Using trauma as a character flaw.

I suppose this would a YMMV discussion but when writing a flawed character who also happens to have a tragic backstory, what do you think is a good way to balance out these two aspects of the character's life without making it seem like the Dark and Troubled Past is used to justify/excuse the flaw?

I mean, I get that going through bad experiences can make a person unpleasant and bitter, but especially in redemption story arcs, I don't personally like the seemingly pervasive idea that people can only be redeemed if their previous bad behaviour can somehow be excused first via showing us a sympathetic backstory.

If a villain, or a Jerkass, gets a Troubled Backstory Flashback right before they go through a Heel Realization and Heel–Face Turn, I'm most likely going to call a cop-out. Same goes for a character who goes through a Trauma Conga Line montage upon first introduction.

Yeah, but that's just my opinion. More thoughts/inputs/ideas, please?

edited 14th Mar '18 11:52:42 AM by Adept

That's ... something of a big question, I'll say.

I feel that there's two things to it: one, avoid the character being defined by the flaw, make it so that unless it's something that would make it immediately obvious that the character did suffer this trauma (stuff that leaves visible physical marks, for example) the reader may suspect but until it's actually confirmed can at most suspect that something like that happened to the character, and two, when you use it (i.e. when it's visible to the readers) make the readers feel that it's something that's not making the character stagnant, that it's not a ... character-defining trait that always stays the same and will always make the character the same.

Not to mention that immediately discarding all the weight coming from past deeds is, unless that in itself is character development of a specific kind done really well, basically negation of character development of any kind, and that's ... no, just no. A traumatic flashback just before a complete change in character does not excuse what someone did, at most it may make their actions bittersweet and with a lot more bitterness than sweetness in the mix. Sure, it can be done well, you can have the character flash back to something and change how they behave, but it should be foreshadowed really well and you probably shouldn't be showing the flashback directly but merely having the other characters refer to what it was about and let the reader piece it together.

Now, I'm not an expert on that particular issue, but I will note that in one of my stories, one likely not available to all of you guys as it's a minor release (a physical one) that's a tie-in to something else that's written in a different language, I have characters who do have issues of one or another kind and whose issues do matter, and the feedback about them was overall positive(-ish), so I must be doing something right, whatever that is. And that means I do have examples, ones that I can likely share without anyone connecting them to the actual work.

So, the example: a villain, the main villain at the starting point of a story, one who for some reason basically made himself into that world's equivalent of a lich, at some point sacrifices himself to power up one of the heroes. He's mostly a jerk, he attacks (via magical constructs) the hero party at a few points, his actions serve to make the hero party be seen as villains at some point and have to escape, the whole plot is kicked by his alleged need of a particular reagent that's ... not something someone with morals would use for anything, and the reason he sacrificed himself is tied to something bad in the past.

Sounds cliche and potentially bad, right? So let's get into the details, shall we?

First, what the reader learns directly before his sacrifice. For some reason, the villain wants to get his hands on a very young (think toddler) natural-born mage. He sends magical constructs to get it, and isn't too concerned about collateral damage. There's a very high chance that whatever the kid is needed for, it will result in its death. He made himself into a lich kind of thing, and ... exists, for a lack of better word, as an unnatural puppet-like thing that he controls via his own magic. Also, and this is only revealed shortly before the sacrifice, he's the grandfather of one of the hero party members, one who up to that point has been presumed dead, and he only cares about that person and whatever it is that he planned to do that involved his "reagent".

Then, what the reader is given before the sacrifice and left to connect the pieces. One, at a certain point during their travel, the party comes across another "lich", and that is someone who was a commander of a now abandoned mountain outpost, and this ... being, is not evil or anything but it is blind to anything but its purpose, a purpose of some kind; no parallels are made between that character and the villain, no visible ones at least, but the whole affair is presented as mostly sad. Two, at some point the hero party actually visits the villain's now ruined laboratory, the only thing linking them being the fact that the non-mage party member recognises some stuff there but this is before the reader learns of her connection to the villain; during their time there, they encounter an artificial mage who basically went insane because of his power (think animal-like berserk state), and they discover notes that suggest that making people into artificial mages requires a specific sacrifice and that it has a very high mortality rate. Three, and this is revealed just before the sacrifice, the person who took the villain's position as a researcher of magic, his assistant prior to his alleged death and someone who's kind of a hero (at least he does a hero's work), hated him for something, hated him enough to hate his granddaughter (one of the hero party members) just because they were related and to attack the whole party while using something that boosted his magic.

Let's go further, then, and write that the readers are given past the sacrifice. Thing one, the villain's granddaughter was actually a natural-born mage, a fairly good one, but when she was a kid her powers got sealed for some reason. Thing two, that had to do with what her grandfather, the villain, was doing, because what he was doing was ... very much not ethical, and her getting sealed was more or less a way of making her a political hostage to make him stop. Thing three, the former assistant guy was actually an assassin who tried to kill him and only failed because the guy lichified himself when dying (no evil acts involved, actually). Thing four, instead of stopping the villain actually tried to make his granddaughter into an artificial mage, and it kind of succeeded but not really because it just went behind the seal on her. Thing five, his power-up involved sacrificing someone with the same magic as the sealee in order to break the seal, which originally was supposed to use ... someone else (the kid), but at the end he used himself; it also resulted in a clusterfuck because her power went on a meltdown almost immediately for reasons. Six, way later it's revealed that the only reason he was conducting those experiments at the start was because someone had to (the person the highest on the chain ordered that someone does it), everyone else basically chose to bail and pay the price but he wasn't willing to so he just clenched his teeth and did the work, and he basically got thrown to the wolves when people from the outside got interested in what was happening enough to force the person at the top to either pay for giving that order or to blame it on someone.

So here you go, a Heel–Face Turn of a villain with a tragic backstory, with redemption via death. But it doesn't feel good, what his redemption does is show that he's not the biggest ass on the board, and though he may not be a bad person he certainly isn't a good one if he's still even a person at the point where you see him. If anything, it only serves to make the fact that one of the hero party had to kill the assistant/assassin guy more bitter than it started out as, and to make the fact that the only people who could help his granddaughter with her power meltdown are in some way associated with the guy so she won't trust them more tragic. It's only if the reader connects the dots that they'll see that it all ties to his fixation on fixing his granddaughter's power and on being blind to anything and everything else.

I need to release the thing in English and in digital form someday ...

Nice. Can you provide the examples of those feedback about what they specifically like about your characters? I really want to know what the general audience perspective is like.

I mean, I've seen plenty of cases where audiences who are quick to label villainous or antagonistic characters as "UNFORGIVABLE!" so the writers have to throw in a Freudian Excuse in order to make their Heel–Face Turn more "acceptable". As a result, I've seen plenty of works where the sympathetic backstory is so poorly executed that it's obvious that it's only thrown in for the sole sake of redeeming the character but said tragic reveal doesn't seem consistent with their actions or personality, and the characterization becomes inconsistent as a result, but people buy into it anyway.

On the other hand, I've seen a work where a good but flawed character did a Face–Heel Turn, and many of their fans tried to come up with excuses to justify their gradual push to villainy (such as that they were Brainwashed and Crazy, or that they're just being an Unwitting Pawn to the actual villain) even though those ideas make no narrative sense.

edited 15th Mar '18 6:39:11 AM by Adept

Well, I can't give you examples of feedback word-for-word for obvious reasons (one, privacy, and two, it's not in English anyway), but in general, sure. I'll limit myself to the three characters who were actually mentioned (the hero party has six people, and then there's some other notable characters), those being the villain, the villain's granddaughter, and the villain's ... former assistant.

So, the villain:

There were people who liked him because they villains, and there were people who disliked him because they dislike villains; them, we ignore. There were also people who liked him purely for his abilities, and those who disliked him for having a fixation on a female character ... no, let's ignore them too.

With the exception of those people, in general the opinion about the villain was somewhat ... bittersweet is probably a good word for it, though some explicitly noted that their opinion about him changed as the story progressed. To elaborate, because a single word likely doesn't tell much, it was something along the lines of "he wasn't a good person, but I don't think he wanted to be a bad person and I don't know if he was, and honestly he never really got a fair chance". There was one person whose opinion about the character consisted of throwing vulgarisms at most other characters, which is in its own way notable but also telling. And there were some people who blamed him for not making a different choice to begin with no matter what the cost, which in its own way is a valid criticism of him because if only he chose to pay it instead then all that would not have had happened.

Now, the villains's former assistant:

Here, the opinions get a bit ... weird, yes, but still kind of standard. There were people who disliked him for being a traitor of sorts, people who disliked him for being the first neutral character the hero party met (I don't know why), people who disliked him for not being a good enough killer, and people who liked him by default for being a good guy nominally. That's it for the groups we ignore.

The feedback we are left with is mostly negative, and can be summed up with "he could have been a good guy but he let hate make him into a bad guy", which is close to the target. There were also people who disliked him for .. basically dying in a non-appropriate way and still finding a way to fuck someone up with it, which is quite a valid complaint as he was basically someone's first kill, only it was more of a failure to save than a kill and that person took his death quite badly.

And last but not least, the villain's granddaughter:

Now she is an interesting character when it comes to feedback, for a couple of reasons. First of all, she's a member of the hero party and, depending on how you look at it (the hero party is basically two three-person groups that kind of merged), either the hero, the lancer, or the smart ... guy, let's say; the smart guy when the party is whole, the hero when it's just her three, and the lancer when the group is divided but acting together. She's also the weakest of them all (already known), but she also is, because of reasons that were already touched upon but only on the surface level (she was taken as a political hostage via sealing of her power, could not cope with what she saw as being pitied by everyone, did some really stupid things, and then the story starts and she learns that the one person closest to her died) she's ... got a problematic personality and that manifests in a few ways, often enough interfering with what she could do (which is surprisingly much because the lack of power is not the reason why she's the smart guy).

The opinions about her were ... fairly polarised, to be honest, and that's excluding people who had weird opinions. I mean, yes, there were those who liked her for being a woman and those who disliked her for to another character when she could have potentially lead (sure, let's ignore the fact that she has issues), but then there were also those who disliked her for sleeping around in her backstory as a way of trying to cope, those who like her for some ... off things that she does in the heat of the moment (using blood magic, of her own blood, to make weird moonshine more ... drinkable because she does not have a normal mage's enhanced regeneration, during an underground thug party thing, for example), many of which are seen as actually quite funny. Overall, though, the opinion about her is ... slightly positive; it's hard to sum it up in a single sentence, but people pointed towards "being someone who deserves sympathy but would reject it if she noticed", "being OP during the boss fight" (opinions varied on whether this was a go), and to some degree "being realistically broken" (though I can't say how much of an expert any of them was).

It probably helps her, and at the same time not really, that most of the stuff that's wrong with her in one way or another does get acknowledged during the course of the story. On one hand, it probably adds to the realism, and it shows that she tries but does not always know how, but on the other hand some people are of the opinion that she could have just stopped and let someone else help her and that would have done it and her issues caused more bad stuff than it was worth.

Going back to what you wrote, I feel that the reason for the second one (people making excuses for good but flawed characters) has at least some root in the first one and in the fact that people don't want characters they like to not have some kind of "beyond-them" reason for having flaws or having made bad choices.

But yes, I agree, in at least some works it doesn't really work properly.

edited 14th Mar '18 4:55:35 PM by Kazeto

Thinking further about that last point, I'm beginning to suspect that people/audience in general hold the view of of Rousseau Was Right, and that the only reason that Humans Are Flawed is because there is an external forces pushing them to making bad decisions or doing bad things.

So if the character doesn't have a sympathetic reason to justify those misdeeds (i.e. someone worse had forced them to do bad, as opposed to them behaving badly because they're just spoiled, entitled or insensitive), the audience strip them of any notion of humanity and label them as an irredeemable spawn of Satan or something.

Those comments about that second character you mention, seem to communicate that "he could have been a good guy but he chose to be bad, so he must be really EVIL and therefore should be hated."

edited 20th Mar '18 8:58:58 AM by Adept

That's actually a very good point. I never really thought about it before because the guy seriously is an arse and a somewhat negative opinion of him as a person was something I anticipated, but yes, I suppose the reason you gave is probably a more accurate one for why people think of him negatively than specifically his general antagonism towards people who've done nothing wrong making him unlikable.

But if that is the case then we are dealing with a perception filter of sorts as outside of his antagonism towards the one person in the hero party (and the villain) he's shown to actually be a good person, if a jerk at times, and definitely a better person than the villain himself, the difference being that he could have been an even better person than he was if he did not let himself be controlled by anger or hate or whatever and in the villain's case that wasn't really a possibility. Sure, the villain did leave a legacy that was ... more positive than not (as some people did survive his "research"), if dangerous and dark, whereas the other guy mostly just did his job, a job that made him a good guy but just a job nonetheless, but objectively speaking outside of his emotional problem it's hard to actually call him a bad person.

Hmm ... I'm wondering if it's because the guy is the primary antagonist in that part of the story and thus the readers didn't much care to notice his reason or if it's simply about him not being a better person despite having some kind of chance to be. I can't really ask the readers for clarification at that point, but it may be a good topic to think of if someone else drifts in.