a hero's want vs need. is it good?
so prepare for a ramble and maybe really dumb hot take. is a hero's want vs their need any good? i came to think of this due to discussions of the movie wish which apparently supposedly doesn't have this and it's used as one of the reasons it's bad (which is false btw). and that just made me think: is that bad?
what the fuck are you talking about?
so in stories hero's often have a want and a need. a want is the thing that they are going after. a need is something they often don't know they have. needing to learn to share, to not be a dick, realize what's actually missing in their life.
arguably all of this can be waved away by saying "that's a bad reading of media", but lets do some readings of a couple pieces of media: belle from beauty and the beast wants more then her simple life, but what she needs it to find someone to love. Judy in Zootopia wants to fight prejudice but needs to confront the prejudice in herself. Elsa in frozen wants to be isolated to keep others safe but needs to learn that love is worth risks. now how could those ideas be bad?
lets start with the weakest: beauty and the beast, possibly skip to the next paragrapth. when you look things up on this you'll find people talk about the beast, not belle. she wants adventure (in the great wide somewhere) but she gets locked in a castle. to me it never felt like she got an adventure or anything. instead she needed to settle down with someone... and that someone didn't respect her, she needed to make that happen. now of course the beast was redeemable. but from beauties perspective did he start out as any worse then gaston? gaston was just a brutish oath, the beast would let her father rot in jail. something gaston would later also do, but again she needed to give a guy who'd do things like lock up her father a chance. but this is more building towards a larger point.
zootopia is a stronger read, stolen from this article: https://www.septembercfawkes.com/2021/02/characters-want-vs-need-explained-4.html now is telling people that they need to confront the prejudice they have a bad thing? of course not. but there's something incredibly insidious to it. it's basically what Jordan Peterson says: clean your room. make it so that you solve the problems you have, not the problems the world has. this is a tool of oppressors. lets say i wanted to be a racist dickwaffle, what would i want the people opposed to racism to do? oppose my racism by fighting me over it, making my racism illegal? or have them interspect and not be racist in their life while leaving me alone to do my racism? the later of course. and needs are internal. so what do wants and needs teach people? that the real problem is always internal. while this is a nice message it's also false. tons of problems aren't internal but external, and teaching people that problems are internal helps those who benefit from the external problems, such as bigots like racists and queerphobes.
the read on frozen in stolen from the same article and so is also strong. combine is with beauty and the beast (or don't, it works on it's own) and what do we see? that hero's don't actually know what they need, that their wants are incorrect and that they need to go through an internal change. don't see the problem? now lets say i watch such movies and am a homophobe... now you see how i can use these ideas against you? you say you want to be together with another man, but what you need is to find the right woman. obvious bigotry, obviously wrong, perfectly in line with screenwriting standards. screenwriting teaches people that they don't know what they need and that what they want is often wrong. this gets even worse if you're trans. if you've ever seen anything from a terf aka a trans exclusionary radical fascist then things like them saying that people need to learn to be comfortable in their bodies and not follow their wants of making themselves comfortable in their own bodies is nothing new. and guess what this is perfectly in line with screenwriting.
3. so are you against wants and needs in characters?
not in absolute terms of course. but lets say every piece of media had messages like beauty and the beast, saying that you should give even horrible people a chance so they can reveal themselves to be good. would that be good? would that be healthy? of course not. i think in that way want vs need can be seen as overused.
so i want to quickly hit on the owl house with this because i think it's an example of how you can not do it. so lets look at Luz: you can see her as a case of want: don't hurt her mother and so relinquish herself so her mom can be happy. need: open up to her mother so she can be accepted, but this feels more like an arc for her mom then for Luz, or at least heavily shared. it's also not fully true. Luz doesn't want to hide shit, she's very open, and she generally needs to be more open. she wants everything, and she needs to be allowed to want everything so her want disappears. you can almost call it a reverse. she wants everything, but her want is to not want everything, what she needs is to not feel pressured by her surroundings to not want everything. her want is internal, her need is external. this may be why some people have trouble identifying these things in TOH since it likes to turn things around, subvert expectations, which may be deeper then just the world but may even extend to theme and motivation.
or i'm just being pretentious about a show i love.
