hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2687.txt

Episode: 2687
Title: HPR2687: Some Additional Talk About Characters -- 02
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2687/hpr2687.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:32:30

---

This in HBR episode 2687 entitled, Some Additional Talk About Character, Nero 2.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 13 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 Nero 2.
Today's show is licensed under a CC Nero license.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is Lost in Drunks, and you'll have to forgive the sound quality I'm in the car right now.
Today I want to talk a little bit more about characters.
There are a couple of ways to approach characters or the inclusion of certain types of characters in stories.
Often the choice of character is dependent upon the storytellers style of story creation.
Some people create their characters first and then think of interesting things for those characters to do.
Other people will create the situation and say, what's the best type of character to tell this story?
Both of them are valid, and probably the most useful technique would be to mix them.
So if you have, maybe it's an espionage action thing, well, I don't know what we need, but I want someone who can do all the action.
I want maybe an undercover agent.
I want this action character, so I don't know where this character is going to fit.
But I'm going to make this character fifth, because this is a concept I want in my action story.
It's a terrorist attack, crazy anti-government terrorists, and they've gotten a hold of some kind of secret nukes that can't be detected with magical radiation detectors.
And they've smuggled it into Washington, D.C., because they're going to get rid of all their perceived enemies.
And that's the premise. We've come up with that premise, so what kind of characters do we need?
Well, I guarantee you that if the government knew about the bomb in advance, they would find the bomb,
because they would arrest absolutely everybody who was even remotely involved, and they would get the information out of them.
So in order for this story to work, they can't know about it in advance.
So it's a complete surprise, right?
So if it's a complete surprise, then our action hero doesn't know how to defuse it.
That means we need somebody else.
Again, just making up a retiree from the army who was trained in defusing nuclear weapons.
That sounds like a very specific thing, but in point of fact, there are a bunch of people in the world who've been trained in that.
Some of them are currently serving. Some of them are retired. This is a retiree.
Maybe we want the retiree to be a woman because we don't often see them in roles like this.
So here's our story. We've got it. We've got an action tale. We've got crazy villains.
We've got a terrible calamity that needs to be averted.
We have an action hero who's found out about it and is chasing this thing down and will find it.
And we have someone who is poised to help.
There are these two. We have to have them cross paths.
And once they do, the rest of it we can fill in as we go.
In that little scenario, we have a plot.
And we have a character that we want to fit into this plot.
We had that character walking in, remember?
And more or less wrapped the plot around the character.
But we've also gone at character through creating a character first
and putting them in a good story and creating the story
and putting a good character in this one tale.
Two different approaches. Now you don't have to go that way.
You can absolutely go one or the other entirely and come up with something fantastic.
That was just an example to illustrate how you might approach
creating these characters.
Now, are these real characters?
Are they fully fleshed out characters?
No, we haven't even come up with a name for them yet.
We've just come up with concepts.
So what makes a good character in this context?
We have to believe that these people could be real.
They have to be realistic for the tale.
If they're not, it's not much of a character.
And you end up, like I mentioned in a previous episode,
talking about character and story and story arcs,
you end up with a character that doesn't have an arc.
The character begins and ends exactly what they are.
They're not really characters.
They're adjuncts to the plot because the plot requires a character.
It can do all these things and you've
blocked down essentially this plot device that will function in the required manner.
Not every story needs.
Now, I've set that before and I'll say it again.
Not every story needs a realistic main character.
Not every story needs a character with a character arc.
However, in order for that to work,
we have to believe it within context of the tale.
So the less realistic the character is,
the less realistic the story has to be.
If the story is primarily tongue in cheek
or is very, very much just action point driven,
that is for moment to moment to moment,
it is nothing but action.
We just need a character to get us from A to B to C to D.
In that case, we don't need super developed characters.
If it's done right, we don't even have time to get to know them.
We're just following them in their crazy exploits on this story.
Or if the story is more or less done,
not necessarily for laughs, but is lighthearted,
you can get away with having a character who's sort of like that
because it's goofy and funny and halfway to being a joke.
That flies, that does fly.
There are action comedies that are exactly like that.
There are also action comedies where the characters all have depth.
It depends on the style of story you're telling,
the style of plot or action that you're offering to your audience.
However, if we are not doing that type of story
and we have a story where we want characters with depth,
what I just described for our espionage thriller tale
with the crazy terrorists,
what we want to do is we want to flesh those characters out,
the main characters, and possibly even the villains.
Because in the end, if we have a story like that
that has good guys and bad guys,
your good guys are only as powerful,
they're only as good as your bad guys are bad.
Your bad guys have to be formidable.
If they are not formidable, your hero is perceived
as never really having been threatened to begin with.
That is the problem with a lot of action tales.
We have these characters that are so over the top powerful.
We all know how this is going to end.
We all know where it's going with stories like that.
The character is so overwhelmingly powerful
that the bad guys have no chance against this person.
And there's no point in even watching the tale.
What we probably want is a character
who has a certain amount of depth,
a certain amount of nuance.
And that includes both the hero and the villain.
Because if the villain is complicated,
if the villain has levels,
we don't have to agree with a single thing that villain is doing.
But if we see where that villain is coming from,
even though the conclusions they come up with are ridiculous,
their purpose in doing what they're doing
has reasoning behind it.
It might be flawed, it might be insane,
but there is reasoning behind it.
That character has more depth.
They have more power and investment in the story,
because they obviously have thought all this through.
Not just by the amount of traps that they set for the heroes,
by how complicated their evil plot is,
they are deeply committed to what they're doing.
If you have a villain who's not committed,
they're not much of a villain.
They're just a thug or whatever.
They're not interesting.
In order to be interesting,
your villain has to be committed,
highly committed to what they're doing.
And that makes the stakes that much higher,
because not only have they come up with this
diabolical plan to blow up Washington, DC,
they are committed to the cause,
meaning if their plan doesn't work,
they're going to keep trying.
They're going to come up with something else.
These are not people that give up.
That makes your hero have to rise above themselves,
essentially.
You have a villain who's risen above themselves,
so you have heroes that have to at least meet
the capacity of the villain.
If the hero is bland,
if the hero can win easily,
there's no point.
There's no point.
So that's just heroes and villains
when it comes to characters.
But let's change it up.
Instead of hero and villain,
let's say protagonist and antagonist.
Now antagonist,
you know, I don't really like the word.
Sometimes because it can be a little confusing.
And antagonist very often gets conflated
with antagonizing.
And antagonist in a story
does not necessarily antagonize the protagonist.
They only oppose them.
You can have a drama,
a heavy drama,
where maybe it's two brothers
and it's a story about fathers and sons,
a classic story about maybe working class father
who always wanted his sons to do better than he did.
And maybe one of them went to college
and the other one didn't.
And the one who went to college
will mix it up a little bit.
The one that went to college is the screw up.
That one never did make it.
That's the near-to-well son.
And the one that didn't rise above
is the long-suffering son.
The screw up for whatever reason
is still the golden boy in the family.
The family still looks at this kid
like he's the greatest, but he's not.
And the other one is just average and often forgotten
because all he does is work for a living.
Maybe he's a plumber.
All he does is do plumbing work all day and come home.
And he watches football on the weekends
and they go camping in the summer.
And that's about as exciting as this guy's life is.
Whereas the other brother who went to college
became very successful in whatever business he's doing.
He flies all over the world
and he goes to all these exotic places
but his life is in his shambles.
And he doesn't have a friend in the world
because he's been so horrible to people.
He's a screw up.
He screwed up left and right.
And there is your drama
because the father who had all these great wishes has died.
And these two sons have come together
at the time of the funeral
and we are going to examine their lives.
We're going to see their lives.
And if we're following one son in particular,
that son may or may not be our protagonist.
Perhaps we're following the near-to-well son.
He's our antagonist.
He's not a great guy
because this isn't necessarily a story of redemption.
This is not one of those stories
where you can insert someone
who doesn't need a character arc.
It's a heavy drama.
Everybody needs an arc.
And what is this guy's arc?
Where is he going?
What revelation is he going to get
that's going to bring him somewhere
where he learns something new,
either about himself or about his family
or about his brother,
his father.
What's going to happen with this guy?
Now I chose him
because he's not a likable character.
That puts the onus on the storyteller
to make this guy tolerable.
He's not a great guy
but he's our main character.
He's not our protagonist.
He might be our antagonist
because the guy we like,
the other brother, the good brother,
the one who works hard
who provides for his family
who never met his father's expectations
because his father's expectations
were unrealistic or unfair.
And he dealt with that burden
at home,
close to home in the same time
while the other brother
went out traipsing around
living the high life and screwing it all up.
And we're not following the good brother
because following the good brother
we get boring.
The guy's a good guy, right?
And he's suffering
and it's sad
but he's a good guy.
We want to follow the interesting guy
who's lived the interesting life
and somehow screwed it up.
That's a story I want to see.
So anyway,
this was just a little more thought
about how you might pick a character,
come up with a certain type of character
for a certain type of story
and what we need them to do in our story.
Just a few thoughts, that's all.
If you have any comments
on this episode or any other,
please leave them in the section
for it on Hacker Public Radio
or better yet,
create your own episode
because you have opinions
and you have interests
and we want to hear about them.
This has been Lost in Bronx.
Thank you for listening.
Take care.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network
that releases shows every weekday
Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast
then click on our contributing
to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded
by the digital dog pound
and the infonomicum computer club
and is part of the binary revolution
at binwreff.com.
If you have comments on today's show,
please email the host directly,
leave a comment on the website
or record a follow-up episode yourself
unless otherwise stated.
Today's show is released
under Creative Commons'
Attribution ShareLive 3.0 license.