Into the weeds about character development

A while back I posted a "flash review" of a fic that was a fusion of Equestria Girls and Bleach called Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls.

It was not positive.

The author of the fic reached out to me and that alone was enough to make me take another look, coupled with his genuinely contrite attitude and appreciation for expressing what I though was wrong with the fic. Even though I had declared I was "done" with the fic, I thought that the author's contrition alone was worthy of continuing the reading.

After the author started backsliding into the same things that got me to rage-quit the fic in the first place, I made a post about it. The author, already having shown humility that a creative really should strive for, replied with apologies and reassurances, which is enough to get me to continue to read. I did want to proved some further feedback, but then it kinda...rabbit-holed. I present to you the resulting essay, on my blog instead of buried in the comments on the story:

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That said, if I were to put my finger on the one thing that you're doing to cause the problems that keep this fic from being one of the true epic greats, it'd be your rather slavish devotion to following the exact format of the anime/manga. You kinda lampshaded this yourself when you had Soul Reaper Flash Sentry spar with Princess Celestia; the instant someone who had to use words (followed by a bizarre parenthese'd Japanese-to-English translation) to use magic (or whatever unobtanium-subspace that's being used that behaves like magic) goes up against someone who can use magic without saying a thing, the one who must use the words is automatically at a disadvantage. This isn't a big deal when you're showcasing someone of lower power against someone of higher power, but it's nails-on-a-chalkboard narrative breaking when you have someone who's as high-power as one of the Soul Reaper Captains having to shout out commands. It's especially problematic when they're having to use vocal commands with their swords, which supposedly they share a mental/spiritual connection with and should eventually just become akin to another limb.

Anime, and by extension pretty much all animated media by this point (because it's all been heavily influenced by anime and manga for the last 30-40 years) suffers from what I call "vidja'game syndrome." Vidja'game syndrome comes from the people who are creating the media (manga writers, anime artists, etc.) being heavily influenced by video games when they were growing up and consequently working to make their production more like the media they loved so much. The major problem with this is simple: Analogue is not digital. This seemingly self-evident phrase has deeper meaning than most people in our digitally-steeped culture give it credit for.

Take a look at a clock. Any clock, because this exercise works with any time piece that operates on any mechanical principles whatsoever. Watch it for five minutes. Or hell, even five seconds. Now, how much time passed while you were doing that? Wrong. Whatever you just said is wrong, because time doesn't actually depend on the clock. A clock is an arbitrary collection of symbols that we, as a culture, have decided has some relevance to how we work within the framework known as "time." I used a clock because it's the oldest known set of measurement symbology that we still use today. There is absolutely nothing in the natural world that determined that we should break our days up into 24 hours of strictly regimented time. Literally the most accurate any part of the Sol system gets when it comes to time keeping is a single day, and even that depends on which of the 9 8 15 planets stellar objects in our system that you're referring to. Where did we get 24 hours from? Two sets of ten plus two. Who came up with that overly complex nonsense? Either the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians, we're not quite sure, but even then you have to define what an hour is. What's a "minute?" One sixtieth of an hour. What's an hour? Sixty minutes. Even getting as scientific as possible introduces a challenge to how we currently operate. A year lasts 365 and one-quarter days. That extra day we throw into February once every four years? That's because without that the calendar would eventually drift until January 1 would be smack in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere's summer, and then back to the middle of winter again.

Time and calendar math are really hard to get right if you're doing anything digitally, because time is just such an analogue thing that there simply is no digital equivalent. Sure, you can measure quantum states and scale those up (the vibration of quartz crystals in particular is handy here) as it's easy to measure, say, a vibration and frequency a time-cycle, but even in that realm there's MASSIVE variances that make it useless for an objective standard.

That's right, kids; the fancy Apple Watch you just got is dependent on what some old guy in the desert though was cool five millennia ago.

This carries over to other aspects of life, like, "Let's say I have a game character and I need to use some method to show that they've grown and progressed in a way that I can measure and abstract somewhat." In real life, that is analogue, we have a variety of analogue ways of determining this, but no matter what the human body has limits and if we reach the limits of what physics and biology place on us, that's it. It's theoretically possible that a human being can travel 760 MPH without passing out, but your legs will seize up if you push 30 MPH. Dead-lifts are measured in pounds/grams, and health is measured by a variety of factors. So how's a video game designer going to distil that down to just what numbers a computer won't crash on to play a video game?

Oh, hello table-top role-playing games, how're you? You've already done most of the math for us to convert human growth and achievement to raw data that we can plug into a game? Thanks so much!

No, seriously, the first ever video games that had any sort of progression systems were nearly direct lifts of D&D's leveling system.

Problem is, humans don't have levels. At best the human growth matrix is best expressed with a series of curves, which are so phenomenally hard to produce in software that it actually takes some pretty freaking advanced math just to keep the computer from crashing when calculating them.

The earliest example I can recall seeing of this phenomenon was back with Magic Knight Rayearth (written by CLAMP, a team of women authors that decided to prove that women can write subversive stories where the endings are just Russia-inspired expressions of the futility of existence too), wherein the main characters introduced themselves with their names (OK), what school they went to (makes sense), how old they are (still with you), and their blood type (...WHAT?!) Turns out that there's this pseudo-scientific school of thought that says that if you have a certain blood type, then you're going to automatically be more inclined to certain functions or roles...like a swords-mmmma...person, a sniper, or a magic user. This, again, is part of the notion that you can distil a human life into something resembling pure numbers.

Then there's DragonBall Z. Oh, how I loath DBZ. The original Dragonball series (and the OVA) were actually quite enjoyable. Epic quest, character growth, story arcs that were interwoven and complex, hidden backstory, etc. DBZ and later incarnations were...animated TV wrestling. Not even the good kind where you aren't quite sure if they're doing real wrestling moves or not, just the really bad kind where all they do is strut about, flex, and grunt at each other. Alone, this isn't so bad, but it's just SO...MANY...EPISODES, and the clincher, the point at which I just flipped the table, was the iconic "Over 9,000" moment. You know the one, I will not dignify it with a description. Even as much as the obnoxious time padding as most of the grunting, posturing, etc. was, it paled in comparison to the notion that it was possible to gauge someone's "power level" as though a single number was somehow capable of determining whether someone was capable in a combat scenario.

All of this starts to really show it's frailty in writing when you start looking at anime, specifically shonen anime. (It's been sneaking into other genre's, too, like mahou shoujo, but it's most obvious in shonen) when all you have as a mechanic for the growth and development of your character is "levels" or some other pseudo-system, it doesn't take long for the character to become "invincible." The DBZ example is particularly apt, as you have a bunch of over-muscled jocks who all become immune to nuclear blasts thanks to their over-developed muscles. (and hair, long blond hair. Are they born with it? Only their hairdresser knows for sure!) Buried in my tabletop RPG resource library is a book who's sting text on the back cover says something like, "Can a first level thief assassinate a 20th level fighter?" And the answer is (obviously) YES! A knife to the back of the neck is gonna kill a person who's nervous system runs through their spine, if you ventilate someone's brain out their shattered skull they're gonna die, if you turn someone's heart into hamburger inside their ribcage they're gonna die, and if you expose tender, fleshy, human tissue to radioactive waves at the right frequency you're gonna have cooked human.

This is, of course, where magic comes in. Back in the early days of the fandom, when we were trying to figure out the mechanics of things like a Sonic Rainboom and Unicorns - How Do They Work?!, there was the chronically narratively challenged contingent that made popular the refrain, "It's magic, bitch! I aint gotta explain shit!" In response, numerous videos were put out by people who actually enjoyed using their brains to explain that any 'magic system' a creator comes up with has got to be internally consistent, both to itself and to the world it's in. Magic cannot be a narrative deus ex machina, or the story it's in will never pass muster. If magic could solve all problems with a wave of a horn, then why not just do so at the start and be done with it?

MLP and EQG have done a fantastic job of showing an immutable law: Actions have consequences. There's probably a "Wizard's Rules" style list that can be generated for the MLP-multiverse, and it would start with that one.

Most important to note is that even God is bound by his own rules. What I mean by that in this context is that the creator of a work cannot violate the rules that he sets out at the beginning and develops as he continues. In some cases, those rules come about as the creator works. Any work that isn't created in a vacuum, however, must be influenced by the partakers of the created work. In the case of fiction, several strains of anime are starting to break down, because humans know that humans get killed by toxic radiation, sword wounds, etc. This even applies to the...odd physics of the spirit world of Bleach, where the "spirits" are made up of "reishi particles" that form cells and organs and whatnot in the spirit people. It might be a different batch of quantum particles making up this particular parallel existence, but the rules will still apply because a quark is a quark, a proton is a proton, an electron is an electron, regardless of the quantum stuff they're made up of. If I set off a reishi-particle nuclear bomb in Hueco Mundo, anyone not behind a wall of reishi-lead and at least a certain distance away from ground zero is dead, I don't care how much of a "big bad" they are. Rules are rules and universal laws are universal laws. They are not suggestions; I don't care how many pushups you do you're still gonna die if a bullet scrambles your brain.

Which is where the problem of Vidja'game Syndrome comes from. The underlying mathematics of video games may say that a character has 40 hit points and they're being hit by a projectile that deals 2 points of damage. 40-2=38, that's barely enough to get the health bar to drop. This is an abstraction on the rules of tabletop games, which goes back to Dungeons and Dragons, which says that a high level character with 40 HP is being hit by a sling-stone that does 1d4 worth of damage, the DM rolls a 2 on the d4, 40-2=38, the character can still keep swinging his sword no problem. The problem with this visualization is that HP is an...EXTREMELY deep abstraction. HP was intended to include MANY factors, such as expertise with weapons, overall skill, learning, experience, etc. A character with 40 HP isn't actually any less prone to death than a character with 4 HP, they're just better at dodging it.

This is what proves the whole problem with Bleach and Dragonball Z and Magic Knight Rayearth and so many other anime and manga; the authors have no fuckin' clue how the human body actually works. They keep doing all sorts of "leveling up" of the characters, allowing them to take hits that would kill any human, and it just creates this...impossible scenario that when taken to it's logical (and too common) extreme - Every character becomes a deus ex machina in uetero, meaning that with enough time, every single character will become so powerful they can't be stopped by anything, not even normal human death, planet cracker asteroids, acid injected directly into the bloodstream, or cholesterol. This breaks the story. An unstoppable character, especially in an action/adventure, is the old trope of the SPASE MUHREEN!!!, the ultimate badass who mows down any opposition and cannot be stopped for anything because the very design of their character demands it.

And this makes some sense that the characters these creators are making are becoming space marines, because when it comes to video games, the medium they're seeking to emulate, the space marine makes a fantastic player avatar. Games differ from writing because in writing the character is on the page. The character can be nowhere else. Similarly with movies and TV, the character is on the screen. Video games blur the line, because while you are said to be "controlling the character," in actuality the main character is you. The metric for who the main character is in any story is whoever it is that grows and changes the most. It's not always obvious. Look at Infinity War, the main character is not any of the heroes we've all grown to love over the years, it's Thanos, because he's the one that grows and changes the most by the time the movie is done. With a video game, however, you're the one growing and changing, your mind unfolding new knowledge as you peel apart the game's challenges. This is why a space marine is a fantastic player avatar (and it can be "space army ranger," or "space special forces," etc.), because making the avatar a walking, anthropomorphic tank allows the player to pour themselves into the character without having to relearn how to do things like haul five weapons weighing 30-300 lbs. each through twenty levels on five worlds, 'cause the player avatar already can do these things.

When you try to write a non-interactive story with a space marine as the "main character," it's stagnant. Back in the 60's -70's, space marine sci-fi was a pretty heavily published sub-genre. If you happen to find one of these novels on the shelves of a thrift store, pick it up and read it for the learning experience. You'll have to power your way through it, though, because it's a fairly dull experience. It's basically the main character striding through scenes, likely killing lots of uninteresting foes, until you've managed to get through the book and wondered why the hell you bothered. Every single book in this sub-genre is nearly identical. Space marine never grows because he doesn't need to grow. Space marine doesn't have any real companions because he's already the ultimate, unkillable life-form, so no need to form attachments to others. Space marine always wins, because he's the space marine.

You know what other character archetype cannot be stopped, never has to grow or change because the story will always turn out in their favor?

Mary Sue.