He spends all afternoon hunting the moon

[sovay]

I don't feel it should be a controversial opinion that not all favorite characters are figures of identification or representation nor should they be treated as such, but I finally managed to articulate to spatch why the expectation to the contrary bothers me so much, aside from the normal number of times since childhood that I have had to fend off people taking statements of narrative interest as a kind of personality quiz: especially these days, it feels like an extension of personal branding, this idea that your clothes and your reading material and your writing music are all advertisements of your ethics or politics or allegiances—assertions, not even reflections, of your identity—and everything you like must be recognizable as a you sort of thing as opposed to sometimes just the most interesting writing in the book or acting on the screen. Yes, everything tells you something about a person. No, it's not the TAT, and it's especially not the weighing of the heart. I hadn't had any dust-ups with purity culture in fandom lately, so I wasn't sure why the subject was on my mind, but it turns out that today was the twenty-year anniversary of my beginning to keep a list of favorite characters in literature and media whenever I ran across them. I did it to find out if there were patterns. I wondered at the time if my tastes would have changed entirely in twenty years. The answer turns out to be a relatively solid "no," although it interests me that in some cases I could still produce a short essay on the character in question and in others I barely remember their source material or why they appealed to me. More aggravatingly, it reminded me how much I miss live theater. Some of these people I can revisit, but that opera from the Yale School of Music in 2005 or that play from the Trinity Rep in 2009 are memory alone. I can tell from the dates when I started really watching movies.

Comments

[sholio]

I don't get it either. I had never actually had the experience of encountering a fictional character that I really, truly identified with until a few years ago (Peggy Carter - it was interesting to me because that's such a rare thing for me that I really noticed it). It's just not how I typically engage with fiction; I want to be caught up in their world, not entangled with mine. I never had self-insert fantasies either - I mean, for me, any fictional experience is about the immersion, and trying to put real-world me in there breaks the fantasy. (I remember my sister talking about her own self-insert fantasies when we were teenagers and being baffled by it. I would never have even thought of the concept if she hadn't told me about it - this was pre-internet - and I genuinely couldn't see the appeal, since for me most of the fun was in the characters dealing with their world and relationships. My real-world self had no part to play!)

Obviously there's always some level of empathy and vicariously experiencing the world through the characters, but not usually in a way that translates to "I see specific aspects of myself in these people", let alone "This is an element of my identity." (Which there's not really with Peggy either, but it was just interesting to actually feel that for the first time in my life, that close identification with a character in a way I didn't normally.)

There are certain things I very predictably like in fiction, but I don't think it's something that can be used for a litmus test of me as a person. I remember someone once, in an online discussion, calling me a psychopath for finding the protagonist's abusive guardians more interesting than the protagonist - but I'm drawn to twisty, emotionally fraught character relationships, and characters with a lot hiding below the surface, whaddya gonna do about it?

Anyway, I feel like this has accelerated with recent fandom, and especially with people not just identifying with characters but projecting onto them - so a character doesn't really work as an identification object unless they also share all the elements of your identity that are important to you. Which is harmless fun as long as everyone agrees that it's a game of let's-pretend; of course the problem is that it doesn't always stay that way. The same character can't be 22 mutually contradictory things, and two different people insisting that they factually, objectively are some contradictory subset of those things, especially with the fraughtness that comes from thinking of the character as an extension of yourself, is a guaranteed recipe for an interpersonal explosion.

And if you're coming from that view of fandom - a view that is completely alien to my own experience of fiction - then you're also going to collide headlong with people who love characters with unsavory character traits, not really understanding that they're loving them in a very different way than your own love-object identity-brand kind of way.

[jesse_the_k]

Ah! Thank you for these words -- like you I've never wanted to insert myself in the fictions I explore. Hadn't realized this was an option!

[sovay]

I had never actually had the experience of encountering a fictional character that I really, truly identified with until a few years ago (Peggy Carter - it was interesting to me because that's such a rare thing for me that I really noticed it).

That's so neat! Do you know what it was about Peggy?

I also do not interact with fiction primarily through self-identification. I can remember two instances of self-insert from my childhood and in neither case was the character actually me so much as an invented role within the world. What I have been able to identify in several, especially childhood favorites is that they were telling me something important or giving me a framework within which to think about something about myself or the world, but I classify that differently from feeling that a character is just like me—or I'm just like a character. I have deep and enduring feelings about a whole lot of fictional people I would not want to be. Occasionally I worry I have ended up as some of them anyway.

for finding the protagonist's abusive guardians more interesting than the protagonist

It does happen more often these days, but I consider it a relatively recent development in my relationship with literature and media that I can like a protagonist best. What was the story?

but I'm drawn to twisty, emotionally fraught character relationships, and characters with a lot hiding below the surface, whaddya gonna do about it?

My favorite character in A Thread of Grace (2005), Mary Doria Russell's novel of Jewish-Italian partisans in World War II, was the ex-Nazi doctor with a bad conscience and a worse case of TB. He has an unanswerable moral problem and his efforts to live with it—and the novel's low-key but steady refusal to let the reader forget what he's trying to live with—interested me more than anything else in the book, including the character I am fairly certain was the author's favorite; I could appreciate the one, but I was fascinated by the other. This was considered by my friend group fairly typical at the time.

Anyway, I feel like this has accelerated with recent fandom, and especially with people not just identifying with characters but projecting onto them - so a character doesn't really work as an identification object unless they also share all the elements of your identity that are important to you.

spatch also identified the projection aspect as a major cause of ship wars and purity wank. I am probably as susceptible to headcanons as the next person with opinions, but I hadn't even gotten to thinking about it in those terms, from which you may conclude it is alien to me as well.

And if you're coming from that view of fandom - a view that is completely alien to my own experience of fiction - then you're also going to collide headlong with people who love characters with unsavory character traits, not really understanding that they're loving them in a very different way than your own love-object identity-brand kind of way.

Yep. I just wish that didn't turn into a moral judgment war of its own.

[ethelmay]

I think C.S. Lewis pointed out that a lot of viewpoint characters aren't there for you to identify with or even find especially interesting - he instanced Gulliver and Alice. I was really surprised to find Mark Twain comparing Anne Shirley to Carroll's Alice, given the difference in how they function in their respective narratives.

[sovay]

I was really surprised to find Mark Twain comparing Anne Shirley to Carroll's Alice, given the difference in how they function in their respective narratives.

Yes; Alice is much more of a lens and much less of a character.

I understand the theory of blank-slate main characters, I just don't enjoy it. I like to think it's fading.

[sholio]

That's so neat! Do you know what it was about Peggy?

Several things, although I don't know why it happened so strongly with this character rather than the many other, similar characters that I didn't react to that way. But it was mainly having to do with feeling like "I want to be this person" combined with "I could see myself having exactly that emotional reaction to the situation she's in" (over and over), plus a sort of general ... aspect of wanting to follow the rules (being sort of a rule-following, don't-make-waves person naturally), but being unable to because her sense of self is so strong that if her inner core and the outer society come into conflict, the inner core of herself has to take precedence over anything that pulls her out of true. I have always felt very much that way; I've been very firmly seated in myself since I was a small child, and the few times I've let myself be pulled one way or another, I could tell, and eventually yanked the steering wheel back.

What's really interesting is that if I had gone to identify a set of traits that would have made me identify with a character, Peggy wouldn't even have made the list! I mean, in terms of how I think of myself, and characters who reflect traits that I see in myself, I tend to align with the shy nerds. I don't present especially feminine (as Peggy does); I'm not a physically active type (which Peggy is). She's not even slightly the kind of self-insert I would write, if I were inclined to do that. And yet.

It does happen more often these days, but I consider it a relatively recent development in my relationship with literature and media that I can like a protagonist best. What was the story?

The Goblin Emperor. I know that a lot of people loved that book, and loved it in a particularly intense and wholehearted way. Meanwhile, the only characters I ended up being really engaged in were the protagonist's abusive guardian and his wife, because their story seemed very interesting and fraught, and was only vaguely hinted at, as well as suggesting a certain amount of unreliable-narrator quality on the part of the viewpoint character. It was the only part of the book that was really like that for me, a part with layers that made me want to dig down and find out more. Everything else was very what-you-see-is-what-you-get in a way that didn't quite work for me.

[sovay]

I don't present especially feminine (as Peggy does); I'm not a physically active type (which Peggy is). She's not even slightly the kind of self-insert I would write, if I were inclined to do that. And yet.

The interior stuff aligns—the emotional responses, the sense of self, the modes of thinking—and that's what's important. It makes sense to me.

Everything else was very what-you-see-is-what-you-get in a way that didn't quite work for me.

Come on, I'll fight you over deadpan queer private investigator/sin-eater Thara Celehar.

(I don't know if I would say that I like Setheris in the same way that I like any number of certifiable trash fires, but I do feel for him, and I agree that what we glimpse of his marriage is complicated. I did love the book, but I don't expect my loves to be universal.)

[sholio]

Come on, I'll fight you over deadpan queer private investigator/sin-eater Thara Celehar.

Completely fair, and an excellent character!! (I did really enjoy some of the other side characters too.) I don't expect my bouncing-off to be universal either, and I think part of it is also just that thing where you're not quite at the right point in your life to really bond with a thing. It may be that if I reread at some other point, the things that didn't click into place would click for me then. I have had that experience with other books.

[anna_wing]

especially with people not just identifying with characters but projecting onto them - so a character doesn't really work as an identification object unless they also share all the elements of your identity that are important to you.

Yes! That is exactly it. THank you for putting it into words for me! Projection! The attitude always puzzled me, because it seemed to me different from sympathy or enjoyment or sheer interest, in a way that I could never quite put my finger on.

I want to be caught up in their world, not entangled with mine.

Couldn't agree more. What's the point of fiction if it only shows you what you already know?

[swan_tower]

I never had self-insert fantasies either

I had them, but at one remove. I made up a character for a licensed tie-in RPG when I was about thirteen, but never played the game (because nobody around me knew how to do RPGs), so in my head she became my world-hopping insert into whatever I was reading at the time. She wasn't precisely me -- in hindsight, I don't even feel like she had all that much in the way of distinct personality -- but insofar as I very much identified that character as Mine, I think she served the function of self-insertion.