Characters are what characters do (and what they go through)

One thing that interests me a lot is what makes a story interesting, and I’ve found that a large part of the answer involves interesting characters. Of course, all that does is invite the question “what makes a character interesting?” Fortunately, I think there’s a more useful answer to that one.

To put it simply, it seems that bootstrapping characters simply doesn’t work. Dreaming up some dude, giving him a name, a look and a background isn’t enough, no matter how deep or complex or tragic or “badass” those are (whatever tickles your fancy).

In order to make the... story-absorber (let’s call him a “player”) care about the characters, they have to identify with them, and the only way of doing that is accompanying said characters through their share of gut-wrenching situations. Therein lies that mysterious leap between “this feels plastic” and “this feels real”. The actual situations don’t even have to be extremely believable or interesting: cook up enough cheesy situations to put your character through and he has a chance of earning a place in someone’s heart... somewhere. Want a demonstration? Go watch a soap opera. If people can become attached to those characters, then they can get attached to anyone if you can only get their attention long enough.

Also, there’s probably a limit to how many characters a player can genuinely relate to. The specific values probably resemble those that govern human relationships (a handful of close friends, a few tens of people on speaking terms, several tens of acquaintances, with variations between individuals, of course). It’s a relatively thin line to walk, because the divide between a “main” character and a “filler” one tends to be blurry, and the player’s attention budget is fairly limited (no, I’m not mocking anybody).

But the lesson I take from all this is that trying to brute-force a character into “main cast status” doesn’t tend to yield good results. Stories have a way of telling themselves, as anyone who ever tried to put one down knows.

Inevitably, of course, some characters are going to be more important than others right from the start (you do need some semblance of a main thread to get the thing going) but the specifics of how they develop, which are going to come out as pivotal, and which will become tragic fodder* is something best left to be digested for a while in the writer’s brain, along with the story itself.

In other, shorter words, characters need to be cultivated.

Which is why I’m cautiously optimistic of a BlizzCon interview where the devs kinda sorta implied that they were peppering the game with candidates for the post of “important character”. That’s good. Here’s hoping there will be no more Deathwings (probably the most arbitrary villain in the fictional universe to date, and that’s saying something) and Varians (a valiant attempt but one that feels a wee bit plastic, but then I didn’t read the comic).

The whole “time-travel-but-not-really” aspect is... euuhhrm... well, you know. Weird. But like I wrote above, it doesn’t really matter if the character’s adventures and misadventures are cheesy, so long as they keep coming in a relatively consistent thread. Let’s be honest here, Arthas’s development had plenty of “wait, what?” moments, and he was still quite probably the most well-loved character in Warcraft, ever**.

So, who knows... maybe Garrosh can become what Thrall in my opinion failed to be (and not from lack of trying, Lord knows): an orc with a personality, and a story to back it, so that we players (and, more importantly, Metzen) can have a backlog of his choices and actions, good and bad, that can be reasonably extrapolated from to create a verisimilar story – or as much as can be expected from Warcraft.

They mentioned Anduin and Wrathion. If that’s about it (one per race?), I still think that Blizzard are putting their eggs in too few baskets. Surely in a game this size there are other characters that can be kept around for tentative promotion. Say, for example, whatshisnameagain, Saurfang the Elder; or Brann Bronzebeard. Those have been around plenty long to make for interesting main characters. And there are lots of others, of course.

Unfortunately, some other characters that were meant to be mains like Thrall and Jaina will probably need some kind of special treatment after years of being bland guys who went around doing random good deeds without any apparent goal. Maybe they could go in the Tragic Deaths bucket?

Jaina, specifically, looks like she’s being honed for becoming a villain, after all the “tolerance” crap she was made to repeat over the years. That’s unfortunate, since villains in WoW tend to become raid bosses sooner rather than later – and then either corpses or the fodder of “it was only a setback!” jokes. It would be much more interesting if she could follow in her father’s footsteps and become a harsh voice of remembrance of the evils that glory-lusting orcs can perpetrate. For two reasons:

First, it might redeem the whole simplistic crap in the Frozen Throne about Daelin being a “prejudiced, intolerant human” (the notion that Warcraft humans are pompous versions of pea-brained Southern rednecks being fairly pervasive at the time***). Maybe Jaina’s father was being shortsighted, but you have to admit that after the First and Second Wars, he had a compelling point. As Jaina found out.

Orcs are “savage but honorable”, they say – but the latter doesn’t excuse the former, nor does it hide its ugliness. I’m all for people who try to cultivate their virtues and fight their vices, but the idea that orcs under Thrall are goody-goodies who simply enjoy some playful axe-swinging every now and then is laughable.

Second, anything has to be better than the “she went crazy and had to be put down” excuse that “explains” a large portion of Warcraft’s bad guys.

Well, that’s enough blabbing for one night. Thanks for reading!

*GRRM for one likes to put the former and the latter in the same bucket, which some may call “ballsy”. I think he’s just a frustrated liberal who likes to portray humanity in the worst possible light.

** Like the joke goes: “tell them only that the Lich King is dead... and that World of Warcraft... died with him.”

*** I’ll take the company of a trailer park redneck over a collective-guilt liberal’s any day of the week, too. Both have thick skulls and intractable tempers, but at least the former is a more honest idiot.