IntroductionI was making a favorite characters 3x3 this morning when I was struck with a realization. All of the characters that I would consider to be my absolute favorites are either psychologically or ideologically complex. I could make a pretty airtight argument as to why any one of them is interesting to think about or unique in some way... with the exception of Claire Stanfield from Baccano!... and it’s not like he’s a soft addition either. If I were to drop any character off of the list it would be Lelouch, and two characters that I had to cut (Asuka and Kaiki) are very emotionally and psychologically complex. When this hit me I sat there pondering for a few minutes as to what actually caused me to like Claire so much.It’s not as if he’s simple or uninteresting on an intellectual level. He has a well established backstory, interesting motivations, and a somewhat unique ideology... It’s just that he isn’t extraordinarily complex either, or at the very least doesn’t have an extraordinary amount of complexity that can be inferred from the information that we’re given in the show. After thinking about it a bit more, I realized that the same could be said of most characters in Baccano! (with the exceptions of Ennis and some of the older side characters, who do have very complex psychological states that the viewer has enough information to infer)... but I consider Baccano! to have my favorite cast of all time. After wracking my brain about this for a while, I came to my answer: personality.Personality is something that I find is rarely discussed directly when people are critiquing the quality of characters in anime. While pretty much everyone references it indirectly, when it’s brought up it’s generally to say that it isn’t a legitimate metric of critique... and I must admit that I’m guilty of this as well. In the following paragraphs I will present the argument that, while inherently extremely subjective, personality is an extremely helpful metric in discussion, and has certain elements that can be quantified.Definition of TermsWhat I mean when I say personality is surface traits. Things that you would have an innate understanding of even if you are given no information about the characters motivation, background, ideology, or psychology. Aspects of it are highly related to dimensionality, which I will use to refer to the above traits. It only makes sense that a character’s personality will be largely informed by their emotional state, ideas, and baggage. The difference is what these elements are for. While multidimensionality exists largely to facilitate verisimilitude, to make a character feel more real, personality encompasses the traits that inform your basic perception of a character. It’s important to note that I do not mean your logical perception, but instead your instinctual or your emotional one here. Personality is what informs your snap judgements, multidimensionality then builds on that before you finally form an overall opinion. With those definitions in mind, let’s run through the big things that will fall under the domain of personality:ExpressionSimply enough how a character outwardly expresses their internal thoughts and emotions. This covers everything from how often a character chooses to interact with others, word choice, natural charisma, ability to lie, tendency to lie, level of trust towards others... the list goes on and on. This is the piece that is most informed by a character’s dimensionality. It can be easy to conflate the two, or even dismiss expression altogether as an aspect of dimensionality, but the distinction becomes clear when you analyze two characters with similar dimensions (ideals, motives, etc...).As an example let’s look at Lelouch from Code Geass and Kiritsugu from Fate/Zero. I’m tagging this as spoilers to avoid issues, as it does hint at one event and gives some information as to character motivations that isn’t directly referenced in ep 1 of either show, but it should be pretty safe to view: Fate/Zero and Code Geass spoilers What makes this interesting is that even though they share so many elements in their motivations and the way they think, the way they express themselves drastically alters how we as the viewers perceive them as individuals. Further than that, their methods of expression affect how other characters perceive them and feed back into their dimensionality. Ultimately this is what leads to both of them using such drastically different methods to achieve their goals (in addition to the difference in their abilities).Character DesignCharacter design is generally discussed as a purely aesthetic feature, but it also informs a character’s personality (and therefore your perception of them and therefore the narrative if the perception the design creates is intentional). How a character chooses to style their hair or what they decide to wear is very often an aspect of expression, and if they do not use it as expression then that can say something about their character as well. Further, because nothing is created in a vacuum, character design is often used on a meta level to (for better or worse) cue you in to a character’s archetype. Examples where this sort of look carries obvious traits with it include the ‘shounen protagonist’ look (generally doofy hair and well defined muscles) , the big boobed older sister/sempai, and the black (often emo) haired edgy “cool” character.Voice ActingVoice acting, oddly enough, I do see sometimes talked about in relation to someone's overall opinion of a character... but generally only if they feel as if the VA doesn’t fit the character’s personality. Voice acting, like character design, informs a character's personality. Cadence, intonation, and everything else about how lines are delivered is very important to how we perceive a character’s expression (even if we don’t really have words to discribe it). This tends to be of lesser importance though simply because we watch shows in a medium where most of us don’t understand the language. This means that some context that a VA’s performance brings to a show is inherently lost for us. Given that dub VAs are separated from the original production of a show, they can’t be counted on to carry the information either (and notoriously fail at it in many cases).As an aside, this is also likely part of the reason that Baccano! has my favorite cast. In this instance, not only does the dub do an excellent job of reflecting the spirit of the show, it is considered by many to be the definitive way to watch it. This means that an element of personality that we don’t often fully process in anime is fully fleshed out in this show.Shot CompositionI know it’s kind of weird to say that a character’s personality is informed by a meta aspect of the show, but hear me out. The above definition of personality is the external presentation of a character. While normally you view another human being through the lens of your own eyes and how you happen to see them, in a show what you get to see of a character can be structured down to the most minute detail. While this isn’t a factor as to how a character presents themselves and therefore doesn’t give direct information as to a character’s dimensionality, it does inform how they come off to you and therefore their personality. This is the point in my mental path of logic where it really started to irk me just how much we (myself included) have been ignoring personality in criticism. Some directors put a lot of work into structuring exactly how shots fit together to give off a certain impression, and to act as if personality isn’t a legitimate critical aspect of a show is to strip validity from their effort. The same can be said for the above sections as well if they’re structured, but this was the point where it really hit home for me personally.Music, the context in which we see characters, and even the order events are shown to us are all similar to shot composition in this way. They don’t get their own section because I’d be repeating myself.When Personality is ImportantSo great, we have a solid definition of terms and a couple of examples as to how personality can inform dimensionality, but when is it actually important to bring up personality in criticism? In general personality is dismissed because whether or not you like a character is irrelevant to their intellectual value, and because criticism is something that’s generally done by people who consider themselves intellectually I suppose it’s easy to conflate that with the notion that to be ‘good’ under some critical measure your show has to have intellectual value. If you watch shows solely for their intellectual merits, then more power to you,, but most people watch shows for a variety of reasons. This is why I personally choose to rate based on impact. To me a certain degree of emotion is about equivalent to an amount that a show made you think and so on and so forth. While the actual weight given to each element will vary from person to person, I feel like this is how most people decide on their overall opinions of shows whether they realize it or not.What’s important in all of this is that personality affects emotion. If you like the main character’s personality, then you are going to be more invested in their experience. If you hate a villain’s personality, you’ll feel gratification at their downfall (or, even better, if you like a villain’s personality you’ll likely experience a range of emotions with their successes and failures). Of course this is all extremely subjective, I might like the personality of a character that you might hate, whereas it’s a lot easier to agree that at the very least their motivations are interesting. What this gives us though is a launching pad for stating our biases though. For example I might say:“Outside of liking his political opinions and motivations, I like Yang Wenli as a character because I identify with his bizarre lazy productivity and inability to handle praise.”Now some of us do this already, but others consciously avoid statements like this because of a perceived subjectivity. I’m sure you’ve heard this point a million times before, but to quickly reiterate: CRITIQUE IS ALWAYS SUBJECTIVE... but not discussing is stupid as well. Everyone has biases that they’re going to bring so as people who discuss anime all the time our job is to identify ours, state them where relevant, and then explain using logic where our enjoyment or lack thereof comes from building off of said biases. Using another subjective but quantifiable metric can only be beneficial.The next use of personality in critique I already mentioned above, and is probably the most obvious: How personality informs and is informed by dimensionality. It should go without saying that a way a character acts on the surface determines how other individuals will react to them. Because of this you can learn a lot about a character’s complexity from their surface personality. For example you observe that Shinji from NGE whines a lot. That relates to his deeper character as it both reflects and reinforces his lack of self confidence. The more he whines, the more people perceive him as weak, the more they treat him as if he is weak, the more he perceives himself as weak, the more he whines.Outside of that, there are some less positive layers as to the relationship between personality and dimensionality. Specifically tropes. Character archetypes are self reinforcing concepts that allow us to automatically imply specifics sets of internal complexity from a character’s surface personality... often simply from their character design. Technically, I’d assume this as a positive since it allows writers to communicate more information in less space. The issue is that writers more often than not fall into tropes out of laziness rather than as a means to create a concise narrative, meaning that, while I consider archetypes to be a technical positive, under most circumstance the way they are employed makes them into a negative... but I digress. The actual point of this is to note the information that can be conveyed through a character’s personality by way of meta expectation rather than inferences about how that personality relates to their complexity, and that that fact is something worth discussing when critiquing or debating anime.Before we move onto the next section, I’ll also talk quickly about personality’s effect on themes. Themes are one of the least tangible metrics for critique and probably a whole other essay in themselves (if I even get enough of a handle on them to properly comment), but surface personality can greatly contribute to a theme. The most obvious way to do this is to have a character whose surface personality matches or compliments the current theme of a show. A solid example of this would be Hyouka, where Minor Hyouka spoilers, basically the premise It’s also possible to go for something more subtle with this, and introduce characters to facilitate moods and therefore manipulate emotional pacing on a minute level... but again, we’re getting into an entirely separate essay here.UniquenessThis is the one instance that comes to mind where we can ‘objectively’ (or as objectively as one can talk about art) about the role of personality, and therefore it deserves its own section. The scale from unique to generic is relatively quantifiable as it is defined by the number of shows a character that is reasonably similar in enough of the categories outlined above under personality appears in. With some examples defining a character’s level of uniqueness such that all participants in a discussion are generally on the same page should be pretty easy... and in fact it’s something we already do, but not to its fullest potential. Generally when a character is being called generic the traits that are called out are the characters surface personality traits, however when a character is lauded for a unique personality, people tend to solely comment on the character’s multidimensionality.The reason for this is pretty straightforward: since in discussions we value dimensionality over personality we tend to talk about unique multidimensional characters when discussing uniqueness. On the flip side, crappy characters in anime tend to be archetypes like we talked about above, and use said archetypes to replace multidimensionality. Because of this the only thing that can be criticised as generic is their personality as the rest does not exist. There are very few generic multidimensional characters (not to say that there aren’t bad ones, there are plenty of those, but multidimensional characters tend to fall less into the trap of generic archetypes because being multidimensional in the first place means that you don’t get to participate in the laziness that those archetypes are meant to facilitate).What I would argue we are missing in discussions therefore is talk of unique personalities. It’s hard to talk generally about this so I’ll just throw out some examples and what they can do for a show. The entire cast of Baccano! fits this pretty much as previously mentioned, and the surface level of their interactions serves to create one of the most entertaining experiences in anime (that’s not to say there isn’t more to the show, but after writing this I’m convinced that this is a major factor as to why I enjoy it so much). To get a little more general though, think of any side character that you really liked. Most likely it was based on them having a unique and intriguing personality, as odds are they didn’t get enough screentime to truly develop dimensionality. Some solid examples of this include the teacher from Kill la Kill, Haruhi’s father in Ouran Highschool Host Club, and Dante from FMA 2003. I’m sure there are plenty more, but honestly even my brain isn’t properly geared for this yet as my mind keeps jumping to characters with very developed multidimensionality.So yeah, in the end, this is all just basically food for thought. Something that I think that we as a community need to be paying more attention to. I’m not really sure where it will lead us, but I feel that not really thinking about or discussing it as has been generally the case up to now is discounting a very relevant line of thought when it comes to what makes a show. I’ll also note before I go that most examples you come up with aren’t going to be one or the other, the best characters generally have both interesting multidimensionality and personalities, it’s just a good idea to think of the two as separate but very related entities.I guess that’s all for now, sorry if that was really dull, my brain just got caught on this tangent and I felt the need to talk about it. http://ift.tt/1Wo60Bz
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