First Published on Facebook 29 September 2014.
A key misunderstanding people have about their relationship with fiction is the belief that their favorite characters are people they would like to hang around with.
In a sense, this is what they’re doing when they read a story or watch a TV show; they are hanging out with people, more intimately than they hang out with real human beings. They not only see the most intimate moments of these people; in many cases they’re privy to their actual thoughts. That’s where the love, and the empathy, we have for them comes from.
But then comes the thought that they would like to hang out with these people. Which is where “Mary Sue” fiction comes from.
And I will make a point of saying that I am not immune to this myself. Without ever losing track of reality, I have daydreamed at idle moments of transporting myself onto the deck of the ENTERPRISE, or hanging out with Hawkeye and B.J in the Swamp, or helping Sherlock Holmes on a case, or fighting alongside the Musketeers, or helping out Batman, or…you know. It goes on.
This is all based on the illusion that we would *actually* like to know these people, but the sad fact is that much of what makes many fictional characters compelling is incompatible with actually wanting to know them. Guys think they would like to hang out with Conan. But to do so they first re-invent themselves as a guy who *can* hang out with Conan. If they’re not that guy, Conan is a lumbering jerk. Girls (and yes, some gay guys) want to hang out with Conan for another reason, and that might make a memorable if exhausting evening, but honestly, he’s not relationship material. He’s a pig. Sherlock Holmes? Going back to Conan Doyle, he’s a remote and impossible man, difficult to know; and if you do manage to forge a relationship with him, he will insult you mercilessly. The Three Musketeers? Fun guys to drink with, but god forbid you spill ale on one. He’ll pull a sword and threaten you at the most minor offense.
Dreams about being on the ENTERPRISE? In real life, I would be creeped out by Data and downright contemptuous of Worf. I would find Kirk and Spock unknowable and harbor secret contempt for McCoy’s bigotry.
In many cases, even if the character is an uncomplicated nice guy, you likely enjoy being a spectator much more than you would enjoy hanging out on a regular basis. I have nothing whatsoever in common with, to name one, Rocky Balboa. As tentative friends, we would drift apart in an afternoon. Ditto with David Copperfield. I would have nothing to talk about with Tom Joad or Huckleberry Finn. I would never get anything but affable politeness from Barney Miller. I would feel sorry for Jean Valjean and might even be moved to help him but would not find him the life of the party. I would run like hell from Seinfeld and his friends, and I would dislike just about everybody I met at Dick Louden’s Bed and Breakfast in Vermont. I would feel nothing for revulsion for Ignatius J. Reilly. And I should thank God daily I am not a neighbor of Peter Parker, that evasive, secretive, self-pitying, superficially charming but flaky and unreliable liar, purveyor of bizarre excuses for ditching you – and that’s before I get to the risk of being collateral damage when some super-villain attacks.
I created Andrea Cort to be unhappy, bitter, prickly, fragile, needy and brilliant. It’s fair to say that I love her, absolutely love her. So do many of the people who read her adventures. In real life, I would write her off fairly quickly, and run like hell.
We’ve all fallen in uncomplicated love with some male or female character glimpsed in fiction, thinking that they would be perfect for us if only they were real. I could fill a small book with fictional ladies I found adorable, who as a single man I would take out to dinner in a heartbeat – but that, first, assumes that as written they would have anything to do with me, either in the short or long term. (Farewell, Mary Richards; farewell, Pam from THE OFFICE.) These fantasy relationships are, even in the case of the most fully realized characters, constructed out of our own heads. That characters have not made overtures to us. We have built the bridges out of our own brain-stuff. If the characters did actually possess the depth of real human beings, we would no doubt discover things about them that we didn’t like. In many cases, that we didn’t like *a lot.” Ladies: you honestly don’t want to know Heathcliff.
We only think we want our fictional characters to be people we’d like to know.
In almost all cases, they’re more properly people we want to learn about.
Comment By: Linda Hepden
September 29th, 2015 at 9:17 am
Hand in hand with that goes the realisation that most of us would loathe the imaginary worlds most of our heroes live in. A very high percentage of those worlds/universes are war zones, and an even higher percentage have lousy sanitation, transport/roads (getting from A to B via horse and/or cart on mud tracks?), and medical knowledge. No thank you!
Comment By: Brian McNett
September 29th, 2015 at 10:18 am
The whole neighborhood breathed a sigh of relief when Peter Parker moved away from Queens.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
September 29th, 2015 at 10:18 am
I love the meme that asks people whether they’d rather live in Westeros or on Middle-Earth. I’d slit my wrists before being a random shmo on either.
Comment By: Paul Crawford
September 29th, 2015 at 10:18 am
I had the distinct disfortune to be married to a physical and temperamental ringer for Edie Monsoon from the Britcom “Absolutely Fabulous,” which led to a lot of complications well after the divorce. At that time, I moved to Tallahassee for a new job, and found an excellent rommate who, as it turned out, was an “AbFab” junkie. Before I knew it, I was a semi-hero among Tally’s diverse and extensive gay community, all of whom wanting to meet me because “Paul used to be married to Edie!” That lasted until one of my roommate’s friends told me he was jealous because “I really like Edie,” where I told him “Fine: YOU have sex with her.”
Comment By: Lee Verner
September 29th, 2015 at 11:18 am
Be Sherlock Holmes roommate in real life? Nope.
Comment By: Zyada K
September 29th, 2015 at 11:18 am
This may be why I like the The Dresden Files – I’d love to hang out with Harry (as long as he’s not in the middle of one of his “patented Harry Dresden anarchy-gasms “)
Comment By: Barb Padgett
September 29th, 2015 at 11:18 am
Please don’t take away my Enterprise fantasies. 🙂
Comment By: Vivian Perry
September 29th, 2015 at 12:18 pm
And I kinda like the folk on Serenity, but I don’t mind ‘sketchy’
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
September 29th, 2015 at 12:18 pm
Walter White is one of my favorite characters. In real life I would want to kill him. I love Frank Castle, as written by Garth Ennis (and almost no one else); in real life I would want to kill him. Many, many others.
I’m enjoying FRASIER, but if I knew him, I would likely have some hard things to say to him.
If I met the Doctor, and somehow ended up with him in my debt, I would refuse the offer to travel with him, because I **don’t want to live in a constant state of running for my life**; (I would, however, likely say, “Show me Saturn from just outside the rings, and I will be deliriously happy, and done.”)
Comment By: Rurssrru
October 5th, 2015 at 1:36 pm
In THE INCREDIBLE UMBRELLA by Marvin Kaye, the protagonist, who’s been involuntarily transported into the world of Victoria popular-fiction, spends a pleasant evening with Dr. Watson, and reflects on while he’d like to meet Holmes, Watson was by far a more congenial companion.