When does a character stop being a character?

[NotaNuffian]

This is a short follow up to https://forum.scribblehub.com/threads/can-a-mecha-be-considered-a-character.23195/

So if enough fluff can anthropomorphize a mecha, how much do you remove a living breathing person until they are just items and obstacles?

I am thinking about the many mooks that the hero kill along the way but somehow sparing the main villain because "killing is bad" and "everyone (important enough) deserves a second chance."

 

[Tempokai]

When you remove enough symbolic weighting that you as a reader don't care about them anymore. They exist, and they don't raise anything, even disgust or pity. Think of balrogs in the Invisible Dragon, they die and that's it. We don't know about them, why they exist, and why they died, therefore they become things that Invisible Dragon just kills and moves on.

 

[ACertainPassingUser]

They don't. A character are always a character.

Once they live, they're no longer an "object".

If they're gone away, we will think them as leaving us.

If theyre dead, we will recogize them as dead person, dead character.

If they're turning back into object, we are still gonna recognize them as dead character. always.

You never categorize a person who's sleeping forever as still living or as an object. You categorize them as dead, until they wake up again.

If until the end of the chapter, theyre still Sleeping, they're dead forever. And one day, we will follow them.

If they wake up, they simply sleep afterall, and they actually comes back.

If they wake up at the start of the story, they're sleeping beauty trope.

Nevertheless,

once they transform from "object" to "character" there won't go be going back to recognize them as object anymore inside our thought.

Watch Toy Story.

Do you ever recognize Woody and Buzz as object afterwards ?

It require special type of mental state and mindset to actually recognize a person as object and not a person anymore, and not as a joke or to peg you down.

Even enemies are a person. Evil dangerous enemy of a person. Even after you turned them into object, theyre still recognized as a person inside your awareness and memory. Even if you daid otherwise.

 

[NotaNuffian]

They don't. A character are always a character.

Once they live, they're no longer an "object".

If they're gone away, we will think them as leaving us.

If theyre dead, we will recogize them as dead person, dead character.

If they're turning back into object, we are still gonna recognize them as dead character. always.

You never categorize a person who's sleeping forever as still living or as an object. You categorize them as dead, until they wake up again.

If until the end of the chapter, theyre still Sleeping, they're dead forever. And one day, we will follow them.

If they wake up, they simply sleep afterall, and they actually comes back.

If they wake up at the start of the story, they're sleeping beauty trope.

Nevertheless,

once they transform from "object" to "character" there won't go be going back to recognize them as object anymore inside our thought.

Watch Toy Story.

Do you ever recognize Woody and Buzz as object afterwards ?

It require special type of mental state and mindset to actually recognize a person as object and not a person anymore, and not as a joke or to peg you down.

Even enemies are a person. Evil dangerous enemy of a person. Even after you turned them into object, theyre still recognized as a person inside your awareness and memory. Even if you daid otherwise.

I'll be honest with you, I am using a computer right now and seeing your pf scared the hell out of me. So much so that I can agree your words to a certain extent.

Take the mooks and rows of soldiers and civilians MC and his rowdy gang might need to roll over for certain scenes.

Unless the author is preparing to make mentions on them later, via third party or a remorseful MC and gang. No one, not even readers would recognise these "people" who were lost and everyone along the ride just roll with it.

Yes, this reminded me of the scenes in MCU's Civil War, where a grieving mother confronted Tony (hey, the lord and saviour of NU and SH) of her dead son. Up until then, the son is a statistic, unfortunate lives that were lost because reasons.

 

[Forcalor]

I am thinking about the many mooks that the hero kill along the way but somehow sparing the main villain because "killing is bad" and "everyone (important enough) deserves a second chance."

If taken in context of this, most likely it's a symptom of a genre (or perhaps of a writing that isn't focused on evoking empathy for some reason). Those 'characters' were never established as characters in the first place, unless there are some metacommentary involved about the value of a human life

Either way, I think this approach to describing a conflict with casualties is kind of unserious. We'd better attempt to convey that individual life matters even if people have to perish for the sake of the plot, or at least to somehow play around the threshold when death becomes a statistic. I don't think anyone these days does the thing where the protagonist goes murder happy and then spares the villain 'cause the life is sacred, it's kind of outdated, right? Afaik there are always some other reasons involved that generate more personal drama

 

[laccoff_mawning]

If the mecha talks to me it's a character.

I was always under assumption that it means having things like agency and personality

Borrowing from the discussion of previous thread, I'm of agreement that a character is a character if it has a voice (personality) to it. As long as a biological entity is not shown to have a personality, it's not a character.

Take a pet in a fantasy world; they are developed with personality, so they are characters. Now take a tree; it's a biological organism, but one without agency. It's not a character.

Take a bunch of trees made out of flesh and bone approximately 1.6m high that walk forward along a city road. These are not characters. The crowd is merely a forest made out of people.

If you stop and talk to them, they can become characters; but just because they can become a character doesn't mean they are currently a character.

Conversely, take a tree that can talk and share opinions. Even if it can't move, it has the voice to tell stories of what it's seen. Thus it's a character.

 

[miyoga]

Borrowing from the discussion of previous thread, I'm of agreement that a character is a character if it has a voice (personality) to it. As long as a biological entity is not shown to have a personality, it's not a character.

Take a pet in a fantasy world; they are developed with personality, so they are characters. Now take a tree; it's a biological organism, but one without agency. It's not a character.

Take a bunch of trees made out of flesh and bone approximately 1.6m high that walk forward along a city road. These are not characters. The crowd is merely a forest made out of people.

If you stop and talk to them, they can become characters; but just because they can become a character doesn't mean they are currently a character.

Conversely, take a tree that can talk and share opinions. Even if it can't move, it has the voice to tell stories of what it's seen. Thus it's a character.

I'm going to disagree with this to a point as I mention Big O in the other thread. It has no voice or agency, and yet is a character because it's indispensable to the story being told. Others mentioned Wilson and it's the same there, no personality or agency of its own, yet is still listed in the credits. A grunt/mook with personality also wouldn't be a character, in my opinion, unless they are named. Why would that matter? Because they mattered enough to the writer to deserve one.

You don't name non-characters and you don't withhold names from characters.

 

[Spacerunner357]

This is a short follow up to https://forum.scribblehub.com/threads/can-a-mecha-be-considered-a-character.23195/

So if enough fluff can anthropomorphize a mecha, how much do you remove a living breathing person until they are just items and obstacles?

I am thinking about the many mooks that the hero kill along the way but somehow sparing the main villain because "killing is bad" and "everyone (important enough) deserves a second chance."

Until there isn't any sintiance left in there body like there soul is somewhere else now. And interesting second part.
Everyone can change for the better and be good, so yeah a Anougher chance.
I don't like when people kill though, don't want to get used to that being a thing happening all the time:). For people in the stories and for my feelings. But I could just not read it and I think it's fineish if it happens rarlybut depends On the Setting the world in which the people characters Are in it. If it's normal for killing and other things to happen in that world. Hope this helps

 

[naosu]

Even being fodder is a role! Someone has to do it! [Fodder Rights Matter!] And goblins are tired of doing it. They are going on strike for more straw this week.

 

[RepresentingDesire]

I would consider ever lifeform that appears to be a character, so from the main heroine to goblin 27 to an AI to a possessed portrait is everything a character.

 

[Dieter]

The devious lil 'what is a chair'

 

[Zodiac36Gold]

Hmm, this is a strangely phylosophical question. In my opinion, a character stops being a character when you stop giving its existence in the story meaning. Anything can be a character, from a rock to the stars themselves, and it's not even a matter of humanizing them.

Oftentimes, I find, it is even a bad idea to humanize things that are not meant to act like humans. How could a flower understand the concept of killing? How would a rock comprehend the passage of time? Can a robot - or mech in your case - understand emotions, when he has never truly felt any? These are things that remove humanity, and yet they turn them into realer characters, into people that are different from your baseline human.

So, to answer your question, there is no intrinsic thing which, if you remove enough of, will result in your character not being one. The only real way to do so is to downright remove the character from the story, remove the spark that makes them a person. And even then, if you've done your job well, even death won't be enough, for the memory of them as they once were will stay with the reader and they'll see the newly changed, de-characterized character, as that same being simply having undergone a change.

In short: either you don't introduce them as a character in your story, or you just kill them. But, the moment you outline a purpose, a 'raison d'etre' for these characters to exist, they are characters, and as such will stay.

Even shorter: unless you want your readers to ship a mech and its pilot together, don't make the mech talk and act alive.

Hope this helped.

 

[Thraben]

A character stops being a character when the audience becomes aware of their existence as a purely functional implement.

I.E. John Warhammer (from Pick a Warhammer 40k book) stops being a character the exact second the audience realizes he only exists to sell you little plastic guys and does not exist to be narratively interesting to engage with.

I.E. AlphaChad69 from that one smut fic you read stops being a character the moment the audience realizes he only exists so that you can (literally or narratively) jerk off to descriptions of comedic proportions and anatomically improbable amounts of bodily fluids.

The exact second the audience can divine with 100% (perceived) certainty that a character only exists to serve some sort of NON-WATSONIAN function, they are not a character, but instead a 'game-piece' as it were for that function. He stops being 'Mason the Grizzled Veteran Soldier with a tragic backstory' and starts being 'U.S. Military Recruitment Ad'. (Example taken from Black Ops One)

Importantly it doesn't actually need to be correct in saying that John Warhammer #1245 only exists to sell little plastic guys, if it feels that way to the reader, the illusion of characterhood breaks regardless.

 

[Deleted member 266]

How about the mc or a self insert, wish fulfilments fantasy, told in second person narrative?