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yukieThere are a few reasons why this doesn't work any more and I'll address them all as I go, but - seriously. People. Please lose the 'but it's okay if our side does it'. It didn't fly even before the current politics made it a manky, manky proposition. it's lazy writing, and immature. If all you do is make excuses for your crew, have background characters pop in to sing their praises if they're ever (rightly) questioned for their actions, refuse to allow them to be wrong and try to justify every action...people are going to stop liking them. I can name several series in which this has happened; I'm sure everyone has ideas of their own that I never thought of.
If it's a single character whom everyone excuses or fanboys/fangirls, that character will quickly become a sue/stu and their author's-darling status will be very, very apparent.
This is especially obnoxious in RP. I have played with a couple of people who have this problem. If their character errs, it is okay or it is excused; if mine err it is a sign of their incompetence/shaky moral standing/n00bitude/et cetera. It's especially annoying with the people who are spotlight-prostitutes and who will drop their character into perilous situations at every turn in effort to grab attention. Usually these situations are easily avoided - or would be, if the characters ever grew or changed. People who play the more-equal-than card usually write stagnant characters, and/or they substitute ass-pullity power evolution for character development and then try to pass off the two as one and the same. (Note: they're not.)
it's very annoying to have your character's run of bad luck chalked up to their innate stupidity while the author's sweetheart fucks up over and over in the same ways, making the same mistakes - and yet everyone is supposed to continue to worship at the altar of that character's badassedness.
it's as annoying playing it as it is reading it. Author's darlings are nauseating.
Don't handwave or excuse your heroees' mistakes. Infallibility is a myth.
I could list a ton of examples of doin it rong.
As an example of doin it rite, though - okay don't laugh, but when it comes to us/them, Final Fantasy 7 does a good job. AVALANCHE is a terrorist organization, and the game does not try to make believe it's okay that you're exploding shit and hurting people. When the Shinra news report comes on the TV talking about the casualties? The first time I saw that, I asked my friend 'so did you really vape people or are they making shit up to get everyone in yo' faces?' When he replied 'oh it's not bullshit, we vaped people' I was amazed. I had never seen a game or story pull so few punches. I had never, until that point, seen a story or game say directly 'it is not okay if you do this, the ends to not justify the means, your bomb just killed people, and though you are doing this for the right reason YOU DID IT TEH RONG WAI N00B'. AVALANCHE are terrorists and they have made people die.
And if the news report didn't drive the point home, later on when you're trying to make Reno stop dropping the column, one of your teammates who's been taken out on the staircase says 'maybe we had this coming because of everything we did'.
AVALANCHE's actions are not excused or whitewashed.
And a damn good thing, too. One can inadvertently end up making their crew look horribly fucking creepy by making excuses for them. "They're murderers/criminals, but I'm doing the work of the greater good"? Hi, Crusaders. Hi, Spanish Inquisition. Hi, creepy people who go around murdering 'undesirables'... For an example of this business handled maturely and without sugar coating, look up the Scarlet Crusade in World of Warcraft. They're basically the Spanish Inquisition, and they make that argument: 'it's for the greater good/it's different when we do it/the divine tells us to do it!' Blizzard does not let them off the hook. Indeed, things end up going quite AWRY for them because of this attitude. And then there's ARTHAS, yeesh--
Anyway.
It's worse if your characters are in a position of authority. I know I've rambled about this before - when your characters are law enforcement personnel and they start breaking rules and covering for one another...well, there goes your sympathy for them in many a big city that's had a problem with corruption. If you're not sure why this is, wiki Frank Serpico. No, really. Go to wikipedia, look him up, look at what happened to him. Read what he has to say. Then you will know why people are very very mistrustful of this 'blue wall of silence' caca. Let me say here that I don't think all police are corrupt or grody folks; indeed I think a lot of them are decent people who want to do the right thing. But, like every human being who grows up in society, they're shaped by societal attitudes. Human beings are fallible, and they screw up; a group will usually try to protect group insiders from outsiders. It's how people are socialized to be and it is HARD to break such habits. Not impossible, just difficult.
But I digress.
Bleating that it's only fiction/that people are trying to get upset/that people are just reading to much into (insert bawwwww here) it is disingenuous and - I'll be blunt - ignorant. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Fiction exists in, and will be read in, the context of the society it's produced in (and in other societal contexts if it's imported/exported, but I'll get into that later on). The new Battlestar Galactica might take place in a future where ethnicity, sex and orientation don't matter shit for shit - but it's a television show produced in a society where they still very much matter. Therefore people rightly call bullshit when all the characters with melanin start dropping like rocks. (And rightly so - cough, cough, yes thats a TVTropes link, be warned.) So yeah. Nothing exists in a vacuum, art reflects life reflects art, I've sung this song before and I don't feel like an encore performance right now.
Annnnnnnyhow.
It's annoying when it's okay for you but not the other guy. Varying moral standards/moving the goalposts/us 'n them stuff is irritating, it's lazy writing, it's immature writing, it can end up implying a lot about your characters that you would rather you hadn't, and if you're RPing it will make your fellow players want to slap the MAC/Axe off you. Laws apply equally to every citizen in a society (or they are supposed to, SIGH okay I'll be good); what is illegal for Mark is illegal for Sylvia is illegal for Joao is illegal for Mariko is illegal for Tyrone is illegal for Cho-Ah is illegal for Giacomo is &c. &c. If your character broke a law s/he broke a law. Don't try to candy-coat it. Don;t try to candy-ass it. Don't make excuses. if they are in a position of authority, DON'T COVER IT UP. Perjury is perjury. Falsified info is falsified info. You can't say 'oh it's badwrongnasty when the vampire mafia does it but totally okay tee hee hee when my supernatural-cop heroes do it'. Now, if you want to deal with this issue IN-CHARACTER, fine! Do that! GO NUTS! Show that cheating is cheating regardless of what side you're on! (This CAN be done without "AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE! (G! I! JOOOOOOOEEEEE~!)", you just need to work a bit at it and a writer who wants to improve will work at it.) Use the actions to draw a parallel between characters! You can totally go 'okay, Vincent and Eugene both came from crappy backgrounds and had this and this happen in their lives, they were OMGBFF forever, so what was it that made Vincent choose to be a cop and Eugene choose to become a bootlegger and end up a mob boss?' Talk about how circumstances and choices affect people! WRITE LIKE A GROWN UP! Holy COW, man, there are so many character development opportunities to explore and you're wasting your fucking time trying to make excuses and play the but-but-but whine-whine-whine game? What's WRONG with you!?
...
*delicate cough*
Yeah, suffice it to say I don't see why people would pass up on genuine character development and mature addressing of real-life issues. I mean, you can have your hero try to convince herself that us/them is legit, that she was justified, did the right thing, et cetera, but have her inwardly grappling with the fact that she knows DAMN WELL she was in the wrong. You can have GENUINE CONFLICT as opposed to fake crap.
I have to fangirl FF7 again because while I know damn well it is no shining paragon of nature and deep and edgy gaming (and it doesn't try to be - it wants to tell a good story and be fun to play), it FORCES your party to face the consequences of their actions. AVALANCHE's actions kill people, and it's your actions in part that lead President Shinra to be a batshit slimy fuck and crush a sector, killing MANY MORE people. Is the sector crash your fault? No. It is Prez Shinra's. He made that choice. Reno decided to follow through. The responsibility for the crash of Sector 7 lies with the Prez and the Turks...but he blames YOU GUYS for it, and while it is not your party's fault they did play a part in the leadup to it. You guys are the luckless schlubs that sold the inert phlebotinum to the mad scientist not knowing he'd transmute it into unobtanium to make a death ray. Your actions had a consequence even though you are not at fault for that particular incident. In that case you guys are like Richter in SotN - maybe - kinda...?
Uhm.
...
Am I making sense? I think I stopped.
Anyway.
For god's sakes. Write like a grown up and game like a grown up. Don't move the goalposts, don't arbitrarily change the credentials for things, don't play 'some are more equal than others'. Your characters CANNOT ALWAYS BE COOL AND RIGHT or they stop being people and start being boring. Your characters cannot always come out on top. Make them fight for shit. Make them face consequences. WRITE LIKE AN ADULT. Work to improve your shit. Stagnation leads to malodorousness! Or dead shit! If you don't believe me let me show you the tiny scumpond puddle in the park near my parents' house, if it has not eroded into the creek! It is stagnant, it is a nasty browing orange colour at the bottom, nothing lives in it, AND IT REEKS! Your writing will become like this puddle if your characters do not grow, change and learn! Could I use any more exclamation points! I think not!
Dark 'n edgy does not mature writing make.
Making your heroes face up to their fuckups, however minor or major, is more grown-up. Facing your fuckups is what grown-ups do (ideally). Sometimes you have to go 'my bad'.
If all you do is make excuses for your characters and let them be Karma Houdinis, people will rightly call bullshit.
All people are equal, and no one is more equal than any other, kthxbai.
(This is as ever my opinion only. YMMV. But godDAMN do I ever hate handwave candy-assing!)
If it's a single character whom everyone excuses or fanboys/fangirls, that character will quickly become a sue/stu and their author's-darling status will be very, very apparent.
This is especially obnoxious in RP. I have played with a couple of people who have this problem. If their character errs, it is okay or it is excused; if mine err it is a sign of their incompetence/shaky moral standing/n00bitude/et cetera. It's especially annoying with the people who are spotlight-prostitutes and who will drop their character into perilous situations at every turn in effort to grab attention. Usually these situations are easily avoided - or would be, if the characters ever grew or changed. People who play the more-equal-than card usually write stagnant characters, and/or they substitute ass-pullity power evolution for character development and then try to pass off the two as one and the same. (Note: they're not.)
it's very annoying to have your character's run of bad luck chalked up to their innate stupidity while the author's sweetheart fucks up over and over in the same ways, making the same mistakes - and yet everyone is supposed to continue to worship at the altar of that character's badassedness.
it's as annoying playing it as it is reading it. Author's darlings are nauseating.
Don't handwave or excuse your heroees' mistakes. Infallibility is a myth.
I could list a ton of examples of doin it rong.
As an example of doin it rite, though - okay don't laugh, but when it comes to us/them, Final Fantasy 7 does a good job. AVALANCHE is a terrorist organization, and the game does not try to make believe it's okay that you're exploding shit and hurting people. When the Shinra news report comes on the TV talking about the casualties? The first time I saw that, I asked my friend 'so did you really vape people or are they making shit up to get everyone in yo' faces?' When he replied 'oh it's not bullshit, we vaped people' I was amazed. I had never seen a game or story pull so few punches. I had never, until that point, seen a story or game say directly 'it is not okay if you do this, the ends to not justify the means, your bomb just killed people, and though you are doing this for the right reason YOU DID IT TEH RONG WAI N00B'. AVALANCHE are terrorists and they have made people die.
And if the news report didn't drive the point home, later on when you're trying to make Reno stop dropping the column, one of your teammates who's been taken out on the staircase says 'maybe we had this coming because of everything we did'.
AVALANCHE's actions are not excused or whitewashed.
And a damn good thing, too. One can inadvertently end up making their crew look horribly fucking creepy by making excuses for them. "They're murderers/criminals, but I'm doing the work of the greater good"? Hi, Crusaders. Hi, Spanish Inquisition. Hi, creepy people who go around murdering 'undesirables'... For an example of this business handled maturely and without sugar coating, look up the Scarlet Crusade in World of Warcraft. They're basically the Spanish Inquisition, and they make that argument: 'it's for the greater good/it's different when we do it/the divine tells us to do it!' Blizzard does not let them off the hook. Indeed, things end up going quite AWRY for them because of this attitude. And then there's ARTHAS, yeesh--
Anyway.
It's worse if your characters are in a position of authority. I know I've rambled about this before - when your characters are law enforcement personnel and they start breaking rules and covering for one another...well, there goes your sympathy for them in many a big city that's had a problem with corruption. If you're not sure why this is, wiki Frank Serpico. No, really. Go to wikipedia, look him up, look at what happened to him. Read what he has to say. Then you will know why people are very very mistrustful of this 'blue wall of silence' caca. Let me say here that I don't think all police are corrupt or grody folks; indeed I think a lot of them are decent people who want to do the right thing. But, like every human being who grows up in society, they're shaped by societal attitudes. Human beings are fallible, and they screw up; a group will usually try to protect group insiders from outsiders. It's how people are socialized to be and it is HARD to break such habits. Not impossible, just difficult.
But I digress.
Bleating that it's only fiction/that people are trying to get upset/that people are just reading to much into (insert bawwwww here) it is disingenuous and - I'll be blunt - ignorant. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Fiction exists in, and will be read in, the context of the society it's produced in (and in other societal contexts if it's imported/exported, but I'll get into that later on). The new Battlestar Galactica might take place in a future where ethnicity, sex and orientation don't matter shit for shit - but it's a television show produced in a society where they still very much matter. Therefore people rightly call bullshit when all the characters with melanin start dropping like rocks. (And rightly so - cough, cough, yes thats a TVTropes link, be warned.) So yeah. Nothing exists in a vacuum, art reflects life reflects art, I've sung this song before and I don't feel like an encore performance right now.
Annnnnnnyhow.
It's annoying when it's okay for you but not the other guy. Varying moral standards/moving the goalposts/us 'n them stuff is irritating, it's lazy writing, it's immature writing, it can end up implying a lot about your characters that you would rather you hadn't, and if you're RPing it will make your fellow players want to slap the MAC/Axe off you. Laws apply equally to every citizen in a society (or they are supposed to, SIGH okay I'll be good); what is illegal for Mark is illegal for Sylvia is illegal for Joao is illegal for Mariko is illegal for Tyrone is illegal for Cho-Ah is illegal for Giacomo is &c. &c. If your character broke a law s/he broke a law. Don't try to candy-coat it. Don;t try to candy-ass it. Don't make excuses. if they are in a position of authority, DON'T COVER IT UP. Perjury is perjury. Falsified info is falsified info. You can't say 'oh it's badwrongnasty when the vampire mafia does it but totally okay tee hee hee when my supernatural-cop heroes do it'. Now, if you want to deal with this issue IN-CHARACTER, fine! Do that! GO NUTS! Show that cheating is cheating regardless of what side you're on! (This CAN be done without "AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE! (G! I! JOOOOOOOEEEEE~!)", you just need to work a bit at it and a writer who wants to improve will work at it.) Use the actions to draw a parallel between characters! You can totally go 'okay, Vincent and Eugene both came from crappy backgrounds and had this and this happen in their lives, they were OMGBFF forever, so what was it that made Vincent choose to be a cop and Eugene choose to become a bootlegger and end up a mob boss?' Talk about how circumstances and choices affect people! WRITE LIKE A GROWN UP! Holy COW, man, there are so many character development opportunities to explore and you're wasting your fucking time trying to make excuses and play the but-but-but whine-whine-whine game? What's WRONG with you!?
...
*delicate cough*
Yeah, suffice it to say I don't see why people would pass up on genuine character development and mature addressing of real-life issues. I mean, you can have your hero try to convince herself that us/them is legit, that she was justified, did the right thing, et cetera, but have her inwardly grappling with the fact that she knows DAMN WELL she was in the wrong. You can have GENUINE CONFLICT as opposed to fake crap.
I have to fangirl FF7 again because while I know damn well it is no shining paragon of nature and deep and edgy gaming (and it doesn't try to be - it wants to tell a good story and be fun to play), it FORCES your party to face the consequences of their actions. AVALANCHE's actions kill people, and it's your actions in part that lead President Shinra to be a batshit slimy fuck and crush a sector, killing MANY MORE people. Is the sector crash your fault? No. It is Prez Shinra's. He made that choice. Reno decided to follow through. The responsibility for the crash of Sector 7 lies with the Prez and the Turks...but he blames YOU GUYS for it, and while it is not your party's fault they did play a part in the leadup to it. You guys are the luckless schlubs that sold the inert phlebotinum to the mad scientist not knowing he'd transmute it into unobtanium to make a death ray. Your actions had a consequence even though you are not at fault for that particular incident. In that case you guys are like Richter in SotN - maybe - kinda...?
Uhm.
...
Am I making sense? I think I stopped.
Anyway.
For god's sakes. Write like a grown up and game like a grown up. Don't move the goalposts, don't arbitrarily change the credentials for things, don't play 'some are more equal than others'. Your characters CANNOT ALWAYS BE COOL AND RIGHT or they stop being people and start being boring. Your characters cannot always come out on top. Make them fight for shit. Make them face consequences. WRITE LIKE AN ADULT. Work to improve your shit. Stagnation leads to malodorousness! Or dead shit! If you don't believe me let me show you the tiny scumpond puddle in the park near my parents' house, if it has not eroded into the creek! It is stagnant, it is a nasty browing orange colour at the bottom, nothing lives in it, AND IT REEKS! Your writing will become like this puddle if your characters do not grow, change and learn! Could I use any more exclamation points! I think not!
Dark 'n edgy does not mature writing make.
Making your heroes face up to their fuckups, however minor or major, is more grown-up. Facing your fuckups is what grown-ups do (ideally). Sometimes you have to go 'my bad'.
If all you do is make excuses for your characters and let them be Karma Houdinis, people will rightly call bullshit.
All people are equal, and no one is more equal than any other, kthxbai.
(This is as ever my opinion only. YMMV. But godDAMN do I ever hate handwave candy-assing!)
