One of the more contentious things that I think (that isn't so much contentious as simply ludicrous at face value) is that the character, in general, is either not a required component in storytelling or something that's long since worn thin on me and it would not be a bad time right now to engineer a replacement, and perhaps improve on the original idea. Needless to say, this has caused many people asking me why I think so, so I think it might help if I wrote everything that I don't like about them in one place.
Just to clarify things a little and to keep ourselves on the ground, here are some things that might not be clear at first sight, including some meta topics and expected responses to the text.
Despite the rather grand sounding title, this does not make a true case against the character, in the strictest sense. It would probably not convince anyone that characters are bad, I don't consider them harmful, and there are a dearth (read: no) sources to back assertions up Furthermore a lot of the arguments are more fundamental values differences rather than any objective statements saying that characters cause pain and suffering in the world (because I'm pretty sure they don't, as the world has endured them for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, and it's none the worse for wear), hopefully explaining the lack of sources. In view of this, I am putting this up front to make it clear that while these are values I hold dear, they are still mere feelings and not a call to action.
There are several parts to the general distaste of characters, but they are pretty fundamental to the whole idea of them, as far as I know. They are sympathy, development and environment manipulation. Each of these I shall now expand on.
Probably above all else, the value of characters as a device for readers to project themselves upon has never been more emphasised than any other quality, with perhaps the exception of character development. The author is supposed to write a "believable" character, and those can and are judged in a standard. That standard being, of course, frustratingly vague, but often the words three-dimensional, realistic and Mary-Sue are bandied about when talk about good or bad characters are afoot.
There's nothing particularly bad about this, really, but as usual, it seems like I have a lower tolerance to this. There is one thing in particular where things come to a head, and that is the projection.
More commonly called "representation", the idea is that there are certain humans out there who would find life greatly improved if they see themselves, or something they can see being as themselves, in some story or another. Not only is that utterly pathetic – which isn't a problem as everyone's pathetic at some point in the phase space of life or another – it also sparks a surfeit of arguments over what groups should be included or not. This is a problem, because now there are arguments over things I have no time for. These kinds of arguments also go against my terminal value that life in real life should have a muted, if any, influence in life in fiction, which is commonly called separation between fiction and reality.1
So the solution therefore is that characters should be eliminated. This is sure to settle arguments about fairness in characters and bickering about which characters are good, bad, or disallowed.
Even though I mentioned that the character is a very general category, in some ways it is not as general as I would have hoped. You see, "characters" already have lots and lots of parameters built-in to them, as they obligatorily have things like temperaments, preferences, dispreferences, strengths, weaknesses, bonding affinities (relationships), thoughts, habits, favourites &c. This is monumentally restrictive, and not just in the sense that it disqualifies almost all possible objects.2 It is restrictive also in the sense that if you want to make something with different parameters, or worse yet, make something with parameters that are like but not quite similar to those of characters, at best you will get confused looks and at worst you will get accusations that you are not doing characters properly. Characters are, after all, things people take for granted.
This means that, again, the full space of literature has not been explored. While most are content to leave that as a gap, as I am already pretty sick of characters I would like to venture forth to greener pastures. Surely, as removing the notion of angle and distance from geometry can yield such fruitful things as projective geometry, as may the removal of characters bring new ground to storytelling.3
Another problem with character parameters is how they are time-dependent.
Time-dependence, in and of itself, is definitely not a bad thing, and in fact it would be virtually essential.4 However, the time dependence of characters is nothing short of mystifying and inscrutable. We have a name for it: "character development". The way that it has been explained to me is that characters develop by interacting with others and the environment. Now the problem is that while most of the time "interaction" can be approximated by simple collisions and altering of parameters, I have been informed that with characters, this is not the case. This is frustrating, because now I have to work extra hard to understand the work, which is of course not very conducive to making enjoyment, especially when the individual character instance is not making it easy.
Tracking the parameters is such a pain that most of the time I don't even do it and instead perceive characters inside of a work as atoms, unanalysable and having few parameters beyond what can uniquely identify them. This is very different with the situation of, for instance, a forest in a story, which as easily analysable components such as size, mass and activity,5 and their time-dependence is easy to perceive and store away. Their interactions, furthermore, can usually be modelled as simple collision or altering of one of their parameters, and therefore is easily consumable and enjoyable to track and break down.
"Coincidences that get the characters into trouble are good. Coincidences that get the characters out of trouble is cheating." In a nutshell, this is one of the worst quality of characters: their tendency to make everything about themselves, the rest of the world be damned. This is perfectly acceptable, however, in popular writings, because after all, characters are the star of the show. It would make sense that the rest of the world should bend to benefit them exclusively.
However, because I already find characters tiring, this is extra-annoying. It would be like spending all day to pick out a font for your book, to the absolute detriment of everything else.6 So sometimes when I go back and review what has happened I get miffed at how much the characters affect the story so much. Which of course in most minds is exactly how it is supposed to be, but unfortunately that mind is not mine.
There are many other ways that characters shape the story. Sometimes people like it, sometimes people don't. But it always seems to be that when the characters affect the plot is when people appraise it with the highest values. Again, I can see why this would be so – in fact I would go so far as to say that this is part of the whole "immersion" effect I talked about in an earlier section, which is vital in the enjoyment of a story by seemingly everyone else, but so far has entirely eluded me.
Another quote then: "Ask who has the most interesting story. If it isn't the story you're writing, ask why you are not writing it now." I can understand why it's very appealing that one would only want to only write the interesting things, but after giving it some thought it seems too odd that almost everything that one reads are so full of intrigue and twists, when there are so many ways that things can go in a straightforward manner. Surely there would be some stories that works fine with automatic resolution.7
So what has this got to do with characters then? Simple: as with the previous point, the point of focus is usually a bunch of characters. Not even everyone, just a small bunch of them! This seems rather backwards, not to mention sounding like tunnel vision. I would be more interested in the bigger story, and having more context than what is usually given.
So enough complaining about characters being old-hat. As people say, if you can't make something better, then why complain? And so I did make something that would fit my tastes much better. In fact, this realisation that I really just don't feel characters anymore actually came because I was making up an alternative literature custom for – what else – my constructed world.8
Instead of characters driving a plot, worldstate literature considers them to be merely an element in the world, which is the star of the show, as it were, hence the name. The world, which could be a literal world or something more abstract such as the body of an animal or the insides of a car, has its parameters and quantities plainly described, and its changes explained by two things: a "natural factor", which would be phenomena such as weather and happenstance, that the author can manipulate to produce a great effect on the change of the world; and an "animate factor", which is usually just actions caused by sentient creatures.
One can easily see a connection between the animate factor and the character. However, there are significant differences that should not be overlooked. Most importantly, an animate factor is almost never a single subject, as individuals are too insignificant to actually make an impact on the world. Rather, animate factors are usually whole groups of people: countries, societies, cities, unions and religions for the case of a literal world. It is the grand-scale interactions that the plot describes. Granted, individuals can and do get attention here and there, as there are always key individuals in any particular (non-)conflict9 or another, but the most important part here is that they are never given character development, staying more or less constant throughout their entire time in the spotlight. Which won't be long – as mentioned before individuals don't have the weight to carry a story, and they bow out (die) after only a short timespan. There will never be a protagonist.
This is much more pleasing for the following reasons. First, this creates a broader and more holistic10 view of the world, its inhabitants and the changes in both of them. Interesting things can and do still happen but now they are more fairly distributed to the entire world at hand. Second, because we have sacrificed some complexity in one realm, namely character development, we can afford to amp up the complexity in another place, in this case the chain (or ring, if you feel like it!) of causality that can now fully be traced in all its detail.11 Finally, graphs and tables can also be produced to describe changes in the world, and nothing, nothing, is more pleasing than a good old graph and table.
One comparison I made in the initial description of worldstate literature is that a book written around this custom (genre?) would end up recreating an encyclopedic article. Perhaps there would be a little more flair, imagery and informality, but on the whole it would be a dry statement of facts and figures, changes in lines on graphs or on the battlefield, a few tables on the power output of all the land, and why the lungs are waging a war against the stomach. I am to understand that this is not generally considered award-winning material.
This is actually not an unfair comparison. It is true that the article on (say) World War II is probably not going to be the next (say) Ulysses, and this highlights one of the major departures of worldstate literature from conventional character-based literature, and why I understand that there will not be a market for anything else any time soon.
There are scant other examples, but there are still a few things that the reader might be familiar with. As a heuristic a story with a title that starts with "A brief history of" is more likely to be worldstate literature than the general case. There are also other heuristics that can help edge a story closer to worldstate. If when looking at the list below two stories are otherwise identical, except for one question where one had an affirmative while the other had a negative, the one that has the affirmative is closer to worldstate than the other.
Worldstate literature is the most well-developed idea I have as an alternative to characters, but there are still many more ways that you can write a story that does not include characters, the extensions and reductions of worldstate literature notwithstanding. These can be very tame, but they can also be very wild. In the most radical case, even the most basic of properties such as plot and time would be thrown away, yet what little remains still has that nice smell of narrative that stories have.
These alternatives are interesting in their own right and probably should not be relegated to an "other alternatives" section, but I have yet to explore them fully and some of them may even be incompatible with how humans feel emotions, or some definitions of literature itself.
Although characters are a universal ingredient in stories all around the world, I have had misgivings with them in general, and sometimes wish for alternatives to show up now and again, even though the likelihood of that happening is not particularly high. I can still appreciate characters as a concept, and individual characters can do the same things to me that they can do to other people usually, but after thinking about them as a generic construct, I realised that they can be quite inhibiting to some other possibly more interesting parts of all possible literature.
A few alternatives to characters are given to illustrate examples of regions in the phase space that characters close off. an alternate literature custom where the world is the key object is given extra attention. However, yet other alternatives are given, which may shed light to what I think is and is not a story.
(This section forthcoming. It will be filled up as I receive feedback.)
Upon rereading this, I think that what should really be said here is that I have an almost comically different standard as to which parts of reality should seep through and which one should be left apart. Some people say that there should be an absolute barrier between fiction and reality, but of course there's an implicit "except for those obvious things true to every reality and even those that aren't true to every reality".
Or maybe when that was said what was really meant was that the barrier is semi-permeable: reality can creep into fiction but not the other way round. This is why communication is hard sometimes.↩
The list might go on longer than you might think. For instance, one would be hard-pressed to find a character who is an amoeba, especially one without anthropomorphism. The justification I get from this is that you need to be able to empathise with the amoeba to make it a character, which of course entails anthropomorphism as, undeniably, it is humans that read them. To me this is simply an admission that empathy is holding literature back to more interesting and diverse characters, and of course to those people diversity is a terminal value in and of itself.↩
Of course, this is not by any means a logical argument, but I do think that much can be gained by making such an exercise, though perhaps not to the degree of projective geometry. I have always found mathematics to be fascinating in this regard, how much of it remains after depriving it of almost everything.↩
To make this claim absolute, you need to add space to the equation, that is, having some notion of either space or time (or both) is truly necessary to have a story. Since I consider guided tours of a certain place to be a story, time dependence is not necessary to storytelling in my eyes. The case of a story that is both time- and space-independent would yield a static image of a single geometrical point, which even I would agree is not the most riveting thing in the world.↩
Well, it is correct that a character would also have these properties, but unfortunately, few stories interact with these properties directly, or at least they are assumed to be so basic that they aren't even worth mentioning. This is true, actually.↩
A proper font and layout selection is important though, and its power should not be underestimated.↩
Of course, the standard reply seems to be that those stories are simply not published because they are so straightforward that no one wants to tell them. Still, at the very least this would provide an unhealthy outlook on how the world works.↩
The J.-Pasaru is equal parts "this is a world that I want to live in" and "this is a world that I don't want to live in but I find interesting to conjecture about", as well as "this is a world that anyone else would have made, and really, sometimes I wish that I wouldn't figure so heavily in its creation". The last part is of course because I would much appreciate it if I don't violate my own values by putting reality into fiction so much.↩
While it would be much more interesting if there was some, I don't think that conflict is truly necessary to tell a story. This ties in to a later point.↩
This word is given an unfortunate connotation, but what I mean here is that there's a greater sense of perspective here, that there is a definite "top" to the story on which everything can hang on, with coordinates if need be.↩
But why would an animate factor do the things that the writer wrote? This question seems natural to ask coming from a background where concepts like "motivation" are taken for granted, but the only answer that I can give here is that animate factors are considered to be random action generators, who may or may not propel the plot in some direction. (Judging by the actions of some people I have met, this way of seeing people is surprisingly predictive, even though it doesn't predict much to begin with.)
This is also why animate factors are rarely individuals: the actions of a group are usually inconsistent to any of its members or even itself in a different time (if time is included in the story) so it would be easier to write in a general group than it is to write indivduals. This is one of the sacrifices that I am willing to make.↩