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Nominull comments on How to Write Deep Characters - Less Wrong Discussion
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It strikes me as a little awful to only care about bad people inasmuch as they're likely to become good people. Maybe I've been perverted by my Catholic upbringing, but I was taught to love everyone, including the sinners, including the people you'd never want to hang out with. This appeals to me in part because I sin and people don't want to hang out with me, and yet I want to be loved regardless.
It's possible that I am the weird one here, but shows with complex but evil characters such as Breaking Bad do seem largely popular. There is a large current in modern adult TV of these sorts of villainous antagonists, and I think it's more than just false sophistication. I think it's people with the courage to see the dark parts of themselves reflected in fictional characters.
I believe you're also supposed to hope/encourage the sinners to repent and stop sinning, i.e., you're supposed to root for them to become better people.
I feel a little misrepresented, but that's my own fault. I think we'd have to do quite a bit more unpacking to continue this conversation - you seem to want to mean the same thing by "love", "care about" and "sympathize with", and I think they all come apart for me. Like, maybe (warning: I'm tired) "love" feels like a timeless relation to a particular person-moment, whereas "caring" is timeful and inherently about wanting a possible-future-person to be better than a present-person, including morally better - surely something like that has to be the substance of caring? Like, what else is caring supposed to do? Just give me warm fuzzies?
I also think that I use different cognitive strategies to deal with real people I actually know, versus fictional characters (though I'm not necessarily endorsing that).
Yes, shows like that are very popular, and I'm getting really sick of it. I don't understand it, but I don't really think that it's false sophistication. Or courageous self-examination.