SPOILER WARNING--Watchmen

Music has the power to move us, words, their sounds, and their ideas—can transfer an emotion into us more powerfully than any telepath. What does it do to the brain?—our mechanical souls?

Sometimes a character in a story affects us. (affect: to have an influence on). If the effect (result) is strong, and causes a wonder and love for the character almost as if they were a real person, this is ultimateness.

Revelation of Who a Character Is.

1) disturbing, tortured backstory/plot
2) depth: they experience intense emotions. Perhaps they snap on screen, or face overwealming pressure.
3) noble/opposite of loserness: Maintain privacy/hide suffering--through deception, destraction, or other means. Losers complain.
4) latent conflict built into their personlaity: potential for multiple “character resolution”s because they have intense potential for conflict written into their character.
5) style


Ultimateness is accompanied by a nosey curiosity. We want to know about their childhood, and why they are the way they are, on a personal level that only people who have earned their trust get access to. As the audience we want to watch them when they are alone and if we could we’d want to read their diary and their thoughts. We analyze their movements for hidden meaning. We forget to respect them and politely not pry—but if the character was a real person (this happens to the actors sometimes, and to musicians as well) hopefully we’d be ashamed of obsessing and analyzing them.

House (House M.D.) is most like this in episodes involving his childhood; we all want to know why he’s so messed up. He is also very touching the meaner he gets, because we know it is a noble/desperate attempt to distract us from his pain. We admire those who fight to keep themselves private, and to not be pitied, and to hide their suffering. We do not admire those who complain about what is really bothering them, and don’t hide anything.

Rorschach (Watchmen) is first stirring when he is being psychoanalyzed. He is unaware of himself, but he still lies when taking the rorscharch test. He is also enjoyable when he is squeezed, and must think desperately to survive (when he is set up and captured by the police). We admire his defiant spirit! He is moving when he is standing on principle, even in the face of Armageddon and death, even if his principles are not our own (hard to decide). His act of courage and uncompromising belief in ideals, and complete lack of fear as he yells for his own destruction, strikes within us knowledge of heroism and goodness.

McKay  (Stargate Atlantis) deserves a section here, but I forget why he is well written…sorry.

Cloud (FFVII) is most stirring when we think he is crazy because he is hearing voices that say strange things to him, and he asks deep questions about who he is. We wonder what snapped him to where he lost who he was to mimicking someone else. We discover it wasn’t childhood abuse, like House, or facing an unimaginable evil and killing him, like Rorschach—but Jenovah cells in his body influencing him after he was experimented on and hunted down by the company he trusted and worked for, and watching his closest friend die for him. But the ultimateness is mixed up with the curiosity and concern; much like that felt by Tifa, of why is he so messed up? It helps that he struggles to pretend he is not crazy.  We admire deception for the sake of hiding suffering.

The Comedian (Watchmen) has such a powerfully strong character flaw/latent conflict written into his personality that we are nearly too repulsed by him to ever see him with enough fondness to be care about why he is the way he is. The only curiosity that exists is that which draws us to watch a train wreck. Until the moment he starts to cry to his old enemy—who he admits is the closest thing he has to a friend. Suddenly we see all of his evil actions as a front. Sure he relished the meaningless of life, but he was also trying to defy it by mocking it. In the end he was overwhelmed, snapped by the joke that the pain and meaninglessness of life was. So his greatest annoyance—the lame quality of reveling in other’s and his own suffering, became a noble struggle to mock all that was cruel in life. He completed the formula: traumatized back-story (his own cruelty in Vietnam) + intense emotion + deceptively hides his trauma through acting out + conflict driven personality + style (this one is somewhat questionable).

 How to write ultimate characters/ emotionally powerful characters:

1) Give the character many flaws. The bigger the flaws are, the better. Build them into the personality itself, so that no matter what “lessons” they learn, these flaws will not be completely resolved because they are a part of who the character is.

2) Slowly hint that they are hiding something. Make them private (Cloud), or deceptive (House and Serith), or guilty, or bitter (Comedian). This will plant the seed of a question in the audience’s mind.

3) Flashback to a tortured back-story.

4) Snap the character (in the back-story or later), make it emotional.

And no matter what, do not do number 3 or 4 without first making the audience care. No one likes complainers. Remember Naruto episode 1? Cry-baby.

Lately I've stopped using xanga because I was afraid that if I wrote about work, someone somewhere would do a google search of my name and boom, my personal opinions of my coworkers would hurt my job opportunities... this is also the reason I didn't dye my hair an exotic color.

Now I think I'm really too careful. I have no desire to enter politics, no desire to get hired in any prestegious field. I want to work as a comic book illustrator some day. I want to work in animation some day. These are both places where jeans, t-shirts, and dyed hair are completely normal, and as for xanga, so long as my name is not used, google won't associate this site with me.

Besides, only a handful of good friends and family even have access to my xanga anyway--not any more than a dozen or a few dozen people at most.

I know everything I just typed is boreing, but I have no better ideas for now...so here's a picture I drew. Which is the better one?