rn the thing i keep ruminating on (and its prob related to my ocd since people treat disagreeing about this as a Failing, but i digress) is the way people treat the idea of characters as narrative devices. and its very important that people understand that at their core characters are narrative devices! so when people say characters arent real im like yeah this is true. and people DO use that to deflect real conversations about that character and the themes theyre used to examine and other related things

but then ill see people claim that treating characters like people at all is wholly incorrect and its like. well thats... not necessarily true. yeah, some art is gonna have characters youre MEANT to look at as parts of a story and not really as a Person! but in some stories, approaching the story from the lens of envisioning the characters as if they were real IS part of the point. many stories will encourage the audience to do this and not just "poorly written" stories. in fact, many stories use this concept to build their themes, not just their world and plot!!

i dont think its necessarily wrong, then, to have a healthy outlook about yeah, characters arent always going to be written exactly how people would act and thats important to understanding different narratives, but some stories are expecting the audience to in order to make concepts stick better! not even counting that people just sometimes like to see stories who have realistically written characters for pure entertainment value, which in itself can be misused by writers in lieu of saying meaningful things with said characters, but also a story can have a deliberate appeal to entertainment without it inherently being because the writers didnt care about themes or the message they were conveying

(id even argue that its important for a writer to deliberately create an intended emotion in the audience and making a story entertaining, scary, upsetting, etc are all different means of creating that atmosphere that can build into how the audience is supposed to interpret the story itself! a story being entertaining CAN also be important!)