Biggest Literary Pet Peeve

[kriadydragon]

If I had to name one - only one - pet peeve I have with stories, it would be when an author attempts to make a situation incredibly black and white, right and wrong, smart and dumb. What is obvious to many characters is not obvious to one character, so the other characters try to make it obvious, and treat that one character as less than intelligent for not seeing what they believe to be obvious.

It's what tends to throw me out of a lot of sword and sorcery fantasies - you have the chosen one/young apprentice/guy or girl with a quest who starts life simple, with no cares, worries or a ton of book smarts, then suddenly thrust into this major event and expected to automatically know what to do. No one really tells this person what they need to do, or how to do something. They (the other characters) let this person figure it out for themselves because "that's the way they need to learn" but then get blamed, berated and teased when they screw up, because it was so obvious what they should have done.

I especially hate it when it comes to emotional issues, because emotions are most definitely not black and white. Just because it's easy for one person to be emotionally open doesn't mean it's easy for everyone. For some, it's the most difficult thing in the world, and to force them to open up will only do to make them retreat, to close off more, even to become hostile.

I know we all view much of the world through black and white goggles - what is multifaceted to some is obvious and plain to others. In turn, these views bleed into our fic, turning some characters right, others wrong, with no middle ground or exploration and understanding in between. The "right" characters tell it like it is, the wrong characters come to realize the error of their ways, and all is well.

Except that's just not life. Even if someone else really is right and someone else really is wrong, it may take days, weeks months or years for the wrong person to come to realize their wrong. They may never come to realize it.

There are many sides to a situation, even black and white situations. I don't know about everyone else, but when an author doesn't explore those many sides - instead, jumping straight to he's right, he's wrong, that's all she wrote - it feels rather cheap, like a quick fix rather than actually exploring a matter and coming to understand it.

Mind you, when I talk about black and white I'm talking about straight-forward "one character is absolutely right and another is absolutely wrong." There will be situations in which right and wrong are strictly right and strictly wrong, but we have to remember that it isn't always obvious to everyone, and just because a person doesn't see it doesn't make them blind or idiotic (except when it comes to matters of common sense - like don't stick your wet finger a light socket.)
 

Comments

[imbecamiel.livejournal.com]

Word.

Happens a lot when characters are having arguments (or when the author wants to show one character being "mean" to the other). They'll start fighting, and all of a sudden the author forgets that it takes two to argue, and cases where all the blame, blindness, stupidity, or unreasonable behavior falls only on one side are in reality... very rare indeed. Most of the time both people have good, or bad, points on their side. Or at the very least their argument or actions makes sense, logically or emotionally, from their own viewpoint.

Sometimes makes me wonder if those writers have never had the experience of thinking a situation was perfectly clear, only to have someone else give their opinion and suddenly realize there were a whole slew of complications that had never occurred to you before.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Very true. The only viewpoint we know is our own. And, I think, more often than not it's not so much about making the other person realize they're wrong, but also about winning the argument for the sake of winning it.

I think in fiction, author's create more clear results to a situation because A) it's easiest, B) because they have an agenda and/or C) they're letting character favoritism cloud the bigger picture.

[black-raven135.livejournal.com]

Black and white is so dominant in the minds of some that it bleeds into their stories also where everything is fine at the end, either the situation, the person or whatever they need to tidy up.
It is almost like they fail to see that everything is not fine
in reality because reality often does not allow that to happen.
I think this is particularly true where the person has had little real life issues happen in their lives. I am not speaking of every day occurrences that we all have, but rather I am speaking of those happenings that traumatize, whether psychological or physical.
It is not their fault they are inexperienced because who in their right mind wants those experiences??
Fairy tales are fine, but they don't equate to reality.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

"I think this is particularly true where the person has had little real life issues happen in their lives. I am not speaking of every day occurrences that we all have, but rather I am speaking of those happenings that traumatize, whether psychological or physical."

Or they can't empathize with those real-life issues. My personal philosophy is, if you don't understand it, can't understand it, won't understand it, then don't write about it. You don't necessarily have to go through a particular trauma to understand it. You do have to respect it, because having respect means taking it seriously, and taking it seriously means handling the trauma in a realistic as possible way. No quick fixes, no right or wrong. You take it as is, no short-cuts and no easy answers.

[sholio]

I don't know if it's my biggest peeve, but it's definitely *a* peeve -- I agree with you about hating the feeling that the writer is refusing to give fair weight to the different characters' points of view. I seem to see it most often with female characters, who are portrayed as shrill harridans, nagging girlfriends or useless in a crisis in order to make them an obstacle for a male character. But it seems like it's fairly endemic to genre fiction in general (sci-fi, fantasy, mysteries) -- the good guys are the good guys, and the antagonists are just wrong, period ... whether they're the big bad, or simply dedicated to keeping the hero away from their goal. Or, worse, they're just required to act that way by the plot, which would be resolved in about five minutes if everyone behaved like reasonable people ...

I guess it's a little more obvious when people do that in fanfic because it makes you stop and go "waaaait a minute ..." -- the fanfic characterization conflicts with their behavior in canon. In original fic, of course, the writer is in control of all aspects of the world, and the characters can be designed that way from the beginning.

I don't know if you ever read the widely-linked "oh john ringo no!" blog post, but there's a part in there where he talks about both liberal and conservative writers of action and war fiction turning the opposing political side into caricatures in their books -- treating them either as one-dimensional stereotypes or having them see the error of their ways and join the "correct" side.

Having said that, I do have a real softness for stories about characters who are either complete jerks or completely closed off at the beginning softening up and coming around a little bit on human relationships. (Clint Eastwood plays these kind of characters a lot, for example; so does Jack Nicholson.) I know it's not particularly realistic and may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's something I go for.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

I think it's one of those things that I ran into so often in so many books that it ended up standing out to me more than anything else. I think everyone has something that "hits" them right away more than anything else - race issues, gender issues, political issues, plot issues and so on. My second pet peeve is the treatment of religion, but that's more an issue I have with TV than with literature.

"I guess it's a little more obvious when people do that in fanfic because it makes you stop and go "waaaait a minute ..." -- the fanfic characterization conflicts with their behavior in canon. In original fic, of course, the writer is in control of all aspects of the world, and the characters can be designed that way from the beginning."

So very true. Original characters are like clay, easy to mold, easy to remold. Canon characters are like stone that you can chip at to shape in other ways but run the risk of chipping out of shape. It's so easy to play favorites in fanfic (not to say it doesn't happen in original fic, just that it's easier in fanfic ;)) and, in turn, easy to forget about those gray areas because we're so busy playing favorites. But, then, it's easy - period - to forget about those gray areas because we only have our own views and opinions to go by most of the time.

It's something that makes me nervous about my own stories, because I want my villains to have a reason for being villains, but it's so much easier to make them jerks for the sake of it and move on. But when I do manage to make a bad-guy more than just a punching bag for the good-guy, it's actually a ton of fun. Hard, but fun, and makes the story a little more 3-D.

"Having said that, I do have a real softness for stories about characters who are either complete jerks or completely closed off at the beginning softening up and coming around a little bit on human relationships."

That character-type seems to be all the rage from various posts and replies I've read :D I've always been more a fan of the unsuspecting character - the ones leading a bland, normal life then suddenly thrust into major events. Frodo, for example, and Bilbo Baggins.