Whenever I talk about criticism sparking new ideas, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. You can take someone else's idea, take out the bits you think are rubbage, keep the bits that are really cool, shove in this bit that's been floating around in your head, then figure out a way to implement it into something potentially awesome. And all because someone got you thinking about something familiar in a completely different way.
I've been batting around this blog entry about what I call The Boring White Guy, which is that drama-sucking character we find far too often at the center of a work. I was thinking about the Lawgiver on Defiance who is filling this necessary role within the narrative but someone forgot to put in any real flaws, so you get this character the story is always telling you is really edgy, but is clearly the most even-handed and almost always right character in the story. They try to create drama, but there's a going through the motions quality to it, because you know he'll come out the other side exactly the same minus some relatively minor supporting character who gets to die so he can have a brief dramatic emotional beat. And this isn't limited to a gender or race, as the same is largely true of the main character in Call The Midwife, who despite constant attempts to inject some level of soap opera into her life just remains this ever-constant, ever-boring center to an otherwise enjoyable and colorful show.
And I think the OP stumbles across why. Neither of these characters has any real emotional depth. They're just there ticking off the boxes of what they're supposed to be feeling in any given story in the most mechanical and obvious way possible.
As far as games go, something like The Last of Us is a stab in the right direction with Joel's emotional arc, but beyond the obvious, there's a lack of depth to his emotional life. He's a zombie slowly coming back to life and just about every other character in the story comes across as more interesting. Tess knows she's a shitty person and there's a sense of self-loathing about her... but in every situation she's the one with agency, while Joel is just pushed in the desired direction. Ellie is always very much of the moment and it's fun watching her reactions. The big emotional arc kind of works against Joel (I'm about a third of the way through the game) as you can make a pretty decent guess where this is headed and there hasn't been any real surprises along the way... so far.
So I'm not even sure it's about being all realistic about emotions, just letting men have them. In GTA V, Trevor ends up being the only character who truly stands out and that's because they just let him experience whatever emotion comes into his head, whether it be anger, defensiveness, or a moment of weakness. The other two guys never really vary much, just hitting their respective marks in obvious ways. Like there's this really great scene in one of the Gears of Wars games (third one, I think) where the football player experiences this one really great memory of his previous life. It's just a wonderful uplifting and tragic scene which puts all the drama of Dom searching for his wife to shame. It feels like a genuine emotion, nothing something manufactured for the plot.
Which might go a long way toward explaining why in the last decade or so, I've taken such a huge liking to female characters as they're quite frequently the only characters with any real depth in stories. Stripped of any obvious power fantasies, they're allowed to be strong, weak, vulnerable, powerful, reserved, extroverted, and so on in whatever combination makes sense at the time. They're wonderfully changeable characters just as real people are, not just a plot delivery device as far too many male characters are written.
