Usually, I know what I'm doing when I write these, but having spent over an hour and a half writing this, I'm not sure with this one. Beware: Not alot makes sense.
When it comes to fiction, I will admit that I am a sadist. Persay, I don't enjoy the pain characters suffer, but I love the dynamics it causes.
From a writer's perspective, this is an all too common joke. The author is a sadist because she/he kills off that wonderful, hot character that we all grew attached to, ruining our lives along with those of the characters; the author is a sadist because she killed off the character we grew attached to. That's not what I really mean.
When I say a author can be a sadist, I mean when the author has a genuinely good and brave person go through miserable and undeniable hell for the sake of a plot arc.
Nobody would read a book about Susy Sunshine getting everything she wants in life by wishing for it. We want things to go wrong. We want fiction to mirror our own lives in that things go wrong and the people we love do us wrong and the bad guys are stronger than we'd like to admit. We want the stakes to be high so that it can mimic our perception of reality.
We want the main characters to go through hell because that's what we think qualifies one for success. And we're sorta right in that the best things in life require the most struggle, but if we keep working at it, we can get what we want. In our own lives, we go through ages and ages of miserable hell for no reason at all sometimes, and often times don't get what we want. Things aren't clear from the outset, there is no one true goal driving us that can be read on the back cover of our lives. There is no simplified hero's journey where our loved ones get kidnapped and we are drowned into a whole new world where things are different but we are powerful. That's not how the world works. But it's how we like to read it.
Here is a general rule of fanfiction: The bigger the fan base, the shittier the fanfiction. Nobody will write about the characters accurately because that's not how they see it. People see themselves in their favorite characters, and thus, will write pieces of themselves into their fanfiction. The more appealing the character, the less accurate the reader's interpretation of them will be.
That's why all good characters are well-rounded, flawed people. If they weren't, they would be caricatures, easily forgotten in the large scheme of our minds and memories and plastered in along with the stereotypes at the back of our minds.
We put our characters through hell to make them human. To give them something to struggle against and to define them. To help us see them as more than effacing plot-roles and as people we would care about if they really did exist.
This post makes no sense. To be fair, it's 2:00 in the morning.
If you want my opinion, the best struggles in a narrative are when the main character's greatest struggle is to keep themselves whole while fighting towards their goal as the world (and villains) threatens to rip them apart with disease or loss or overwhelming odds or losing battles or whatever great things that make up the fabric of who they are. That's more interesting than some empire. (And ultimately, what the empire as an idea is meant to symbolize)
I didn't mind in the Hunger Games (Spoilers for Mockingjay) when Peeta got hijacked. I wanted to see him fight against it, I wanted to see the real Peeta fight against what threatened to destroy his sanity and the girl he loved most after having murdered his entire family. I wanted to see him manage to hold himself together long enough to be fixed at the broken places, and to keep holding on to the values and things he holds most sacred despite the world and his own body trying to convince him not to. It's so much more interesting to watch a good and decent human being fight miserably against that inmesurable force. When you're fighting an 'empire' or a demon for your soul, you earn my sympathy.
All these clear cut struggles from novels mirror our own inner battles, the ones that take place over the span of years during Chem class and those boring lunches that make you want to poke your eyeball out and the back of your mind during those lonely times.
I should sleep.
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