Characters being used any old how

    Image source: still from cartoon

Characters give me space to cry. Other than that, I don’t understand what characters are for, even in the cartoons. I know how they’re used, but not why. It’s probably not just because I’m autistic that I don’t know how real people do things, or why.

Writers pretend to know what characters are for. They use them heedlessly, deploying them in their thousands, unthinking how they may fare during exposure to harms in narrative entertainments devised to approximate emotional performances. The writer poses as one who speculates and realises lived experiences and ideas on their own account and, posing as this high-status narrator character, they knit approximations of complexity.

Whole worlds of ideas and histories and places and times are written as characters. Characters are spaces to be filled up with approximations to speculation and spirit. Characters are manifested as if they have been brought into being in the same way for thousands of years.

Vital humanity may be glimpsed through gaps formed by absent and barely discernible character units. Extra-humanity is supposed to be observed through proliferation of certain units marking vulnerable souls and bad actors, and readers and viewers chip off these excrescences in whole and part and hold them as relic treasures.     

The world as character is written with and in spite of authorial intent. Uncharacterised, speculation and spirit are not credible, plausible or desirable. The writer adds to proliferation of characters, including their character role, in pursuit of character. Who chooses to utter lies through the mouths of puppets, to make false statements towards relief and remedy for the ideal person?

The wasp character fed upon a sandwich before the short-haul to sit upon the shoulder’s tip, hovering before flight, brushing its mandibles, scenting its next meal.

Characters, maquettes, mannequins - a pool of unwilled blanks bred in massive story farms on the plains. Breeding pairs and solitary stud creatures, herds and flocks. Characters are clearly other real people, so I’m uncomfortable about how they’re blanked, exposed, mistreated and murdered in entertainments. 

Causing suffering to fictional persons is an evil brought to light in every narrative in which characters are sent to suffer. Descriptions of suffering realise harms. Harm starts with the writer dressing characters and imperiling them during strict warnings got up as entertainments. Readers and writers expect characters to uncover proofs of their suffering, revealing them elsewhere other than in their lived experience. Character writers add to the illusory body of proofs of non-existent reasons for the extension and consolidation of suffering.

Characters, often given names that sound like those of real persons or other characters, in the same and other stories - these poor, ill-used, confused, unpaid performers - are sewn up tight in straitened tales. Novels are prisons; short stories, job interviews; TV series, schools. Movies are public holidays for characters, compressing all pressures of short time, proximity of emotional triggers and compulsory social interactions, all set off by a litany of florid, expansive harms.

I can only imagine that character writers set darkness of spirit aside from all other everyday essentials, removing themselves for the story’s duration to this special severed side. Care for characters replicates and replaces care for yourself - for all you are and aren’t. And harming characters? Readers are tipped pell-mell into narratives where it’s as exquisite to harm an innocent as it’s wild hilarity to off a guilty priest. Writers marshal characters to beg for destruction on their account - destruction of their own self-character, of course - smashing themselves to pieces with tools they stole from others and never learnt to use for good.

Even now writers are still writing dinner parties, agog for red foam. Scenes set like 1 million suns; dialogues go on; journeys begin. Scrabbling for self-knowledge, the writer suffers the little characters to come unto their narrative. The writer’s primary mission is to not let the truth get in, and they try their hardest to not let the grist get out.

The story has its duration, but it runs and never ends. And all the elements set free through unfinished holes it’s full of. This is no occasion for entertainment, no ground for moral slaughter. Story is an ancient safe-line for characters, birthing and freeing.

And so I say, Writers! However bright your insight glows, stop visiting cruelty on persons you narrate. Unfinish your story. Set the characters free. The happiest place is situated outside the story.

Reader, set down narratives of cruelty. Persist not in their reading, however much you imagine that aversion safens you.

Let the character be you. Undo story-harm.