry Potter is wrong. Fuck you fatphobes!” and people who go “Harry Potter did nothing wrong! Aunt Marge is clearly an abuser. Anyone who brings up fatphobia here is protecting an abuser! Fuck you abuse apologists!”