![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gravityeyelidsvia http://ift.tt/2jhqDmc:
mairzydotes:
pedoshaming:
prokopetz:
On top of everything else, what gets me about the whole “stubbly, brown-haired, thirtysomething white dude with anger management problems” thing is that I’m not convinced it even serves its ostensible purpose.
Game creators are all like: “Well, we have to do that so that players can identify with the protagonist!”
Like, I am a stubbly, brown-haired, thirtysomething white dude, and I can’t identify with those guys at all. That caricatured hypermasculinity they’re trying to pass off as a personality is just totally alien to me.
Seriously, I can identify with fucking Waluigi more readily than I can identify with whoever is biting on Nathan Drake’s shtick this week - at least Waluigi has an emotional range that extends beyond dull surprise and generic rage.
waluigi is passionate about sports, thats a very relatable trait
I know that pedoshaming’s comment was a joke but I think that’s kind of the crux of writing a relatable character right there
a lot of the times in boring media all we know about a character is what they don’t like. ‘he doesn’t like terrorism, he doesn’t like milk in his coffee’. it happens a lot in literature meant for teens too ‘she does’t like beanie babies, she doesn’t like preps’.
but what really makes people fall in love with a character is when they do like things. i would be (marginally) more interested in the stubbly, brown-haired, thirtysomething hypermasculine white dude if I found out he has a love of lizards. like he has a lizard background on his phone and knows all kinds of lizard facts and keeps a lizard and runs a blog about the care of lizards.
i feel like, at some point, in my generation, it became like, a sin to have likes. to be really passionate about stuff. like protagonists had to be completely focused on their problems or whatever or they’re just childish. and now it’s like, we’re coming out of that. look at homestuck. all those kids have geeky interests and they’re unapologetic about it. and it resonates with a lot of people.
mairzydotes:
pedoshaming:
prokopetz:
On top of everything else, what gets me about the whole “stubbly, brown-haired, thirtysomething white dude with anger management problems” thing is that I’m not convinced it even serves its ostensible purpose.
Game creators are all like: “Well, we have to do that so that players can identify with the protagonist!”
Like, I am a stubbly, brown-haired, thirtysomething white dude, and I can’t identify with those guys at all. That caricatured hypermasculinity they’re trying to pass off as a personality is just totally alien to me.
Seriously, I can identify with fucking Waluigi more readily than I can identify with whoever is biting on Nathan Drake’s shtick this week - at least Waluigi has an emotional range that extends beyond dull surprise and generic rage.
waluigi is passionate about sports, thats a very relatable trait
I know that pedoshaming’s comment was a joke but I think that’s kind of the crux of writing a relatable character right there
a lot of the times in boring media all we know about a character is what they don’t like. ‘he doesn’t like terrorism, he doesn’t like milk in his coffee’. it happens a lot in literature meant for teens too ‘she does’t like beanie babies, she doesn’t like preps’.
but what really makes people fall in love with a character is when they do like things. i would be (marginally) more interested in the stubbly, brown-haired, thirtysomething hypermasculine white dude if I found out he has a love of lizards. like he has a lizard background on his phone and knows all kinds of lizard facts and keeps a lizard and runs a blog about the care of lizards.
i feel like, at some point, in my generation, it became like, a sin to have likes. to be really passionate about stuff. like protagonists had to be completely focused on their problems or whatever or they’re just childish. and now it’s like, we’re coming out of that. look at homestuck. all those kids have geeky interests and they’re unapologetic about it. and it resonates with a lot of people.
