Do Characters Have to Be Miserable to Grow?

 In my last post I was talking about some IGN article calling Andor the "Show of the Year" and I didn't agree.  Then a bunch of low IQ trolls called me names.  [eye roll]

Shortly after that, someone posted a fake poster for a Chief O'Brien show that would be like Picard or something.  Someone commented that it'd probably be about O'Brien as a broken-down alcoholic who's divorced and estranged from his wife and so on.  

And then it hit me:  there's the problem with shows like Picard, Andor, and Better Call Saul!  The writers (and critics) think that "character development" means making the character miserable and then doing something to achieve "redemption."  Which inevitably is anything but a fun journey.  But it's so grim and gritty and real! Critics shout and idiots parrot.

Sure, it's grim and gritty and real(ish), but it usually isn't anything I really care about.  I guess I'm just so shallow that I don't really need to see these characters as "real" people.  I want to see Jean-Luc Picard doing Federation captain stuff.  I want to see Saul Goodman doing sleazy lawyer stuff.  I want to see Andor doing Rebellion stuff.  That fake O'Brien show, they'd want to make him a sad sack loser so he could "redeem" himself when really I just want to see O'Brien working miracles to fix shit.  That and his blue collarness is what we loved about the character.  He was the everyman character who was most relatable to us in the 20th-21st Centuries.  He wasn't trying to save the universe; he was just doing his job to go home to his family.

If I say I don't want O'Brien being miserable and his life shattered, low IQ losers would say, "You have a short attention span!  You just want lasers going pew-pew!"  Because of course everyone really wants Star Wars shows with characters sitting around talking about loans and bad marriages and internal Imperial politics and whatever. Yeah, right, virtue signaler.  Maybe I am immature in that I don't really want these to be entirely "real."  They're our escapist fantasies; where are we supposed to escape to if we make them as crappy as the real world?

Especially with Trek, it's not supposed to be all gritty and grim and "real" like our world.  Roddenberry's whole vision for TNG was for it to be a universe showing humanity at its best if we unlock our potential and stop being assholes.  I loved DS9 despite that it was grimmer and grittier, but even that wasn't about dragging everyone down to our shitty level.  There were challenges and our characters met them and while they sacrificed some principles they were never as bad as humans today, which still gives us hope of what we can be.

The thing is, character development and fun action (whether physical or less physical like in the courtroom or on a starship bridge) doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.  You can have fun action-y plots and sew in character development.  They did that to some extent with Picard in TNG and Saul in Breaking Bad and Andor in Rogue One.  You just need moments here and there, not hours and hours and hours of it.  It's about balance.

I was thinking that if they did a James Bond movie with his backstory of joining the Royal Navy and becoming a secret agent it would be fine for 2-2 1/2 hours, but if you stretch it into 10-12 hours like these series, it would get pretty annoying.  After a while, I'd start to get annoyed if we're just seeing Bond doing calisthenics or moping around or other bullshit and not seeing him doing suave, cool secret agent stuff.  That's what we love about the character.

That's really the root of the problem.  When they announce these shows, I'm expecting them to be about the things we love about the character.  Instead with Andor and Better Call Saul they're these slow, ponderous origin stories that explain stuff that didn't need explaining.  And take forever to do it.

Part of it too is these sequels like Picard, the Star Wars sequels, or Ghostbusters Afterlife is the writers think for some reason they have to make the original characters' lives miserable for some reason.  If the characters aren't miserable, how can they overcome anything, right?  Um, gee, stuff happens in the present and they have to overcome it?  But in those cases I think part of the problem is the real world issue that the actors are all so old and you can't really have them all in a whole movie or TV series.  And I suppose another thing is it's "edgy" if the characters aren't living Happily Ever After.  That's real and gritty and stuff!  But I think there's enough of that in the real world that we don't need it for every fictional universe.

Part of the problem it occurred to me is these sequels and prequels are almost always written by people who didn't work on the original.  When I did my "Where Are They Now?" about the Scarlet Knight and Chances Are characters, I didn't want to make their lives miserable.  Why?  Because they're my characters!  It'd be akin to making my own family miserable--I mean, more than I do.  I think I've said before that one of the reasons I stopped both series where I did was they ended in a good spot for the characters.  Everything wasn't perfect but there was a happy-ish ending.  If I wrote more books, I'd have to do something to disrupt their lives again because you need that conflict to drive the story.

As the one who created and nurtured those characters for literally years, I want them to be happy, not miserable.  The same way you want your family to be happy.  It would probably be much easier for someone else to come along and write a sequel making my characters miserable because they don't have the same connection I do.  Maybe that person would have read about Emma or Stacey, but he/she wouldn't have created them and wouldn't have painstakingly developed them sentence-by-sentence from one book to another.  It's not the same.

To think of it another way, it's easier to knock someone else's sand castle down than to knock yours down.  I mean, if you've spent hours making and shaping the thing you probably aren't going to want to just knock it down right away.  But if you see someone else's, it's a lot easier for you to kick that over.  I mean, if you're an asshole who does that.  It's a lot easier for Michael Chabon, Jason Reitman, or JJ Abrams to make Picard, the Ghostbusters, and the original Star Wars characters miserable because they didn't create the characters or develop and nurture them.  They're at best your imaginary friends, not your children.  It's a lot easier to torture them because they're a lot more disposable in the minds of those people.  You can claim to love those characters but you don't love them the way a parent does--an author does--because you're not the parent; you're the babysitter.  The studio handed these things off to you to take care of for a few years and after those few years you'll go back to other projects and some new babysitter will take over.  So, it's definitely not the same.

Those are my thoughts.  What are yours?