hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2680.txt

Episode: 2680
Title: HPR2680: Some Additional Talk About Characters -- 01
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2680/hpr2680.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:25:53

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This is an HBR episode 2006 180 entitled, Some Additional Talk About Character, Zero 1, and in part
on the series Random Elements on Storytelling.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 12 minutes long, and Karim a clean flag.
The summary is, Lost in Drunks takes a look at what sorts of characters work best for certain
types of tales.
Part Zero 1.
Today's show is licensed under a CC Zero license.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Lost in Drunks, and you'll have to forgive the sound quality I'm in the car right now.
Today I would like to talk about characters in stories and their role in storytelling.
Now this is a very big subject, and I'll probably return to it at some point.
But today I'd like to talk about the different kinds of characters that you might find in a story.
Now you can find almost any kind of character in a story.
And of course, when you're referring to genre fiction, fantasy, science fiction, that sort of thing,
a person doesn't mean a human necessarily.
Children's stories have used anthropomorphic animals for many, many years.
Not just children's stories, but they're best known for it.
Essentially you're just using that animal, that android, that alien, that elf, whatever it is,
as a stand-in for a human being.
And by altering one or more different basic aspects of them, you can examine the human condition a little bit easier.
You can see it from a slightly different angle.
So in Star Trek we have Mr. Spock, and we have his eternal struggle between logic and emotions.
That is just an allegory for the human condition.
Rationality versus irrationality, and we all fight that every single day.
And he's just a stand-in for that.
It's much more explicit. It's right in your face.
This guy has this issue all the time.
But when it comes to characters, they can serve different purposes in a tale.
They can be as realistic as you possibly can make them.
And tell a story that's realistic.
They can be unrealistic and tell a story that can't possibly happen.
But that perhaps has themes that touch on the human condition to the point where we empathize with them.
Many of the fantasy stories of recent years, or past years, superhero stories, that sort of thing,
they cover situations and experiences that are far beyond the human norm.
Things that just simply can't happen.
And yet we still care about these characters.
Now why is that? How is that even possible?
These are people who engage in experiences and activities that are patently impossible.
Yet we come to care about what they're doing.
It isn't because what they're doing is so believable. It's not.
What's believable is the character that is experiencing it.
If you can make these characters seem like real people, then we're going to care about what they're doing.
It doesn't matter how ridiculous, impossible, stupid, bizarre, or alien to our own experience.
Any of that is, if we believe the character, we believe the situation.
There are times, though, when you want a character that is not even remotely accessible,
a character that we really honestly can't understand.
They're also a stand-in. They're a stand-in for the unknowable.
In real life, there are many times people will do things and we simply don't get it.
You know, we may think about it for years afterwards.
Why did this person do what they did?
But it is unknown, and it will remain that way forever.
Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes that's extremely tragic.
And it can leave a scar in your life. It doesn't have to.
Again, it could just be something bizarre and random and ultimately, unimportant.
It's just something you might remember. You saw somebody do something weird while you were walking down the street.
And it stuck with you because it was either so funny or so strange.
And you never got the context for it.
Whatever the reason for them doing whatever they were doing, you never find out.
Then, of course, there are other things that are much more emotionally compelling in our lives.
It remains a mystery.
Characters who are innately unknowable, their motivations, primarily, are innately unknowable.
These characters are kind of a stand-in for that sort of thing.
Even if they're major characters in a story, if they're doing things and ultimately,
we never really understand why they're doing what they're doing.
We never really get a handle on the motivation behind this behavior.
In such situations, that character is a stand-in for human mystery.
Not larger mystery, not treasures, you know, buried treasure.
The more immediate mysteries of life, and that is the mystery of our fellow human beings.
And in such a situation, characters like that can serve a very important function in the story.
And that is to leave other characters, and especially the reader, viewer, listener, whatever, the audience,
to leave them wondering, why?
Why did they do what they did?
You know, why are they doing this?
Now, sometimes a character, especially in simplistic stories of Good vs. Evil,
which is possibly the simplest story in modern times.
Good vs. Evil, very binary, very simple.
It doesn't necessarily mean it's unimportant.
It certainly doesn't mean it's bad, but it is a very simple structure.
Star Wars, you know, you have your Dark Side of the Force versus the Light Side of the Force played out on a very large scale.
Darth Vader, Darth Vader is compelled by the Dark Side of the Force,
essentially a negative force, a force of selfishness,
while other people might consider evil.
And he dresses him black, he's your bad guy, right?
And he's your bad guy throughout those three movies, parts four, five, and six.
And of course, he appears in the break walls and his influences fell throughout the rest of the films.
But we'll just stick with those three for now for this conversation.
And he is a binary character, and he's actually very, very simple throughout this story,
until the third movie, until part six.
I would posit that that was a poorly written part of that story,
because until part six, we have no idea that there is any conflict whatsoever inside Darth Vader.
We don't see it at all. It never shows itself.
And in fact, we don't hear about any kind of conflict inside this guy.
And conflict, in this case, means depth.
It means complexity to the character.
Before that, he is essentially just a force of evil, and that is it.
That's really all this guy is. There's nothing else to him.
But until part six, we don't hear about this conflict.
Until Luke says no, there is good inside him, I feel it.
And until the very end of the movie, when he gets rid of the emperor,
and is, quote unquote, redeemed, we have to take Luke's word for it.
Because we haven't seen a single thing about this guy to make us believe,
the audience, believe that this guy is conflicted in any way, shape, or form.
Now, I think personally, that should have been foreshadowed much earlier.
It should have been foreshadowed in the first movie.
We should have seen some level of conflict, something about him,
that we say, I don't know if this guy is entirely on board with this agenda.
Because then, when he does turn at the end of the movie,
it wasn't just, oh, Luke was right, it would be, oh, I was right.
When you're going to have a character with some level of complexity,
you have to start early.
Now, again, I am talking about a story that is innately simplistic,
a good versus evil story.
When you have a story like that, these characters can be much larger than life.
These characters can really just stand in for these large concepts of the human condition.
Other stories that are basically human dramas without genre overtones.
Basically, just stories about people.
And perhaps even a modern setting, not a historical one,
a simplicity of setting, which is always going to be whatever the modern setting is.
If it was a film, because it's visual, I talk a lot about film and television
because they're visual and very widely spread in modern times.
Everybody knows the movie, everybody knows the television.
If this film has a simplicity of setting,
you can then focus on complexity of character with a bit more ease.
If you don't have simplicity of setting, then it is a larger hall.
If you can capture that, that's a lot of work in and of itself.
Your setting needs a great deal of attention.
Then if you can give us complex characters on top of that,
that's quite an accomplishment from the storytelling standpoint.
If you can pull it off, that's great.
I would argue that by and large, star wars are something simple like that.
That doesn't do it at all.
But it's not trying to.
It's not a fault of the story.
They're not trying to do that.
They're trying to really tell these allegories on a large scale.
It's like an opera in many ways.
It's this simplistic story being presented in a huge way.
And the structure of the story is what is required to tell that kind of tale.
If we have characters that don't stand up to it,
then what you have is a beautiful looking tale that doesn't actually tell you anything you want to hear.
That sort of dissonance between the tale and the characters
can leave you wanting.
Because character is not divorced from setting.
See, that's a thing that we need to understand.
Your setting has to match the character.
What you're doing, the story you're telling,
where you're telling it, and who you're using to tell it,
these things all must mesh.
If they don't all mesh, you've got a problem.
See, the worst thing, the absolute worst thing for a story
is not for the audience, the viewer, the reader, whatever.
It's not for them when it's all done to say,
you know, I had some problems with some of this stuff.
When I think about it, I had a problem with the character.
I had a problem with this, or I had a problem with that.
That's not the worst thing that could happen.
The worst thing is that they think about that during the story.
If they're not sucked into this thing,
if the action of the story, the setting of the story,
and the characters within the story,
if they are not holding your audience,
then you have failed there.
Now, of course, you don't have control
about the things that are happening around your audience.
And that's not your fault.
But it's your fault if they're watching it,
paying attention, and their mind is wandering.
They're noticing the problems.
That is your fault.
That is something that the storyteller has failed on.
And they failed because at least one,
maybe more of these elements,
you're setting your character,
and the story you're trying to tell within those things,
or with those things.
At least one of these things is failing.
Character is a tool.
Your characters are nothing but tools to tell a story.
That's their only function.
They don't have a function beyond that.
Anyway, this has just been some really random talk
about a very complicated subject.
I'm likely to go back to character again.
So why don't we call this one,
talk about characters part one,
because there's way, way, way more to talk about.
Maybe next time I'll even make a list of points
I want to get to.
But at any rate, this has been lost in Bronx.
If you have any comments about this episode,
or any others, please leave them in the comments
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