601 – Crafting Nuanced Characters

Everyone likes to rave about nuanced characters, but what does it mean for a character to be nuanced? How do you show different sides of a character without being contradictory? Is a random assortment of subtextual details enough, or does it require a more targeted investment? In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of adding complexity to characters, when it works, and when the extra details add more clutter than depth. ## Show Notes - The Other Black Girl - 474 – Character Development: What Is It and What Is It For? - How Much Character Development Is Enough? - Nine Ways to Distinguish Characters From Each Other - What Is Subtext? How Does It Work? - Letting Readers Get to Know Your Villain - Five Common Problems With Background Characters - Why You Should Watch Out for Hindrance Characters - Live-Action Avatar Has a Reason to Exist After All - Does Your Villain Twirl Their Mustache? - Making Sympathetic Antagonists (And Why Thanos Wasn’t One) - Six Improvements From the Murderbot TV Show - Five Tips for Portraying Your Characters as Intended - The Why & How of Character Motivation - Judging What Backstory to Keep and What to Let Go - Five Tips for Writing Your First Novel—Brandon Sanderson - Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting - Understanding Character Representation ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Ari.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. **Chris**: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.  **Oren**: And I’m Oren.  **Chris**: Now, you listeners all know me as a voice on this podcast, but did you know I also have a physical presence? With a body and everything?  **Oren:** Whoa.  **Chris**: I know, right? Like, I actually exist in meat space.  **Oren**: Sounds fake. Citation needed.  **Chris**: I’m a full-blooded, nuanced person, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna let anybody see video of me. **Oren**: No, obviously not. I mean, you gotta get the class for that.  **Chris**: It’s true.  **Oren**: You take Tension & Hooks, you get to see a video of Chris’ face.  **Chris**: Yep, yep. That’s, uh, totally worth all the money of the course is just seeing my face. That’s what it’s about. But on this podcast, you just have to do with our bad voice imitations if you wanna see another side to us. So this time, we’re gonna be talking about nuanced characters.  **Oren**: We shall indeed, but first, I would like to give a nuanced appeal, that doesn’t mean anything, but go with it, that if you’ve been enjoying the podcast we could use your help. We are currently looking for transcription volunteers to help us make sure every episode launches with a transcript. We are grateful to our existing volunteers, and we wanna make sure they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode out every six weeks or so at most. So if you’re interested, you can just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.  **Chris**: Ooh, how subtle. How sophisticated.  **Oren:** Yeah. People heard that appeal and were like, “Wow, there’s layers to that,” and the layers is that we would like more volunteers. **Chris**: \[laughter] I love the idea of layers, ’cause it just sounds so pretentious. And of course, I immediately think of *The Other Black Girl*, the show, where the main character is forced at her publisher because an author that is really famous got mad when she pointed out how racist one of his black characters was. **Oren**: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  **Chris**: And so when she’s forced to give him an apology, which of course is terrible-  **Oren**: *Ugh*.  **Chris**: –- she’s like, “Well, see, I didn’t realize this character has layers.”  \[laughter] **Oren**: Each layer more racist than the last! Which, to be clear, this was a very good storyline. It was just hard to watch.  **Chris**: It was hard. It was painful. **Oren**: The secondhand embarrassment of, *oof*, white people be like that. *Ugh*.  **Chris**: But yeah, this time we’re talking about character nuance or complexity. They’re pretty similar. They both require that your character has more than one trait that defines them. Although with nuance, usually the emphasis is on some level of subtlety. And we did not have an episode on either of these issues, which is just shocking. After 600 episodes, we’ve done everything except for this apparently.  **Oren**: Well, that’s because we’re a nuanced podcast and we don’t go for the obvious topics.  **Chris**: Oh, we don’t, do we?  **Oren**: That’s actually what I was wondering about. Is nuance synonymous with character development? Is a developed character automatically nuanced?  **Chris**: We had a previous episode talking about how much development you need to do.  **Oren**: Right.  **Chris**: I think it’s a very literary fiction idea that every character needs to be super developed because in a story we have some characters that are central characters and some characters that are bit characters, and they have different roles. **Oren**: Hey now, it’s not just a literary thing. It’s also a Blake Snyder thing, who is the most crassest commercialist you’ve ever encountered.  **Chris**: That’s true. That’s true.  **Oren**: And he also thinks every character needs an arc. Okay, Blake, calm down.  **Chris**: Every single character! \[laughter] **Oren**: Every single one! Except villains. Villains never have arcs. Shut up.  **Chris**: Wow. So I would say that this is one thing that you typically do when developing a character further, but of course how much you wanna do it depends on the presence of the character, in particular. The more nuance and complexity just requires more time to communicate, clearly. So generally, the smaller the character’s presence is, the less time they have on the page, less complex they should be because you want distinctiveness first. First you want to be able to distinguish them from other characters and for that they need to have a memorable trait. And if you make them super complex and give them a half a dozen different traits and they only say two lines in a scene… \[chuckles] **Oren**: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a lot.  **Chris**: It’s not gonna work out. But the more you show the character, the more you kinda need them to be complex to stay interesting, and the nuance usually is we’re just taking that and making it so there’s a little bit of subtlety involved, maybe a little bit of subtext. *Subtext*.  **Oren**: Ooh, I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards! \[laughter] **Chris**: So that’s kind of what it is. And again, if the character’s important, they can just get boring or tiresome. And this is most common with villains, and we’ve talked about this with villains before, that a villain that is just pure evil and is actually on screen and talking gets dull really fast. But it can happen with other characters. We can talk about how it happens with other characters. It’s just for different reasons. Like for a side character, it tends to happen. Nuance and complexity tends to be lost just because, again, we want them to be a full-fledged character ’cause they’re like the main character’s best friend or something. **Oren**: Mm-hmm.  **Chris**: But in the plot we always use them for the same thing, like telling the main character not to go do anything fun. In which case they end up feeling very flat when you want them to be more complex.  **Oren**: Yeah. I guess what I’m wondering is if complexity and nuance are generally the same thing, so like, to use a completely not controversial example, we have Fire Lord Ozai in the live action Netflix adaptation, which, you know, people don’t have any strong opinions about. A very normal way people feel about that show.  **Chris**: Yeah. Honestly, I really wanna talk about the animated *Avatar* versus live action, even though everybody’s gonna get mad at us.  **Oren**: The live action one, you certainly see more of what Ozai is doing, right? It goes into more complexity about the way that he is manipulating his children, whereas in the animated version he’s pretty flat. He does abuse his children, but in a very straightforward way. And is that nuance? Is his character more nuanced now?  **Chris**: Yes.  **Oren**: Yes? Okay.  **Chris**: Yes, because we’ve softened the edges a bit. He’s not as exaggerated.  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: For instance, when we have a scene in season two where he tells Azula that, “Hey, look, Zuko found the Avatar, and that’s a good thing.” In the animated version, maybe he praises Zuko at the very end when he thinks that Zuko has killed the Avatar, but him just saying good things about one of his children is different. So yeah, I would call that more nuanced.  **Oren**: Notably, he is doing that to manipulate Azula, not because he suddenly feels warm feelings for Zuko. **Chris**: Right. But he’s not cackling, you know, or… When we’re talking about nuance, we’re talking about adding a little more realism to the depiction and having it not be quite so exaggerated. I would say that an evil character who is doing evil things but not cackling, you know, and waving a knife around has gained a little more nuance. If we were to put it on a large spectrum, right? Not that they’re super nuanced. **Oren**: I think people tend to assume when you say nuance, especially in regards to a villain, you are making them more morally ambiguous, which is not really the case here, right? Ozai’s not any less evil in the live action version, you just see a little bit more of the process of how he does things. And, you know, he’s just a little more active.  **Chris**:  But I mean, you could make him more morally ambiguous and that could be a form of nuance-  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: I think.  **Oren**: You could.  **Chris**: You could do, you know, many things to express nuance. I think a lot of times if people are thinking about what is the most nuance, what if we nuance-maxxed our characters? **Oren**: \[laughs] Oh God, Chris  **Chris**: That’s when we get things like people loved in *The Last of Us*, I remember one patron was talking about a character that was setting down a plate in front of the other and then turning it so the meat is in front, which is a thing that servers at fancy restaurants do.  **Oren**: Mm-hmm.  **Chris**: And that’s like a small, subtle little thing that enriches the depiction. If we’re talking about super nuance, we can talk about all these little signals that are designed so that people don’t have to pick up on them, but if you do pick up on them, they enrich your experience. Kind of like subtext. It’s how subtext should be. You should not have to pick up on subtle, super subtle subtext to enjoy the depiction, but it should enrich the depiction if you do pick up on it. There’s things like that, but I think we can put this on a big scale and say that if a character becomes less cartoonish, they’re generally more nuanced to some extent.  **Oren**: ‘Cause when I think of a character that they made more nuanced, like the first one I think of is Gorothan from *Murderbot*, in the book versus the TV show. **Chris**: Yeah, absolutely.  **Oren**: And that is a case where we made the character more morally ambiguous, ’cause in the book he’s just a jerk.  **Chris**: Yeah, he’s just a hero hater, and he’s very shallow and flat.  **Oren**: Whereas in the TV show he has deeper motivation, and he’s probably my favorite character.  **Chris**: Yeah, no, he’s great. Again, there’s a depth to it that I think helps with the nuance where we know that he has a background in working for the corporations, and that was really bad, and that drives his fears about their safety. That makes him suspicious of Murderbot, and so we can kind of see that come through.  **Oren**: Yeah, the fact that he and Murderbot are both much more conscious of how dangerous the world is than the other characters really helps bring that character out. And there’s like a tiny bit of that in the original book, but it isn’t really used for much, whereas in the TV show it’s really developed. And they, those two characters have a lot in common, which motivates them to not like each other, which I find fascinating. I thought that was great work.  **Chris**: Yeah, and that’s a form of nuance in itself. They don’t like each other, but they have something in common that they can in some places actually agree sometimes. So we have subtleties to how this works, and it’s not just a flat, “I hate you.” “No, I hate you.” Those subtleties make it more interesting to spend more time with the character for longer. Going back to *Avatar* and getting in trouble again.  **Oren**: Yes! More *Avatar*.  **Chris**: The thing that was so fascinating to me, okay, not that the live action *Avatar* was a good project to greenlight-  **Oren**: Yeah **Chris**: ‘Cause it just didn’t have enough to do. But I didn’t really appreciate, until I saw the first season of the live action, the fact that when we look at an animated cartoon like *Avatar: The Last Airbender*, our expectations for characters and the level of realism and subtlety they have is different. We expect a cartoon character to be less nuanced and more exaggerated, and I think it really just goes with the lower level of realism of the animation itself often, and the simplified character designs. And those things just go together aesthetically, and we just accept a depiction that is more exaggerated. And some of the characters in *Avatar: The Last Airbender*, the animated version, are cool because they’re not nuanced, but they stand out so strong, and a key one is Azula. We don’t have to talk about her issues with Ursa that pop up at the very end, which we don’t really see that much of earlier. **Oren**: The second most cursed discourse in all of Avatar fandom.  **Chris**: But for most of the show, Azula is just delightfully evil. She’s really competent, which makes her a good villain, and when she actually starts acting nice to Zuko, we’re very suspicious. And that gives her depiction a little bit of complexity because we see her have a pair of friends and actually act like a sister to Zuko kind of. **Oren**: A little bit, when it’s in her interests.  **Chris**: A little bit, in the beach episode, for instance, when it’s in her interests. But what’s fun about her is just the fact that she’s evil and good at it, and that’s what we like. So but when we take things into live action and we have actual actors playing the characters and it’s not a cartoon anymore- It doesn’t look right when characters act like they’re a cartoon character. And so we kind of need them to have a higher level of realism to the way that their personality works and they act. And I thought it was fascinating to see how the showrunners aim to flesh out characters and add more nuance and complexity to them.  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: Some of them I like better than others. I really like Sokka. Yeah, I think he’s goofy when he needs to be goofy, but also can be serious and that just gives him a bigger range. One character that’s been interesting to look at is Iroh.  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: The Iroh in this, by the second season, I’ve concluded that Iroh is actually not as nuanced or complex as the animated version, and that has been a disappointment. **Oren**: Yeah. Or at least the things they gave Iroh in the live-action second season to try to make his character deeper are completely removed from what Zuko is doing. ‘Cause they decided to play up his war guilt, which is totally reasonable. I can totally see where they came up with that idea, but Iroh’s war guilt is just, he’s having a separate arc from whatever Zuko is doing, and one of the side effects is that their relationship isn’t really that strong in the live action. **Chris**: Yeah, there’s definitely a cohesion issue there in the plot. But when it comes to just the character, one thing about the animated version is that Iroh is a very jolly character who always sees the bright side and is always good-spirited. And then when we get to know him better, we see the level of sadness underneath sometimes. Like when he, you know, decides to take time off for his, I think it may be the anniversary of his son’s birth or death.  **Oren**: Death, yeah.  **Chris**: And so he, you know, we see that he’s really cheery and he’s cheering people up and he seems to be having a good time. And then he goes to the tree where his son died, and we see that this is his way of mourning his son. **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: The thing that’s of course left out of the animated version is the fact that we don’t really see him reckon that much with the fact that he was a general who caused lots of deaths.  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: He just seems to be over it. So I can definitely understand the showrunners wanting to loop back on that and make that part of an arc for him. The problem is that the Iroh in the live-action show is just very sad.  **Oren**: Yep.  **Chris**: He’s not jolly anymore. And so when we bring in this background that would be sad where his son died and he lost a war and he shouldn’t have waged it in the first place ’cause they killed lots of people, that doesn’t add anything new to his character. It doesn’t add any complexity or nuance. Now he’s just sadder and he’s just a sad sack.  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: And if we had done that in the animated version where he’s jolly, it probably could have added more range to him. But since we’ve already made him sad, when we add that, we’re not seeing other sides of the character, and so it’s not enriching in the same way. **Oren**: Yeah, that’s true. So how do we go about taking our own characters and making them more nuanced? Can I just make them contradictory? Will that do it? Like, can I have one of them want to eat a million cheeseburgers but feel bad because they have concerns about agricultural ethics?  **Chris**: \[chuckles] I honestly think that you can do contradictions. The key is that you have to be able to communicate them to the audience, which can be tricky sometimes. So if your character berates somebody for not being conscious enough about food choices and then goes and eats a bunch of cheeseburgers-  **Oren**: Yeah. \[laughs] **Chris**: Right? We just, we need to know about why that was. We need to have a really clear picture of how those two things fit together. And in real life, people of course can have all sorts of cognitive dissonance in their brain that they use to hold contradictory ideas if it serves their interests, but that would be really hard to put on the page.  **Oren**: Also, even if you could realistically portray it, is that really someone you want as a major character in your story? Like, God, imagine how annoying that would be.  **Chris**: Very annoying.  **Oren**: Imagine meeting that person in real life.  **Chris**: A person who is like, “Yeah, no, other people should have responsible food choices, but I’m different, so I get to eat the cheeseburgers.”  **Oren**: “I’m actually a philosophical zombie, so it’s fine for me to do it.” **Chris**: Whereas if you had a character that was like, they were eating a really strict diet, and then they felt good about that, and then they berated somebody else, and then something devastating happened to them, and they just feel a sense of despair and give up, and were like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter anyway, I’m gonna binge on cheeseburgers”- **Oren**: Mm **Chris**: –Then we could see, like, what is the reason we have shifted gears here. That’s an instance where a character’s actually changing because something emotionally impacts them. If we have a weird contradictory idea that just continue to coexist, like “I hate all of these people except for that person.” **Oren**: Yeah. **Chris**: What is their framework? “Well, I hate all of those people because I’ve learned they’re all lazy, but that particular person I don’t think is lazy, therefore they’re okay.”  **Oren**: Yeah.  **Chris**: And what is going on that allows these two things to coexist? And I think those kind of contradictions, they can be really rewarding and really interesting, it’s just, it does take more time, again, which is one reason why complexity requires time in the story so that it looks like it’s part of the same character and the character’s not just being inconsistent.  **Oren**: I’m trying to think. If you’re developing your character, do we think that they are gonna become nuanced as part of that process, or is making them nuanced a specific job you would set out to do? **Chris**: I mean, it may depend how you develop them. The thing that I tell people to do when they’re developing a character that’s supposed to be complex is that we don’t want to just take all of the obvious choices because we end up with a stereotype. So if you’re like, “Oh, my character’s a nerd,” and then you’re like, “Okay, where should they work?” “Oh, well, they’re a nerd, so they work at the library.” “Okay, well they, what do they look like?” “Well, they’re a nerd, so they got wimpy muscles and they’re small and bent over and have glasses.” Like, if that’s your chain of thinking, where you’re just linking all of the traits that seem intuitive to you to go together, what you’re actually doing is pulling from a stereotype, and that character’s gonna come off as very one-note. **Oren**: Yeah, that’s true.  **Chris**: So the first thing you need for complexity is to create some contrast where it’s like, “okay, my character is a nerd.” “What do they look like?” “Oh, well, actually, they work out at the gym every morning so they’re buff.”  **Oren**: Uh-huh.  **Chris**: And that’s how we start to get the complexity. And then for nuance you want some level of depth, and this is where it can help people to come up with a character’s backstory and other details. The key, though, is that you have to know when to, like, not include those in the story. It can be helpful to be like, “okay, well, why does this person go to the gym?” Well, maybe they’re really self-conscious about their appearance. And then that allows you to, when you are putting them on the page, be like, “Okay, what would a self-conscious person do in this situation?” And then subtly change their behavior to be more self-conscious, and you get more nuance from that.  **Oren**: I don’t know, Chris. I was watching a video about Brandon Sanderson’s tips for your first novel, and he starts with this tip about “do a little interview with your character.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ve seen this writing tip before.” And then he’s like, “You might wanna put this in the story.” Like, no!  **Chris**: \[painfully laughing] No! **Oren**: No! Don’t–! Don’t put that in the story! Come on, Brandon, no! Brandon! **Chris**: No! You were the chosen one! You were supposed to defeat the dark side, not join it.  **Oren**: \[laughing] He’s, like, talking about epistolary stories. And look, I love epistolary stories, but epistolary as a concept isn’t a reason to just put your getting into character interview right there on the page. Come on, Brandon! **Chris**: No. Oh, man. Yeah, this is why I don’t listen to people’s storytelling advice a lot.  **Oren**: \[laughs] Although in that same video, he does a pretty good job of describing through lines, which I was surprised by.  **Chris**: Yeah, people are getting better. People are learning.  **Oren**: He doesn’t call them that obviously, but the terminology’s less important than the idea. **Chris**: I mean, the funny thing is when I read … Oh, God, the book that the three-act structure comes from, I forget what it’s called.  **Oren**: Are we talking about Syd Field’s?  **Chris**: Yeah, yeah.  **Oren**: No, no, the older guy. Uh, the Prussian who’s racist against Polish people.  **Chris**: Oh, no! that’s not, for a three-act structure.  **Oren**: Oh, right. That’s Freytag’s pyramid. **Chris**: That’s Freytag’s pyramid. It is Syd Field. Like, I can tell that he is trying to describe a through line or a plot framework, he just doesn’t have any conceptual way to say it, so he just says, “you know, your beginning and your end” a half a dozen times.  **Oren**: I should make it clear that Syd Field’s book did not originate the concept of the three-act structure, but his book is the one that a lot of people are referencing when they talk about the three-act structure. **Chris**: Popularized. It’s the most popular version.  **Oren**: Or at least became a defining idea of it. I don’t know how popular it was before he wrote his book. It may have already been popular in other forms. It’s just his version of it became very popular.  **Chris**: Any case, so characters and nuance.  **Oren**: Yeah. We have those.  **Chris**: We have those. It can be really hard if this is somebody who’s a little different from you because, again, I found that when people are talking about characters with representation, for instance, what they want is the nuances. What they want is the small things, and those are small things that are things that people don’t talk about very often. They don’t tend to put in books. For example, I had a beta reader read one of my stories, and she was strangely happy that I had my main character put her hair in a ponytail before she went out. When she was gonna be going through a hike through the post-apocalyptic woods overground area. And it’s one of those things that- People who have never had long hair before generally don’t know that you don’t leave your hair down when you’re working out or exercising because it’s too warm. It’s like having a scarf around your neck. And also it gets tangled and gets in the way. And so, like, if you’re gonna go work out, you put your hair back. And so I’ve seen, for instance, people who just grow their hair out for the first time, and they often just don’t know that. But are women and other people who have had long hair for a while, are they going online all the time talking about how they put their hair in a ponytail? No, ’cause it’s taken for granted. It’s a small thing. They just do it. And so that’s one of those things that’s really hard to do if you don’t have personal experience to find those types of small details and include them. This is why actors I’ve seen, sometimes, they just observe people to try to get some of those small nuances in how people behave. My sister’s an actress, and she was doing a role that was a Hollywood, rich, housewife. She watched Housewives of Hollywood or, you know, whatever that reality TV series was, and looked at other people and was talking about things like they hug in a very specific way that’s meant to not mess up their nails and makeup. **Oren**: I could see how that would be something you would probably not arrive at from first principles. You would need some experience with that. So what you’re telling me is that if I want to write nuanced characters, I have an excuse to stalk people? \[Chris laughs] That’s where we’ve gotten here on the Mythcreants podcast with our legally binding ideas? **Chris**: Oh, man. Again, I feel like that’s a problem that’s always just gonna be really hard to solve if you wanna get those subtleties that people don’t talk about. Sometimes if you are trying to represent somebody who’s different than you, just getting a consultant to give you ideas for subtleties is not a terrible way to go. Because, again, it’s not that they’re impossible to research, but they are very difficult to research. And people watching in some cases might work, but that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and you might not get very much from it. I don’t know of a really easy solution to this one other than just hiring somebody or talking to somebody if you have a good friend that has whatever personal experience and talking to them, because those are kind of subtleties that really do help make people feel represented in the story and help make a character feel relatable. **Oren**: Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.  **Chris**: If you learned a few nuances about characters that you didn’t know before, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  **Oren**: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.