Wendy Palmer on Nostr: #PennedPossibilities 140: Do you agree with the choices that your characters make? ...
#PennedPossibilities 140: Do you agree with the choices that your characters make?
They’d be pretty boring books if I did… but I’d hope they were understandable and even sensible choices, given the character’s situation, personality and background.
This prompt touches on a nerve with me, which is that I frequently see books/movies/media criticised when the characters make decisions the reader/watcher/consumer disagrees with.
The example that jumps to mind (as always when I try to think of examples, it’s a movie rather than a book) is a mother rating Inside Out very poorly because the lead, 11-year-old Riley, makes the extremely poor decision to run away from home, and that’s just a terrible example to poor vulnerable children watching this travesty!
Of course, the movie makes it very clear, both implicitly with all sort of cues AND explicitly, that this is not, in fact, a good choice — an understandable choice, but not a good one.
It speaks to a lack of literacy (in the more general sense of wider media literacy, not just ability to read and write), that some people seem to think any decision a character makes is an endorsement of that decision.
They’d be pretty boring books if I did… but I’d hope they were understandable and even sensible choices, given the character’s situation, personality and background.
This prompt touches on a nerve with me, which is that I frequently see books/movies/media criticised when the characters make decisions the reader/watcher/consumer disagrees with.
The example that jumps to mind (as always when I try to think of examples, it’s a movie rather than a book) is a mother rating Inside Out very poorly because the lead, 11-year-old Riley, makes the extremely poor decision to run away from home, and that’s just a terrible example to poor vulnerable children watching this travesty!
Of course, the movie makes it very clear, both implicitly with all sort of cues AND explicitly, that this is not, in fact, a good choice — an understandable choice, but not a good one.
It speaks to a lack of literacy (in the more general sense of wider media literacy, not just ability to read and write), that some people seem to think any decision a character makes is an endorsement of that decision.