STORY - The flat male lead.

[juncmodule]

Male leads in stories are broken, or perhaps not broken enough.

I look to movies for a lot of inspiration, as I'm sure many here do. A large problem that I'm having is that female characters are always easy to find inspiration for. I can write a dynamic interesting female without problems. When it comes to the male though, everything falls apart.

Male leads are almost always, it seems, shaped by the world they are currently in or the love interest they have. I think characters should be shaped by the world they *have* lived in, not the current one. So, by their past. This is how people work, they adapt to a new environment and events based on past experiences.

With the male lead this seems to be not quite coming together for me.

An example: When I think male lead and go to movies to find that male lead, one mind springs to mind, Johnny Depp. A few weeks ago I watched Edward Scissorhands. I think this is a great example of my problem in a way. This character certainly doesn't seem flat. But, when I break down what makes him interesting, I can't see anything left but his environment, love interest, and the story before him. Without a doubt, I see "incompleteness" as the dynamic trait that drives the character. Somehow this doesn't seem to do it for me.

Perhaps this is a problem with me, I just like creating females more. I, personally, don't find males interesting.

So, the question is, what do you do to overcome this? How do you create male leads? Is there anyone that has the opposite problem?

Thanks for reading.

later,
-junc

[Jim Reed]

Well, realistically, males are driven by their alpha male syndrome, showing itself in many ways. Any male who doesn't think with his jimmy probably makes him an interesting character. Or too feminine =D.

Take eg. Daniel Leary (David Drake, RCN series). He screws women a lot, but his duty comes above all.

[Babar]

Juncmodule!

Welcome back!
Unfortunately, after I read your post, it got into me, and now I can't think of any good examples of male leads that do not conform to your analysis. But then again, I can't think of any female leads that do either!

I guess for your criteria, you could look to male leads who have gone through some major change (that their past is definitely separated from their current environment). Like prisoners, or hermits or outcasts or exiles, etc.

PS: Whatever happened to all those sprite files you used to have, for templates and such?

[Akatosh]

My characters have a tendency to live more in their own mind than anywhere else... 

But yeah, I think I know what you mean. A character should be a person living in an environment, not a piece of environment given humanoid form.

[Snarky]

Female leads are better written (well-rounded and interesting) than male leads in general? I can't say I've noticed anything of the kind. In fact, many feminists claim that the opposite is true: that men get the meaty, interesting roles and women are reduced to "romantic interest" and stereotypes.

I think you can find good example of characters constructed in all kinds of ways of both sexes. Let's look at some male characters. (I tend to look primarily to books, so that's where I'm taking most of my examples from.)

The archetype of the character shaped and driven by his past is probably Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo. Or take the books by Salman Rushdie, which always explore how society, family and biography combine with individual quirks to form people's personality.

For characters driven by their interior lives, how about Holden Caulfield, Leopold Bloom, or any character by Conrad or Ballard?

Characters for whom duty (and their conflicting feelings about it) constitute a major motivation include Hamlet, Gaiman's Dream, Titus Groan, Paul Atreides, and Jesus in Matthew's account.

And then there's ambition, which often produces the most obsessive personalities and outright villains. Again we could mention Paul Atreides, along with Macbeth, Daniel Plainview, Stringer Bell, and Michael Corleone (who also exemplifies many of the other motivations).

A lot of characters are searching for something their lives are missing, like the unnamed protagonist in Fight Club, many of Faulkner's characters, or the butler in The Remains of the Day/

And don't forget the reluctant, "I just want a normal, comfortable life" characters who are beset by rather than driving events, like Bertie Wooster, Arthur Dent, or Jeff Lebowski.

These characters may be more or less rounded, more or less realistic, but to me they are all interesting. And in terms of important interesting characters in literature, cinema, and television, there's certainly no shortage of males.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I agree with Snarky, and I'll go a step further:

I actually get annoyed by female characters in media because they're so utterly boring and conform to three basic archetypes  (you can find all three in Aliens):

1.  The damsel in distress.  She offers almost NOTHING to the story aside from a plot objective.  This includes the so-called biologist/psychiatrist/doctor character that tags along with the hero and constantly ends up in trouble in spite of supposedly being competent.  Newt is a fair example.

2.  The utter and complete superbitch.  She's annoying, completely unlikeable, but somehow the writer thought a bitchy woman that behaves like a man with tits is what people want.  She spends most of the story grabbing you by the balls and reminding you just how butch she is, all the while forgetting to actually be a compelling character with some kind of realism.  Vasquez fits this perfectly.

3 (very rare).  The well-rounded woman.  She's resourceful when situations demand it, compassionate when its called for, and earns your respect through her deeds.  Ripley is a fine example of this.


I very rarely see women of type 3 portrayed in media, even romantic comedies or dramas tend to reduce the female leads to comic shells of real people, overly fixated on themselves and their minor tragedies.  To be fair, most men in these same shows are flawed in exactly the same way, though occasionally they have the 'nice chump' character who has a lot of fine qualities but for some reason the woman is too stupid to notice until the end.


I think one of the problems with writing a good female character is that most people tend to factor them in as an add-on to a male lead (or vice versa) for sexual tension or as a target for rescue rather than as another character in the story or as friend or confidant.  If you spend time on developing the uniqueness of these characters and building their interactions and subplot layers, eventually even the one-off characters seem believable in the short time they've been around.

[Gord10]

To original post;

Why doesn't it work to create a female character that possess the all unique properties we want and then just to change her gender?

And vice versa, I believe changing the gender of a character that's designed to be male wouldn't be too hard. This could give us a 3rd type story ProgZmax mentioned.

[Anian]

Well writing any character to seem rounded and "real" is usually hard to do. On the other hand sometimes there is no need for it, sometimes you need a damsel in distress, sometimes you need a superbitch - same way you need that one character in any horror movie who'll do something stupid (like stray from the group, open the door, be bitten but not say anything etc.) and thus movig the story in the direction the author wants.

Hmm, isn't the whole point of a story the way a character changes through it, how he/she "evolves", faces problems etc.? Especially in an adventure game, you're basically starting with a tabula rasa (a person with no memory and such) - that way the player easily forms his thoughts and the way a certain character is supposed to be while the authors just nudge and hint at it's personality (bringing in frineds, family, lovers...) and guide to some sort of half character half player persona.
Of course you can take it a step further and make some history from the start (like characters job, education or similar) or a complete history.

In any case showing is always more than telling so it's no wonder that a character gets more "real" within the game then before the actual plot of the game.

On ProgZ 3. option - isn't that a hero type - we want to be that person instead of, for example antihero that we feel we are, in some way at least, actually that person. In modern games, books, comics, it's always preferable to have a main protagonist as an antihero, not only cause "dark" stories are much cooler, but also cause it's easier not to be jealous and turned off somebody who's perfect and because it's much more fun to see somebody overcome the odds. Besides heros, today, don't seem "real" enough...heroes are happy and content and very few people feel like it.
I know I kind off divert from your statement, but to go back to it - Ripley is a good example of a hero, in a way that she isn't perfect (she is not the perfect fighter, at least not in the first 2 movies) and she is scared etc. but she isn't completly useless and tries to do good.
Don't know if that all makes here well-rounded, I don't thinks so, but then again that brings me to the begining of this post nobody is reading anymore , that's not what we really always want from a protagonist, is it?

[Jimbob]

I'm only just starting to enter the realm of writing for adventure games but here's my comment anyway.

You say your male lead should be defined by his 'past'. Well thinking about my own past has been pretty much defined the relationships I've had (with friends/lovers/colleagues etc...) and the places I've been too along with, probably most importantly, the change in outlook I've had regarding these things... every new place, new face, new event you meet will inevitably change that... and you (subconsciously) relate things in your current world to your past, new people you meet seem to show traits you may have seen before, creating an opinion even before you actually know them (don't lie, we all do it).

I think you can kinda show that within an adventure game with the snippets of past recollections, items you recall or actions the character has done before. Everyone remembers their past mistakes, successes and missed opportunities, we just don't talk about it, yet in an adventure game you do have a chance to be within a person's head (as sickly voyeuristic as it sounds, it's true).

So you talk about your 'flat' male lead being shaped by his current world, all it takes is to show some relation to his past with regard to what he's experiencing now (e.g. maybe he's more guarded towards certain personality traits because of a past event) then you can add a so-called extra depth that you are looking for...

Err yeah... I have had a large glass of gin... so I may be talking rubbish...

[juncmodule]

@Snarky: I didn't say that female leads are better written. I said "female characters are always easy to find inspiration for.", but I agree with many of your points. I think my female leads may fall close into the range of type three that ProgZmax pointed out. I certainly agree that men are portrayed in the more "meaty" roles. But, I guess my problem is, how often is that done well? You cited many books that I have never read, but many VERY good authors. I think, if anything, this proves my point. I don't think I've read a single book that you mentioned and I'm sure that they would be inspiring characters. I believe they are in the minority though when compared against the flat males in film. Perhaps this is the real problem, my source of inspiration coming from film instead of books.

Gord10 nailed it in a way. If I find it easy to write female leads, maybe I just need to build up the male as a female and then swap genders. I believe the line in As Good as it Gets was: "How do you write women so well?" "I imagine a man and then I take away all reason and accountability."

Perhaps I shouldn't have said male "lead" to folks making adventure games. I agree with everyone that the male lead in an adventure game needs very little to be engaging. In fact, the less of themselves the ego brings the easier it is to become involved in their story. It is usually the other characters that make the story interesting from the adventure game perspective. So I guess apply those questions to your NPCs instead.

@Anian: "isn't the whole point of a story the way a character changes through it" Absolutely! That is my issue, getting a good and interesting starting point. I have the story, have the romantic lead, the challenges and adventures that will shape my male lead into a great character. But my first chapter is looking terrible Bringing him, and the reader, into the story world is the whole problem. He isn't interesting enough for a reader to follow for 300 pages, little enough for me to write him for 300 pages.

Also, in regards to the "tabula rasa", this is part of my personal problem with the male lead to. My starting point has been a blank slate, because he started as an adventure game character.

So is the general consensus that I'm wrong? That I'm just not seeing the many dynamic males that are out there? The males do have the meaty roles, and I'm just being block headed and refusing to accept them?

@Babar: thanks, I took all of that stuff down a while ago, more on accident than anything. Perhaps I should put it back up. Guess I haven't received any requests for it so just kind of forgot.

later,
-junc

[Snarky]

Presumably all characters stem from inspiration? So if there are as many great male characters as female ones, then maybe it isn't inherently more difficult to come up with a male character. I'm sure that varies from writer to writer, but that's just it: to me it sounded like you were taking an observation about your own creative inclination and turning it into some grand statement about How The World Is. Personally I find it much easier to think up male characters than female ones, and I'd hazard that that's the more common experience (among male writers).

I used famous books as examples because they come easily to mind, are more likely to be recognized, and less likely to lead to quibbles over whether the character is really all that good. That doesn't mean you have to be some Nobel Prize-winning author to create a cool male lead for an adventure game. Of course, good writers create fascinating and real characters and bad writers create dull and stereotypical characters, and there are many more bad writers than there are good writers. But still that doesn't say anything about the gender of the characters. If you fail to find many great male leads, are you really saying that there's a whole lot of female ones out there?

I think film may be a bad medium to look to if you value biography as a key to character, because movies are so compact, and so concerned with the immediate action on screen. It doesn't leave a lot of room for backstory. Television, comics and novels tend to delve into its characters' pasts to a much greater extent. That said, Edward Scissorhands is not a particularly representative example. The whole point of his character in that movie is that he has no past, that he's never been a part of the world.  If you look at a film like The Sixth Sense, you see that Bruce Willis's character's past has a much more prominent place in the story.

The "everyman" protagonist that players project their own personality on is a perfectly fine approach, but I don't believe it is the only valid way to create an adventure game hero. Rabbi Stone (The Shivah), Gabriel Knight, Robin Hood (Conquests of the Longbow), Simon the Sorcerer, Larry Laffer, Manny Calavera... they are all fairly distinctive and strongly defined personalities. And I usually find that more satisfying than controlling a featureless puppet, mostly because a character who has no personality or history cannot have a personal stake in whatever the story is. There's a quote that says something along the lines of, "Only by describing a specific life can an author show us the universal truth of all lives." (Warning: Quote is badly mangled!)

I think it's a mistake to rely on characterization to engage players at the beginning of a game. Depth of personality and character development is something that by its very nature has to be discovered gradually. Also, you only grow to care about the characters and their world over time. Like I often say: No one cares about your stupid backstory! (Not when they first start, that is.) To draw people in, use interesting events or cool puzzles. Use this time to expose aspects of the character, focusing on some fairly simple traits that make him/her awesome, likable or outrageous. For example, Raiders of the Lost Ark starts off with a very cool action sequence in Peru. We watch for the perilous jungle quest, and as we go along we slowly get to know some basic facts about Indy. Only once we've bonded with him through "shared" danger does the plot take a step back and start filling in more of the blanks and adding layers to his personality.

[Anian]

Yeah, Manny Calavera is a good example - we don't know and are not allowed into what he did to be "punished" and what was he like when he was alive, but the whole game (which is a story and a journey of it's own) assumes something happened and you as the player don't care in the slightest.
Maybe he was a serial killer...who knows. The fact is that only a few things are taken into consideration and those are the ones that are needed for the story - he's is stuck in job with no future and is becoming desperate...that's all. Later, through the story we actually are playing/experiencing and for the sake of the actual plot, we discover he is romantic, he seeks salvation, he is actually very capable (every task he takes like the diner, boat etc. he becomes a boss and a success).

What I might recommend is to go in the opposite direction.
If there is a story that's already fleshed out then the actual character is used to move it along. But it's done is such a manner that when a reader/player goes through he/she feels like the story is going a certain way because of character's personality.
That way the character is made to suit the story but also you use your own judgement to say what's a logical reaction and how it all fits into a character.
-> there's a murder and even though our character is innocent we want him/her to shot a cop that comes to the scene, because we want him/her to be wanted and considered extremly dangerous or something. But why would somebody shoot at a cop? Well because when he/she was little father was shot or took them to a gun range or was a criminal -> so now a story made a need for an explanation of history...did we need to know that about a character if it was a love story? Not really, but in our case we needed it for the actual story to fit.
(I know stupid example, all I could think of on the fly)

Then again, you can always try the classic of making a whole sheet with characters info on it, everything from hair color and shoe size to what college they went to and thier first job...really it depends on the writer. Still nobody will ever read that, you need it for the story.

In any case, I don't think anybody writes something saying to themselves "I'm going to write the greatest character ever" but a story, that's more like it. Since the characters is connected directly to the story, use them to complete each other instead of making one then the other...

[Mr Flibble]

I find that male leads in fiction are usually pretty diverse and interesting, but that most people are incapable of writing a good female lead. They're always either the action girl, the ditzy clutz, the brat, or the (and this is something I have trouble defining) really weird, weak, pretentious kind. Unrealistically and irritatingly obsessed with romantic ideals and plagued by naivety and cowardice.

On the last kind: Often seen in short films with no dialogue, the only real example I can think of is the eponymous character from Leon de Winter's Eileen, a book none of you would have read (certainly how she appears in the opening of the book, as this is all I have read).

[TerranRich]

The male lead in my series of games is an exception to this rule. While at first he will seem to be the ideal child of a utopian society, we learn that things aren't as perfect as they seem, and the character goes through some personal growth and change that leaves a permanent impression on him, eventually changing his personality, pretty much. That's all I'll say.

[qptain Nemo]

I think it's best to create something you actually like and are interested in. I don't know what exactly inspires you so much in coming up with female characters but since you're obviously satisfied with the results you probably just like them in some way. So I suggest you in order to create a good male character just imagine a guy who'd you like to meet, to do something with (like, say, go adventuring) or even be. This may help you getting quite sure what do you want to see in a character.

Well, it least it works kinda like that for me. Sometimes I think 'geez, how much fun would a woman with certain features be' and another female character gets born. Some other sime I think 'it would be cool to be a guy like that' and invent a new male character. Often they appear from some single stroke of personality that I happen to like at the moment.
And it's not that I'm a genius of characters, but hey, sometimes I'm really satisfied with the results.  

[Stupot]

I think it's easy to generalise any character and say it in a smarmy tone to make it out that they were lazily written... just like the much-used saying that there are only 7 plots.  So sure, you can generalise any story and say 'oh god not another revenge tale', 'oh, great, rags to more bloody riches' or 'here we go, boy meets girl again'... but it's what you do with those general plots that makes a good story

And the same goes with characters... yes you can generalise them and package them into 'damsel in distress', 'everyman' or 'utter and complete superbitch', but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not interesting people.  Sometimes damsels just get themselves into distressing situations.  And if the prince who saves her happens to be charming, don't write him off just yet... he could be a really complex guy, sweetheart.

[Jared]

The first thing to jump to my mind was Captain Horatio Hornblower. He performs the deeds of a true hero, but it's all actually fuelled by a massive inferiority complex having grown up as a lower-middle-class guy with no idea what he wants to do with his life. He joins the navy as one of the oldest new midshipmen around and instantly gets a reputation as 'the midshipmen who was seasick in Spithead'. His fear of failure drives him to near suicidal bravery and resourcefulness when he sees any oppurtunity and his deficit of any ego makes him refuse to acknowledge most of these as successes. He's a royally messed up character, and that's without going into his lovelife. Most of this came across well in the Granada adaptations starring Ioan Gruffud (though purists felt the TV version was too confident)

Personally, I think there are more male leads that have depth to them out there, usually founded on psychological perspectives. They seem same-y because Hollywood prefers a certain kind of ultra-Alpha archetype - guys who want to screw every woman they like and kill every guy they hate and generally will by the end of the film. If it's toned down they'll put in a tokenistic 'softer side' for the character, like the disgustingly cute kids they love so much or something like that. Because movies are so influential this has creeped into some other media and people largely accept it, but it's a long way from being universal.

[Stupot]

Horatio Hornblower.

oh no, not another typical 'lonely hero'...  :

[Anian]

oh no, not another typical 'lonely hero'...  :

...this is sarcastic, right?   Lonely hero to me is osmebody like Mad Max, Hornblower (although I didn't read the books, just watched the series/movies) just doesn't give out that vibe although is in some way alone...don't know what he is, but I wouldn't describe him as "a lonely hero"...since he does have a crew and all.  

[Ali]

I haven't read all of the suggestions int the thread, but mine would be to watch several noir films: The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past/Build My Gallows High. Particularly the last one since you're interested in men with a past.

These films do all involve men doing foolish things because of women they love... but that is what men do.