Depth, connection, and humanity
How pain makes characters feel real
This has been on my mind for a while now. By a while, I mean of course a lions share of my life, as this is just my nature and how I think. What makes a person’s story relatable? What is it that draws us towards fictional people that objectively can’t exist? Why do certain archetypes just make us swoon, or make us feel in ways that people in the real world just don’t?
What is it, truly, that makes us human, and why is it that is what we see in stories but not in each other?
One of the things I learned very young was that a good story involved true things. A character ends up being more than just a series of bullet points on an overview. They’re a piece of yourself. You’re splitting your lived experience, your actual physical knowledge of the world, and pouring it into this vessel that is then the avatar of the true-message of the story.
What that message is, well, that’s up to the author and the interpretation of the readers. For me, the message is pretty much always the same no matter what I write or where.
See, I feel everything. All the time. I can’t not feel, just like I can’t not think. This little feature doesn’t go over well with most people, so I learned to hide myself. I still have a piece of writing from when I was 11 and I called it ‘the leviathan inside me’. The true-self of all the desires and thoughts that are denied reality just so I can continue to exist.
I say this because my characters are all aspects of this pain. And it is pain, without doubt. We all experience it to some extent, but whether a person is aware of it or not is another matter. The pain of isolation, the pain of conformity, the pain of rejection, the pain of loneliness, the pain of expectation, the pain of loss, the pain of knowing that it is all, ultimately, meaningless.
Now, this isn’t a nihilistic post, nor is it meant to be a philosophical thing so let’s attach this to the character creation process and pretend to be functional for another moment in time.
What makes a character truly compelling? In the context of the modern world, it is the pain we relate to. The most popular characters tend to do one of two things: they exemplify the quiet rage of that pain or they blatantly reject the need to hide it.
Explosive personalities who defy their peers and society at large are hugely popular in anime for example. Characters like Bakugo Katsuki continue to win popularity polls, despite having told other characters (that should have, in a perfect world, been childhood best friends with) they should die. His attitude is generally terrible, he believes he’s the best at everything he does, he’s unrepentent and unapologetic, stubborn beyond all reason…and it’s intoxicating to so many people to watch or read.
Perhaps, it is his rebellious quality here?
But then again, when you examine the character, he isn’t rebellious. At all. He gets perfect grades, he excels in all fields he attempts, he wants to be essentially a law-enforcement agent in his world, he doesn’t attempt to empathize with his enemies or understand them, and he listens to authority figure. He just emotionally and physically dominates them, his friends, the whole fictional world around him.
If you really dive into the character, you’ll start to see some other interesting things that I don’t think reflect on the desires of the author necessarily. Bakugo feels more like a character trope made manifest, then accidentially made into a tangible entity by circumstances and comparisons of characters around him. It’s easy for someone like Bakugo to exist and stand out when he isn’t in a realm where he’ll be punished for his behaviors like he would in the real world.
At the same time, he’s got some depth to him. His emotional and rational intelligence is exceptional (as written by the author anyways) which makes him a fascinating point of view character. Here we have a raging delinquint by any other name, and yet, he offers insight that typically shouldn’t be possible for his character type.
Of course, we could just say that this is the author pulling shenanigans, especially given the weak writing of the series, but at the same time this also points out a possible aspect of connection.
If Bakugo acts as a subtle rejection of the world, while overtly accepting it and his place in it, then the appeal of the character is that he’s just rebellious enough to not get in trouble, while still feeling like he has personal agency. Character’s like Naruto also pull from this trope as well, giving them both a style of empathic connection for the reader that has become relatively less popular since their inception in the late 90s an early 00s.
However.
Bakugo exists as a point of view trope, a classic heroine archetype and ultimately a throw in rather than as a proper duerotagonist or think piece on society. He isn’t pushing boundaries, he is the boundary. This is just a case of poor writing and apathetic author, but it is important to point out what the character ended up being compared to where people hoped he would become.
Despite that rational awareness of him, I still find myself drawn to his character. Not because he’s a funny little shit or anything, but because I can see a part of myself in him (and Lelouch but that’s a can of worms for the future). I can relate. That’s the ultimate draw of any story, or any character really; to see yourself reflected.
And to me, I see my pain reflected in him.
When I write, I write from my lived experience. My lived experience has been…diverse shall we say. After connecting with a friend who knew me as a child and catching up on life, he said “wow, you’ve really done a lot”. Honestly, I had barely scratched the surface and decided I should just stop while I was ahead because, yeah, I’ve done a lot, seen a lot, experienced a lot and a vast majority of it was terrible.
It makes for fascinatingly powerful writing however.
If the world is a thing of objective suffering for you, and if your perspective of it is flavored as such, then the characters you write - being necessarily a bit of yourself - all reflect this. If you’ve taken the time (thank you!) to read the character posts I’ve done in the past, then this should be pretty obvious. Lai’ee and Azhugei both are little bits of me. And that is what makes them so powerful as characters.
They feel real because they are real.
Bakugo doesn’t feel real, because he was never made with that intent. He was never made to be humanly-relatable on a deeply personal scale.
Get it?
No?
Okay, let’s try another popular character.
Jack Sparrow!
Okay, I know you groaned, I groaned, the world groaned because why him, but hear me out! Jack Sparrow has won a billion popularity polls, people loved him in theaters and his character archetype is actually super similar to Bakugo.
He’s a duetagonist (arguably the superior protagonist, like Bakugo), offers a scathing rebuke on absolutely everything, is sly, charming, whimsical, and humerous yet ultimately he doesn’t defy convention.
But does he feel real.
Does he feel like his experiences in life are a thing that you could point to and say, “Oh, yes, I’ve felt that before!”
This is of course a subjective opinion, by I would wager that most would say “no” which is what makes him, in my eyes, a weak character. His portrayal on screen is what saves him from mediocraty and being utterly forgotten, but write him on a page. Rob him of his actor, his voice, his colorful attire and mannerisms as seen, and take a look at what is left.
Sparrow is just a joker archetype with the depth of a thimble. He offers the occasional 4th wall breaking commentary, the subtle harmless jibes at the audience and the world, the usual things a person expects from the joker.
Nothing revolutionary here either, but unlike Bakugo, he doesn’t have any redeeming qualities. There isn’t a growing awareness on the creators part that there is potential for more.
So what is a good character?
Mafuyu.
BL, I know, but hear me out.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS FOR GIVEN SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
STIL SPOILERS.
…
Right, so, Mafuyu is an introverted individual who endures child-abuse where his father harms him anytime that Mafuyu speaks. This conditions him very early on to be silent, quiet, and otherwise non-expressive. The effects this has on a childs development are deeply profound and typically life-long (making his father an absolute scum bag who deserves to rot in hell). For Mafuyu, this manifests in an uncertainty with words, a difficult barrier in expressive emotions, and an affect that says “I look like I’m not thinking of anything” - the thousand yard stare.
By itself, it’s a tragedy of a lifetime. Here is a kid who is abused in one of the most damaging ways possible - he’s isolated from himself and humanity.
We are, at our core, cooperative with each other. We depend on each other. We are social creatures in desperate desperate need of our fellow humans; of validation, of acceptance, of love, of actualization. For an anime, the characters in Given have a fantastic array of emotional states and subtle complexity, but I think that Mafuyu is the best of them all because of how strongly he wants connection.
And the catalyst of that desire is another character, Yuki.
It’s only in flashbacks we see this character, but in these flashbacks it is clear that Yuki more or less “saved” Mafuyu’s humanity from isolation, abuse, and pain.
The most poignant moment to me was when he found Mafuyu sitting alone near a tree as children. It was just happenstance, a one in a million encounter. Had Yuki been a little further in on the road, he’d never have seen Mafuyu. Arguably, he’d be alive still in that case, but fate is not biased towards kindness nor life.
Inserting himself into Mafuyu’s life, Yuki quickly becomes his best friend and his anchor. Through Yuki, Mafuyu lives, experiences joy, connection, and happiness. Through Mafuyu, Yuki experiences the same spectrum of emotions.
As described by other characters, they had their own little world with its own rules compared to everyone else. Two pieces of one soul.
And then Yuki dies an utterly meaningless death. One so bitterly pointless that in of itself it is enough to make one weep.
This brings into question something that is rarely ever brought up in any fiction, “What do I do with myself, after the end?”
For Mafuyu, he just exists. He’s in a state of total agony, but so stripped of anything else, so numb to it all, that he no longer feels anything. He dreams, every night, of the day that Yuki died, and like a shuffling corpse, he simply mirrors the actions of a living being. But in his heart, he’s been dead since that day and he recognizes it. He recognizes his isolation and loneliness and that Yuki was, in a real way, his own humanity made manifest.
When it’s poured into an avatar that then becomes the center of ones capacity to feel love, is it any wonder that a person like Mafuyu would shut down upon losing it?
What’s more fascinating though, is how insanely relatable it is. Mind blowingly relatable. It’s the pain of true loss. The anguish of seeing someone you love die and being so completely powerless. Of standing there, staring at a casket, not knowing how everyone else is able to walk away.
Here is a person we don’t get to see much of in terms of internal thoughts. Just a whisper here or there, giving us the implied message of “maybe they were right, maybe he really doesn’t think of anything” due to his affect. His behavior, though, is so achingly familiar to my eyes.
If you shut yourself down because the pain is too great to endure, then other people start to look at you as being broken. As having lost what little made you interesting to them. There’s a tiny bit of awareness there, when people recognize that but it is often swiftly rejected. Truth be told, most of the modern world is built around shallowness, emptiness, and feckless behaviors, so of course this ends up being the case when we see someone in immense pain. We’re taught to ignore it or push it away.
Mafuyu had two other childhood friends, alongside Yuki. However, both of them abandoned him, leaving him utterly alone after the funeral. Whether they blamed Mafuyu for Yuki’s death is unknown and never really explored, but the tangible impact this has on Mafuyu is very clear. Early on, Hiiragi makes an appearance and is startled to see Mafuyu carrying Yuki’s guitar. Unable to face any of that shit, Mafuyu literally runs away. At a later point, Mafuyu confronts Hiiragi about everything that happened and Hiiragi says nothing one way or the other about his behavior, only that he is sorry and that he “wants his friend back”. Hiiragi’s internal dialogue is a repeat of desperation for forgivenss from anyone.
Credit to Mafuyu for having a heart big enough to accept Hiiragi back, because I don’t think I’d have it in me.
Transitioning a bit further, we get some snippets of realization that Mafuyu has been able to come to terms with Yuki’s death and accepted the unrealized need to move forward with his life. Or perhaps, it’s that he feels he has that as an option now thanks to another very stubborn “I am now in your life muahaha” character, where as before he was the fugue state personified.
It’s a little tropey, but I also empathized with it. I went through a similar experience, where a very extroverted person decided randomly upon meeting me that they would be my friend and there was absolutely nothing at all I could do the stop them. I had no idea how much I wanted that until I had it. Had no idea how much I would always want that, until I lost it.
Like Mafuyu, I had to endure losing that connection. So for me, it is a deeply personal sensation of pain that I empathize with, that makes the character scream I am alive, damn it!
But Mafuyu takes it even further, because not only does he have to piece together the broken remnant of his half-soul, but he has to navigate the after-it-all and the how-can-I-love-again. He has to express it, he has to get it out, he has to push this burning mass of anguish from inside and feel the rage and the despair and the hurt in order to be human again. He has to brave, to face the possibility that ultimately it could be for nothing anyways, that he could lose it all again. And again. And again.
The way the show does this (manga too) is stunningly painful, in the good way. Credit to where it’s due, but holy god does the VA sear echoes into my fucking soul. Maybe they too, felt connection with Mafuyu, and they too could channel the impossible-to-express into that moment in time.
That’s the magic of Mafuyu though, he’s not a generic archetype. He comes across as shy, timid, a little bland, but he isn’t. He’s just deeply, deeply traumatized. He takes the standardized uke personality slot and dumps it on its head. He’s actually absurdly expressive, so much so that the only other character that really gets it is, himself, a product of trauma and the distance of genius.
When Mafuyu is busy singing his literaly heart out, another character named Ugetsu Murata is watching from the sidelines. Murata is a genius prodigy at violin, described as “feeling everything” all at once which is then translated when he plays. Only when behind a violin does he find expression. So when he listens to Mafuyu sing, he immediately hears an echo of himself.
Mafuyu says he just wants someone to understand, for anyone to understand his desire to scream and cry and being utterly unable to do so. Murata does, because his nature is extremely similar.
Murata, in this instance, is the audience point of view character. We understand Mafuyu and his pain, we relate to that endless need to scream and cry in total grief at just everything. And, like Murata, we envy Mafuyu in the moment, because in that moment he was perfectly in tune with everyone around him. There is absolutely anime-magic happening, but I can see it as something that could happen in the real world too. We crave connection, we crave magic in that connection, and if we were all standing there before a real-life Mafuyu just as he starts to sing his heart out, well..
I certainly would be brave enough to admit to crying deep tears.
This is what makes an amazing character. This is what adds depth, complexity, and emotional connection. When you dream of that song, when you hear his heart, and when you understand “that is me, right there, in that moment”. That the pain never goes away, but that the pain is not all there is, that there is hope, that you aren’t totally alone and you aren’t just some broken useless ruin.
That you don’t have to be.
The capacity of Given to tell such a compelling story just goes to show how utterly impactful emotionally-driven characters are. They show you demonstrably what our humanity looks like, what isolation looks like, and gives us a place to connect. With so many stories and so many characters rote and dull and uninteresting, I thought it would be useful to point out the emotional antithesis of a Bakugo. I love Bakugo, but he isn’t real.
Mafuyu is.
I have tried to articulate the profoundness of the moment when I heard Mafuyu’s amazing VA sing. Dub, sub, doesn’t matter, the quality of the singing is near-identical and the emotional impact chilling.
I found myself sitting there, going from a previously passive and analysis-mode perspective to a seat-gripping enthrallment. I didn’t even realize I was crying.
There was, in some way, a moment of apotheosis there. Where everything felt like it had been hand-crafted to reach that exact moment. That the author had dreamed of this single sequence with a nameless character with a fathomless tragedy and finger-snapped, “that, that right there is what I am making”. Often times, stories get started that way, and in retrospect, I think that’s the case.
Or, perhaps I’m too far up my own ass to consider that the song was a later addition. Only the author knows.
What matters though is the masterful execution. Building the character of Mafuyu around this moment and then finally letting the dam burst. Yes, this was masterful.
I also felt grief for Yuki too. A stupid mistake, a pointlessly stupid mistake, and he lost it all. He lost what I would argue is a species-wide dream; of having love all your life. Of finding that perfect soul mate. Of losing his life, so very young. I grieved for him as much as I did for Mafuyu.
This sort of impact is what happens when you write a truly strong character. When you really sit down and hammer out the emotional complexity that is being alive and then tie it together with the tragedy of living that life. It’s the kind of writing that honestly, we need way more of.
I really enjoyed this read about character development and your insight into how a writer uses their own experience to create nuance. That said I also think writers can use fantasy to create. Who they are not, as much as a piece of who they are.