Pacifist chararters and power

There's also these things to consider. For one, technical pacifism may not be intentionally pacifist at all, but merely a way to have heroes handle violent situations without incurring the wrath of various moral guardians, or sometimes, without disposing of premier villains. Avatar: The Last Airbender may very well be the case of writers cornering themselves with a thoroughly evil yet underpowered villain, and thus needing a family-friendly way to get rid of him.

Then again, with pacifists possessing supernatural powers, I'd say there can be another desired effect. Normally, absolute pacifism can be considered flawed or weak because it leaves one defenseless, meaning others have to take up that burden themselves. Being a doomed moral victor is frequently praised in fiction, but nobody wants to stand next to one in real life. There's also an element of hypocrisy in claiming a moral high ground by refusing to fight for a country or cause, when one enjoys the benefits of said country or cause explicitly due to the effort of others willing to fight for it. With all this in mind, a superpowered pacifist may dodge the idea of being defenseless or a burden to others, or even possess powers enabling their views in a more practical way... that's still totally inapplicable in reality, but a feel-good bout of wishful thinking nonetheless.

edited 16th May '16 11:00:57 PM by indiana404

So don't think of 'pacifist' as 'powerless'. Gene Sharp is the writer to look out for here, especially From Dictatorship to Democracy. Nonviolence shouldn't just be viewed as a philosophy: under some circumstances, it can also be a highly effective tactic. Used right, it can deploy significant power against an opponent: namely, the power of perception.

After all, when challenging a dictatorship, it's usually a sucker's bet to try to employ violence. The dictator has the secret police, the soldiers, the tanks; in all the world, something like 25% of violent insurgencies succeed. In contrast, something like 50% of nonviolent campaigns result in regime change, and that's not even counting things like the passing of the Civil Rights bill in the US due to the nonviolent political campaign sustained by the Civil Rights Movement. It's still a coin-flip against a determined enemy who often knows no boundaries, but the chances of winning are higher than those of challenging the regime violently.

And it's not just street demonstrations: those, too, are only one tactic, even if they're the most attention-grabbing. An effective campaign can deny the dictator his legitimacy, separate him from the armed forces and the police and the rest of his power base, get the fence-sitting public on the side of the revolutionaries, so that ideally when the final moment comes, it's the dictator who has to step down. If that sounds a lot like a political or military campaign, that's because it is.

The 1989 revolutions are the case in point, but there's also Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Otpor! in Serbia, and Tunisia in the Arab Spring. There are also failures, bloody ones too, and those also are interesting case studies in what went wrong.

But pulling off something like this would, of course, be extremely difficult in practice—especially in a regular series which, judging by the examples given (Mac Gyver, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Superman), would seem to be what we are mainly talking about here.

The way I see it, the regular series format creates most of what can be considered "problems" in the superhero genre: Death Is Dramatic but since people want to read stories of their favorite characters they are brought back and death becomes cheap. The cast relationships are getting out of hand? Well, you got to have romantic subplots and the longer the series goes the more you get them. Not sure who's an original character and who's a clone/Shapeshifter/whatever anymore? When you get to the point where you've tried literally every possible Plot Twist in the book sometimes you just got to open that can of clones.

In this case the problem is not writing a character who doesn't want to utilize violence as a tool for solving problems. It's coming up with enough situations this character can solve without having to resort to violence to fill a long series worth of episodes. Mac Gyver is a pretty interesting example that proves this to be possible... though today's audiences are probably a bit more cynical and thus willing to ask the question: What if when the hero says "Just shoot me" the villain actually shoots him?

The same thing applies to what Cid (x3) referred to as people expecting the villains to get punished for their bad deeds. In superhero stories you can't really kill the villains because they, too, are regularly appearing characters (and since we're talking about pacifist heroes this wouldn't be an option anyway) so what are we left with? Throwing them in jail? Cardboard Prison is a thing which means that seeing Joker return to Arkham Asylum after going on a murderous rampage for the Nth time in Gotham history doesn't really feel like a punishment at all. Whereas if Batman beats Joker up then at least we as readers can say that he paid some price for doing what he did.

Violence is the most direct way possible to oppose a villain which is why it's so easy to write violent stories. Writing a character who defeats his/her enemies without using violence is, in a sense, writing around the need to use violence like putting MacGyver in those situations where he has enough stuff around him to be able to MacGyver his way out of it. This is why the pacifist character is so difficult to pull off in a long series: you can always create a new villain who needs to be beaten up for whatever reason but coming up with new situations that can be solved in a very specific way is way more difficult and will inevitably result in increasingly more contrived setups in order to make the character work.

edited 17th May '16 5:50:42 AM by Paradisesnake

I agree that the main way to have effective non-violent characters is to have problems where violence isn't inevitably necessary. One issue with that is to think of problems that can also be easily serialized. There's medical dramas and mysteries, where every episode may feature a new disease. Or legal dramas with new cases. However, the problem with the former is that it breaks the rule of showing rather than telling, since both the problems and the solutions rely on medical babble, just like how Star Trek turns science and engineering into plot-device magic. And in both examples, the situations themselves wouldn't usually warrant violence anyway, making pacifism as unusual as people sitting on chairs.

And there is another problem. Namely, that most serialized fiction is still a bit squeamish about characters both hostile enough to serve as proper antagonists, and humane enough for pacifist solutions to be viable. I'd love to see a Cold War drama where the main character is a diplomat trying to avert disasters, rather than a hotshot spy mainly prone to causing them, but that would take a level of humanizing portrayal for both sides that light entertainment isn't exactly known for. It's basically about moving the traditional mentality from Star Wars all the way to Sector General. Good luck trying to even pitch such a thing nowadays.

edited 17th May '16 6:41:01 AM by indiana404

Well, I actually think there's plenty of room for characters who practice peacekeeping like that... in drama that is. Mainstream entertainment is, as you pointed out, more reliant on action which makes this kind of character more difficult to work with.

I mean, like in the healer character example I mentioned earlier, it's really not that difficult to fit this kind of character even in an action focused story. But what is difficult is having this character be in the center of action and still come off as useful and interesting. The audience doesn't really care how good of a spy Black Widow is or how great of a leader Captain America is when they are put next to the Hulk who's punching villains through walls left and right.

I was thinking about something else. There's a video game concept called "traversal", coined by Amy Hennig of Legacy of Kain fame, to describe gameplay where the objective is to go from point A to point B in one piece, overcoming obstacles along the way. Basically it's a fancy way of saying platformer, but it brought me to an interesting train of thought. When you look at classics like The Lord of the Rings, as well as other stories telling of epic quests, the backbone of the story isn't about defeating the monster at the end - if anything, it can easily be replaced by any number or MacGuffins. What is important is the journey itself, and the problems it presents. That's where characters of all kinds can truly shine - aggressive brawlers, sneaky rogues, charismatic diplomats. There doesn't need to be a villain at the end, merely a string of antagonists throughout the whole adventure.

And that's the main limitation, really - it takes a whole adventure to tell such a story. Meaning, it would work well for longer serials - full-length novels, whole season plot arcs etc., but probably not for single hour-long episodes. Still, since adventure books like the Dirk Pitt series are pretty good sellers in their own right, it's definitely worth trying the same thing with non-violent characters - say, adventurer archaeologists that don't bring the house down wherever they go.

edited 17th May '16 7:44:30 AM by indiana404

Adventurer Archaeologist/Jungle Opera was actually one example that also crossed my mind. The Quest also works, in theory at least, since fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings have an awful lot of epic battles for them to be considered good breeding grounds for pacifistic heroes (though I guess this doesn't need to be the case).

Video games are another good example of how difficult it is to make a good story without any violence. Even in Platform Games, and not only in the Darker and Edgier ones like the Jak games but also in the most cartoony and child-friendly platformers, you at least have to Goomba Stomp a couple mooks to be able to proceed in the game.

Games like Life Is Strange that avoid confrontation are almost always left to be niche titles that need to find very specific audiences to sell well. (And even this example isn't of the action focused type we're talking about here but rather a Puzzle Game with a hefty amount of relationship drama.

edited 17th May '16 11:23:38 AM by Paradisesnake

It's not easy to do; it's far from impossible. Stop thinking superheroes and start thinking, say, Selma, and you'll be on the right track. Power from people and politics, not superpowers.

Or, for a one-off instance in a large action-filled series, there's Fitz against Aristides in Ghost Story. It's a mini-scale version of a nonviolent "regime change".

There's also the Hidden Object / Adventure game genre, which has positively exploded on the casual market, and is all about puzzle solving and non-violent or at least not directly confrontational solutions to common adventure problems. (And to top it off, the vast majority of protagonists are female - so much for lack of representation.) So yeah, if a video game can do it, so can less limited forms of storytelling. For that matter, before the modern Sherlock Holmes interpretations racked up the action aspect, weren't good old-fashioned mysteries the premier genre for non-action guys and ladies to shine? Stop thinking superheroes is right; start thinking problem solvers.

(Because if you think superheroes and problem solvers at the same time, you can't help but end up with the Punisher. )

Well, obviously having a pacifist character in a more realistic setting is way more manageable. I used examples with characters with superpowers since the original post specifically mentioned cases like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Superman.

Yeah, about that - the problem with the whole powerhouse pacifist deal is precisely that it shifts the focus from the problem at hand - and various logical solutions thereof - to the powers of the main character, which tend to increase for no reason whenever they don't offer easy solutions by themselves. ATLA's ending is infamous for that, while supposedly pacifist superheroes in general rely on so many contrivances it's not even fun to list them anymore.

However, I'd say the actual problem with that is that these characters lack an endgame, an actual purpose to strive for. In ATLA the heroes literally followed a preset cycle, in lieu of actual considerations on how to deal with the evil overlord. Moreover, the trump card of the main character becoming a ball of elemental doom was on the table from day one, and despite all build up to the contrary, turned out to be as safe and ridiculously easy to use in the final fight. Meanwhile, superheroes in general are mostly reactive, and when they aren't, it feels more like pointless martyr masochism, rather than a genuine attempt at crime-fighting.

In a way, fights and superpowers are easy to relate to on an emotional level, since they're the easiest way to convey conflicts and personal qualities. The idea of being strong enough not to need stooping down to your opponent's level is certainly appealing from that standpoint. However, one trip to the fridge or two, and a lot of that can seem like massive ego-stroking for the designated purity Sue, while the actual problem is resolved by sheer luck.

Hi, I know this might have been a long while but, I might be considering doing more pacifist characters at some point. The problem with this I want it to make logical sense. I personally find the idea of a character that manages to tame a world destroying eldrtich Monster unrealstic as heck. although In steven universe it did work since the cluster could be reasoned with. But as someone who's Into stories with conflicts that may or may not have violence, the idea of putting a pacfis t character in a peaceful can become boring unless there's some form of adventure of conflict in it. It doesn't have to involve violence, just something that excites the reader.also, a superhero doesn't always need to use brute force to solve problems by the way.

I recently had an idea for something related. A character who had gained One-Punch Man levels of power, and grew bored. So, looking for a challenge, he opted to become a pacifist and try to resolve conflicts non violently.

you use SU and I dont think that is a good example: a lot of people feel that kind of asspull to write steven out of the problem with go back the issue of hand: how Pacifism need power in fiction to stay viable.

Now THAT sound intersting since it put everything in is desire to resolve conflict and sound like more cynical take on it.