Ok so I'm listening to a really good audiobook right now, the Way of Kings/Words of Radiance books by Brandon Sanderson, and I'm loving it....buuuuut.
There is one character in the series that hits almost every one of my "oh for fuck's sake!" buttons. So I felt like partially venting my frustration, and sharing my dislike for this archetype of character.
It's what I usually call the "Girl with a TERRIBAD AWFUL NO GOOD SECRET PAIN AND PAST!!!".
Common traits for this character.
1. She has some dark past crime/sin/transgression that she has mentally locked away.
2. She can't even think about it, and any mention of it will make her shut down and withdraw into a near catatonic state of "not listening, not listening, don't think, don't think, lalalalalal" crap.
3. She has most likely run away from this past, and is pretending to be someone else in another location, and has a pathological fear of anyone finding out who she was, feeling if she can just hide from her past, then it didn't happen to her, and instead was someone else.
4. She will lie, manipulate, cheat, steal, and do pretty much anything morally/criminally wrong to protect her secret, even from her friends/allies. Justifying this behavior as being ok, because anything is allowed to hide her secret.
5. The actions of point 4 frequently will end up making the overall plot much worse for the heroes, and is frequently the driving force behind "Everything turning to shit".
6. When her secret is inevitably revealed, almost every time, her friends will still accept and love her, and not shun her like she assumes they will. So all of her self driven paranoia/guilt is in the end, pointless, and is hand waved away by her friends, without any actual repercussions.
Note to 6: Many times, the action done by the woman isn't actually very bad at all, or is totally justified in the situation e.g. Killing someone in self defense, but she feels she murdered them because of her own fucked up mental processes. Which further frustrates the issue, in that all of the above mentioned shit, was basically only because the woman was wrapped up in her own fucking drama, and couldn't see past herself to do anything productive. And she's then embraced lovingly and all that crap at the end.
I can't accurately describe, without using all caps and many profanities, how much I hate this character type in stories. I just...gah! It pisses me off so much. I find myself rolling my eyes, and growling in frustration when one of them pops up in a book/movie, and fast forwarding through their drama shit to something, anything else.
So what character archetype do you hate?
capcha phrase: Yellow Belly, oddly fitting given the context of my archetype.
There is one character in the series that hits almost every one of my "oh for fuck's sake!" buttons. So I felt like partially venting my frustration, and sharing my dislike for this archetype of character.
It's what I usually call the "Girl with a TERRIBAD AWFUL NO GOOD SECRET PAIN AND PAST!!!".
Common traits for this character.
1. She has some dark past crime/sin/transgression that she has mentally locked away.
2. She can't even think about it, and any mention of it will make her shut down and withdraw into a near catatonic state of "not listening, not listening, don't think, don't think, lalalalalal" crap.
3. She has most likely run away from this past, and is pretending to be someone else in another location, and has a pathological fear of anyone finding out who she was, feeling if she can just hide from her past, then it didn't happen to her, and instead was someone else.
4. She will lie, manipulate, cheat, steal, and do pretty much anything morally/criminally wrong to protect her secret, even from her friends/allies. Justifying this behavior as being ok, because anything is allowed to hide her secret.
5. The actions of point 4 frequently will end up making the overall plot much worse for the heroes, and is frequently the driving force behind "Everything turning to shit".
6. When her secret is inevitably revealed, almost every time, her friends will still accept and love her, and not shun her like she assumes they will. So all of her self driven paranoia/guilt is in the end, pointless, and is hand waved away by her friends, without any actual repercussions.
Note to 6: Many times, the action done by the woman isn't actually very bad at all, or is totally justified in the situation e.g. Killing someone in self defense, but she feels she murdered them because of her own fucked up mental processes. Which further frustrates the issue, in that all of the above mentioned shit, was basically only because the woman was wrapped up in her own fucking drama, and couldn't see past herself to do anything productive. And she's then embraced lovingly and all that crap at the end.
I can't accurately describe, without using all caps and many profanities, how much I hate this character type in stories. I just...gah! It pisses me off so much. I find myself rolling my eyes, and growling in frustration when one of them pops up in a book/movie, and fast forwarding through their drama shit to something, anything else.
So what character archetype do you hate?
capcha phrase: Yellow Belly, oddly fitting given the context of my archetype.
