@Eriskegal said:
I am no stranger to feeling deeply connected with various character creations. Whether on television series or in a book, when there is an emotionally tragic event in the life of someone you've invested time following, there comes a certain level of heartache. To me, this is one of the signs of amazing writing and facilitating of a good story arc. If you can invoke tears or anger in a reader or viewer, you're doing your job!
I'm interested in seeing what characters you've felt this kind of connection with, why, and what kind of emotion did it spark in you?
This is the story of me & X-23.
I didn't know much about her while reading Kyle/Yost's X-Force, but found her interesting, so I went and bought their miniseries covering her creation/birth and childhood, Innocence Lost. I don't really know how to articulate what about that story struck me. Maybe it was everything -- the horrifying way in which she was born (they kind of mechanically raped her scientist/mother into birthing her), the way she was denied a childhood, the way her mother tried so hard to show her kindness even though doing so meant risking her own life, and the way she was forced to do terrible things even, and especially, when she didn't want to and when it meant hurting the only people who had ever been good to her. Maybe it was seeing her arm, with the scars from self-inflicted wounds which she would continue to inflict on herself whenever she felt ashamed of who she was but didn't understand what she'd done wrong. It was such a deep tragedy, and she was just a girl, even behind all the conditioning and the attempts to turn her into a machine, she was still a girl. I cried at the end of that story.
Sometimes X-23 gets the rap of being some pointless Wolverine rip-off that people only like because she has tits. After having read Innocence Lost, I was deeply offended by that. I don't know Logan's past, so I'm not going to make the same mistake of unfairly disregarding him, but frankly I've never been half as interested in him as I was about her, about the way she behaved, and about how she was always struggling to just act like a normal person and finally have freedom over her own life. I've read through Target X, NYX: Wannabe, and Liu's whole X-23 run. And the whole time, I've cheered for her with every slow, hard-won step towards being free, being able to love herself, maybe even someone else.
I suppose the way she dresses, if you don't really know anything about her, you might just say she's hot. Some people no doubt like her for that reason, and think about her in that way. For me, and maybe it's because she was supposed to be a young teen and I'm almost 24, I've always felt a bit more of a paternal thing. I want to protect her from evils like Kimura. I'm right there with Logan wanting to impale Scott's head for putting her back on a kill squad to exploit her skills. And now she's in a death camp, once more with no control over her life, being asked (and likely being forced) to kill, or maybe to kill herself (which for any other character might be honorable, but for her it's just one more case of her believing that other people deserve to live more than she does, it's just one more cut (albeit the last one) on the arm that tells the story of a girl who never got to be a girl).
So the kinds of emotions? Sympathy. Horror. Compassion. A weird kind of love. A desire to protect. And now absolute lividity on her behalf. It's irrational, I suppose, but in a way, after all this time, she's as "real" to me as any fictional character could ever hope to be. I grew physically ill when I read about Avengers Arena, and the situation Laura had been put into. I actually almost threw up. And even a month after the fact, I'm still slowly simmering over it, because I'm powerless to do anything about it. Sometimes that emotion can get the better of me; I have a difficult time accepting attacks against her or her fans because in a way they feel all too personal; and while I can't lash out against Hopeless, I can to some extent lash out against other readers. I'd like to think I've grown remarkably calmer since I joined -- and it's worth noting that my feelings on this were so strong that I actually joined Comic Vine specifically so I could jump into the discussion about whether Avengers Arena was "everything wrong with comics" or not. But if there's one wound I can't stand having salted, it's her and her predicament. The fact that I haven't actually gone overboard sometimes surprises me.
I care about X-23 because of the amazing stories told by Kyle & Yost, and even to some extent by Quesada and Liu (but mostly the former pair). I have spent a lot of time getting invested in her, and all the positive emotions I mentioned above, the ones targeted towards her, are because of the strength of that writing. To that extent I agree with you about emotion proving a writer is doing a good job. But Hopeless and the people behind Arena are now eliciting their own emotion from me, not a new one or positive one, but an inevitable one born up from the pre-existing emotions I had for the character. They, too, are making me feel something, making me angry, likely to make me cry. But they ought not be commended for that, because they are simply feeding off the devotion I had prior to their work. To say that them making me angry is a sign of a good job is akin to saying that someone killing a close friend of mine is a good job: hurting someone people care about is guaranteed to evoke something, but that doesn't make it inherently a positive thing to do. To be clear, I'm not saying that was your point, but some people (including Hopeless and his editor) actually have pointed to reactions like mine as a good sign for them, and I felt like this was a good place to address it.
So, yeah...how emotionally invested?
The limit does not seem to exist.
Log in to comment