The Mythcreant Podcast 546 – Fixing Over-Candied Characters
We love it when a character does cool things and gets cool rewards, but only to a point. When a character goes past that point, they get annoying, contrived, and frustrating. They have too much candy, but it’s we who get the stomach ache. Fortunately, this is not an automatic state of affairs. Characters get too much candy when authors make mistakes, and it’s possible to avoid those mistakes. This week, we’ve got a few tips on that!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Aiden Lumb. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: We are of course cohosts. We’re completely equal partners, but I happen to have a secret dramatic backstory. So… the next ten episodes are going to have to be all about me and how shocking but cool my backstory is.
Oren: We’re all equal, but some of us are more equal than others.
Chris: It’s okay, Chris. We love you. You deserve this. Go for it.
Bunny: I want to learn more!
Chris: You’re so correct about how these next episodes should go.
Oren: Well, hang on. I think I’m actually going to disagree with Chris, just so that she can show how right she is, of course. Like, I’m not going to try to actually argue. I’m just going to put up some really pitiful objections that will be easily smacked aside.
Bunny: Don’t listen to him, Chris. He’s a jealous hater.
Oren: This might literally be a sign that I’ve been mind-controlled by the villain.
Chris: Yeah, did you know that I used to be a rebel who wouldn’t follow anyone’s rules? That’s right. They called me “the book ender” because I would sneak around finishing people’s unfinished manuscripts. But no-one ever knew who I was. But… ta-dah! Shocking. I am the book ender.
Oren: That’s so cool. That’s just the greatest thing that has ever happened.
Bunny: Oh my god, your eyes just changed colour!
Chris: I know! They change colour depending on my mood.
Bunny: They’re new and exciting and sparkly! Yes. And your hair, too: interesting.
Chris: It’s also a sign that I am the chosen one and I have the secret power that’s needed to defeat the villain.
Oren: Yeah. But you’re very modest, obviously.
Bunny: Of course.
Chris: Naturally. In fact, that’s why I’m the chosen one: I’m so modest. And only a modest person can defeat the villain. Don’t worry, I’ll win every verbal smearing match with him, though. So… making fun of candied characters is always very easy. So, we’re talking about how to fix over candied characters and just a review. Most people listening probably know what we’re talking about, but again… So, a candied character is one that gets lots of glorification. Lay people are most likely to call these characters “Mary-Sues”, which we don’t use because it’s a gross and sexist term. It specifically targets women, even though in really big budget popular works they are far more likely to be men.
Bunny: Also, what if I don’t want to marry Sue?
Oren: You don’t have to marry anybody. You can be single for as long as you want.
Chris: The other thing that’s weird about Mary-Sues is it kind of conflates having a self-insert character with having glorified character and while those things can go together, they are also others that are… who will put in a self-insert character and really beat up on them.
Oren: Yeah… which is way worse! It’s so uncomfortable to read a book about a character who is obviously the author’s self-insert and then the book just craps on them. And I’m just like: “author, are you okay?” I don’t know, maybe you need to talk to someone.
Chris: I think oftentimes it’s their younger self, where they’re like, oh, why couldn’t I be more like this when I was younger? But hey, stories are an outlet for our deep feelings—
Bunny: Psychology…
Chris: —Sometimes making them more transparently obvious than we would choose.
Oren: In reality most of the time you will never know if a character is the author’s self-insert or not. And for the most part, that never comes up. It only matters when suddenly people are looking for a reason to dislike a character and they’re like: “ah, this is definitely the author’s self-insert.” Like, if you say so bro.
Bunny: Sometimes a self-insert character might be an incredibly boring, everyday person. I’m kind of reminded of that Calvin & Hobbes strip, where Calvin says he’s writing a book and Hobbes asks what it’s about and he says it’s about a guy who flips through channels with his TV remote and Hobbes looks to the camera and kind of walks away. And he’s like, “they say you write what you know.”
Chris: Again, there’s something wrong with self-insert characters. They’re fine. But in any case, if we’re looking at candy, which is different than a self-insert character, we’ve covered some of the typical signs. Always being right is a thing that a lot of candied characters have. Usually, they are more quirky and unique than the characters around them. You can see that that’s where the creative energy’s going. They typically solve problems easily; being exceptionally good at an unusual number of things, like having three sets of professional skills that they’re the best in the world at, for instance.
Oren: They have so many PHD’s.
Chris: Having special physical features, like bright eyes or colour changing eyes. Or, you know, red red hair instead of just red hair.
Bunny: Redder than red. True red! The colour of flame. It’s like, wait a second.
Chris: Flames aren’t true red! What!?
Bunny: It’s blue at the roots. I don’t know.
Chris: So, is it the colour of flame, or is it true red?
Bunny: I should just say the colour of blood, in that case.
Chris: And then, oftentimes they get lots of social recognition because in many cases, the storyteller is looking for excuses to give them social recognition. So, like them being famous; being the chosen one; having people admire or, alternatively, envy them, right? Like those jealous haters, for instance; having them die or fake die so that everyone can be super sorry about it.
Bunny: This one is the most reliable way to identify them, for me. If there is a gratuitous funeral sequence where everyone weeps and talks about how cool they are, that, my friend, is a character you need to take some candy from. And I know it’s because I used to do it and… they’re absolutely self-insert manuscripts.
Chris: Right. And I do think actually that young people, like kids, tend to have more taste for candied characters. They like more candy than adults do in general. But there’s lots of personal variation, I should say. Just because a character is candied does not mean that story is for kids. I just have to be firm about that, because there’s a lot of people who say things like that that’s not good. But, kids in general do seem to like candy a lot and I think a lot of us have had the experience when we were young of making our super-candied character in our stories. And that was fun. And it was fine.
Oren: But, you do have to evolve a little bit.
Chris: Kvothe in The Name of the Wind was the true red her[ring]—red as flame, is pretty much the quintessential example of a super-candied character. So, candy is not bad altogether. It’s just… once you get to a certain level, it can start causing a lot of problems, especially in the beginning of a story if it’s the hero. But, it also can be very, very enjoyable because it’s a way of getting vicarious validation, which is a very powerful form of wish fulfilment. Everybody wants to feel special, so it allows the audience—if they like the character; if they’ve already bonded with the character—it gives that vicarious feeling of validation. And that’s really fun. The problem almost always comes when the audience is either not super into the character or needs to be sold on the character still, that it causes lots of issues.
Oren: Right. Because it’s harder to invest in a character when you start off by being told how great and cool they are. It’s like, that’s not anything like me; it seems like a weird space alien that you’ve created right here.
Bunny: Alternatively, maybe the character is being endlessly beaten up on. Surely, that’s more relatable?
Oren: Yeah. You go too far in the other direction, right?
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. Generally, you do want your protagonist to have some candy. And again, there are audience members who will really just love a character who has some candy just right out of the gate. At that point, I don’t think it’s optimal for talking about the hero of the story, just because I think that you can… if you do a few things to help mitigate it at the beginning you can get a wider appeal. Right? Get those people who like candy, and then also additional people. Whereas, if you go with tons and tons of candy, anybody who is just ready to identify with that character instantly, they might love that; there are some people who just like candy. So, I’m not going to say that if you really love candied characters and find an audience for that and that’s enough for you, that that’s a bad thing you shouldn’t be doing. But, for most of us, we’re trying to get a little bit of a broader audience onboard and this divisiveness of force—also why there’s unfair double standard and why we’ve got this Mary-Sue label blaming women, because if men are the ones who have the most influence, they look at these female characters with lots of candy and they don’t identify with these female characters, so they’re like, “ugh, Mary-Sues.” Meanwhile, Kvothe gets a free pass. So, in any case, that’s kind of the low-down on candied and over-candied—I like to use that to specify that they have too much candy, as opposed to assuming every character that has a lot of candy has too much. I think Luffy, for instance, in the live-action One Piece, I think he’s generally a good character. He has a lot of candy, but it’s kind of kept just under wraps enough through most of the show. At the end of the first season I think it goes a little too far.
Oren: Yeah. He becomes too much of an unstoppable badass and you’re kind of left wondering: why are the other characters here? Like, why did they bother to get out of bed that day?
Bunny: Everyday can’t be Halloween. Candy must be spread out.
Oren: But Luffy has the obvious benefit of—he’s a real goofball. Characters who don’t take themselves as seriously can handle a little bit more candy than characters who do take themselves more seriously, just because they don’t rub it in your face; they don’t act like they’re so cool. Because when someone starts acting like they’re so cool, you immediately want to be like no you’re not; you’re not cool, because we’re all contrarians. Whereas Luffy’s like, “I’m just a guy, I just like to steal stuff or be pirates.” He doesn’t really like stealing, but he does like being a pirate.
Chris: Yeah. I think humility and kindness work really well for candied characters, because then them being so cool and such a badass is not so in-your-face. And it also helps to prevent them from actively mistreating or pushing aside other characters. So, Luffy, for instance: his entire goal in the beginning is to get his own pirate crew. So, he’s really nice to the side characters; he wants to charm them, instead of being like, “oh, I’m a cool, badass loner and I don’t need any of you.” He’s just a really nice guy and you don’t know that he has all of these skills. Obviously, if we were writing this from the movie’s viewpoint, we wouldn’t want to pretend that he doesn’t have any powers for a long time, but… if he’s naturally a humble character he could still downplay them in his head a bit and do that kind of thing.
Bunny: The thing about candy is that it can come across as boastful or boasting on behalf of the character, because boastfulness is annoying. Then, we’d want to see that character taken down a peg or two. But, when the character exists to be cool, they probably won’t be and that’ll get irritating.
Chris: It’s starts to accumulate—it feels like an arrogant character, starts to kind of give them bad karma. We feel like, okay, they have all these rewards they haven’t earned and we have a natural sense of fairness and so, we want to see them kind of punished at some level. Now, the other thing with the hero is, again, when you’re introducing them, we usually want them to have sympathy and if they have so much candy—that absolutely kills sympathy. So, if you can just delay some of their coolness a little bit, so that you can give them the dark backstory or actually make them struggle (especially in the beginning) and have a hard time, that’s really helpful. Have them do cool things so that they earn being famous. Again, everybody enjoys candy once they’re actually attached to the character and they feel like the character has done something to earn it, right? Everybody likes… As far as I know… Somebody out there is going to say that they don’t like it. But in general, if you watch this underdog character struggle and then they do something cool and they earn a cool new title and get some hero-worship: we usually all enjoy that, because at that point, we’ve had time to get attached to them, we’ve seen them as underdog first and then we’ve seen how much they’ve done to earn people admiring them.
Oren: Yeah. And you’d be amazed how much of this problem you can head off by just having your characters earn their victories and have to work hard, or demonstrate perseverance, cleverness or sacrifice, right? If you can have them demonstrate those things, their wins will just be more natural and they will not feel like you are just making them seem more cool and on one hand, that seems obvious, but on the other hand, it turns out it’s kind of hard to do, so, I can see why authors struggle with it.
Chris: And, of course, there’s the tension issue, too. Because, if you have a character who always gets everything right, is never wrong, and shows off by solving problems really easily, then pretty soon, your tension is gone. And so, there’s a whole trick: if you have a super-candied protagonist, a lot of times, making them a fish out of water—okay, yes they are the most baddest of fighters in the entire world, but this time they have to do diplomacy. Or, another thing that I see frequently with characters that people really want to have tons of candy, is they give them a curse, because that’s a way of tricking your brain—“no, this character is inherently to most specialist of characters that ever was.” But they just happen to be under a curse right now.
Oren: We’ll get back to that later, don’t worry.
Chris: Yeah. This is, for instance, used in Owl House… oh man, what’s her name?
Oren: Eda?
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So, Eda is way too candied in the first season of Owl House, but she has a curse and that kind of starts to take over and reduce her power level by the second season. So, then she’s more balanced out.
Oren: I’ve got to be honest: I was impressed and amazed that that happened.
Chris: Yeah!
Oren: The first season, Eda just does everything and I just assumed that was going to be the state of affairs for the rest of the show, but they actually fixed it and… they could’ve done that earlier, but better late than never.
Chris: One reason these characters seldomly get fixed is because the reason they have so much candy is because they’re the storyteller’s favourite character and the storyteller just isn’t on the same page as the audience, because it’s their own character and they love them.
Oren: Right. And a big one to think about is: where does this put the character in relation to everyone else? Because it gets much worse when it seems like this character is overshadowing others. So, if your character is kind of on their own and solving problems and they’re the only one who does that sort of thing, it’s not as big of a deal. But if you give them a team and we’re like, “yeah, you’re a team of cool martial artists.” But any time there’s a martial arts fight, only your protagonist ever really does anything, then there’s your problem, right? You gave them a team—they actually have to matter.
Chris: So, it’s also worth talking about different roles. So, the protagonist—the nice thing about having a protagonist that’s candied is that that is the character that people are supposed to be attached to anyway. So, giving it candy to some level does align the interests of the audience with what you like to do. The problem is just the beginning, mostly. There could be problems later but the beginning especially when you need to get them attached in the first place and candy can stop that from happening. But then there’s other characters in the story who can also have too much candy. Candied side-characters, particularly those who are not love interests, I think is usually the worst situation.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because if they’re a friendly character, they’re an ally. Again, this is exactly the Eda situation. Why it causes so much issues is because they want to help the protagonist and now, because they’re candied, they have tons and tons of powers and that’s where they oftentimes push the character that the audience is supposed to like the most aside and just takes over. And I think that is extra likely to create resentment. I do think—sometimes I have seen candied mentors that did okay, though. I mean, Eda, once she’s levelled down. But in the Raksura books, I think there’s a candied mentor that’s really powerful in those books too. But Martha Wells finds ways to toss his name to stone, to get him just to go away for a while so that problems can happen. It’s kind of like the Gandalf problem, right? Gandalf is super powerful. In the Hobbit, he has to away every single time they get into trouble.
Bunny: I mean, that’s kind of Kelsier in the Mistborn Book One where he’s very good at fighting and stuff, but he needs a team. He’s charismatic and he’s good at fighting but they’re trying to incite a revolution and he’s kind of made himself the figurehead of that, because his ultimate plan was to become a martyr. So, he’s kind of like… make himself larger than life. And the other characters teach him about this and are suspicious of him over it. But the book is very obviously… you can be as cool and good at fighting as you’d like, but you need someone on the inside; you need someone gathering the troops; you need someone attending the balls and turning nobles against each other, and so forth. So, while Kelsier has tons and tons of candy, there are multiple roles happening in the book so it doesn’t feel like he’s taking away the other characters’ jobs.
Oren: Yeah. And Brando[n] Sando[erson] in those books spent a lot of effort on the question of: why does Kelsier have to be somewhere else right now? He’s got other places to be.
Chris: He’s a busy guy.
Oren: Yeah. We’re focussing on Vin now. Kelsier is somewhere else, don’t worry about it.
Chris: Right. And if you gave a candied side-character like that the level of social admiration that often storytellers want to give to a candied character, I think it would get out of hand and create a lot of resentment. It’s a little bit better when the side-character is a love interest, because oftentimes being super-competent makes that love interest more attractive. But, they can still be obnoxious… But there are definitely—especially in heteromancy—there’s definitely quite a few women who want the male love interest to just be the most candied. So, that’s partly a matter of taste at that point. Again, we have the same problems with him completely getting rid of her agency and that kind of thing. But, I think it’s often not quite as bad because there are also some benefits to having a candied love interest.
Oren: Well, he does have to brood a fair amount. So, there is that.
Bunny: Brood, but in a cool way.
Chris: And sometimes if you have a side-character that you super love or is really candied, maybe you should consider making them your main character.
Oren: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they would be the worst as the main character, though.
Chris: Yeah, it depends on the situation. But there are times when that might be a better solution. Of course, I do feel like sometimes people get attached to the side-character because they know they shouldn’t make their protagonist so candied—that the protagonist can just breeze through all of the challenges of the story. And they also cannot get away with making their main character super mysterious. And so, that’s why they build up a candied, mysterious side-character, which—I don’t know what to tell you—it just doesn’t work well in prose. It just doesn’t work very well. Oren just had an article about that. And the finally, there’s villains, which also are supposed to be competent; they’re supposed to be threatening. And so, they can tolerate candy. In fact, having people admire them could be a great way to make them more interesting and have them than, “oh everybody admires them, but it turns out they’re really evil.” Even so, I have still seen villains that are too candied. It still happens.
Oren: Once the villain gets to the point where it feels like the writer is into the villain and wants you to believe that the villain has a point when the villain does not have a point, that’s the classic, right? It’s like, “yes, I had to torture the babies for the greater good. It’s deep, you see and yes, you have to stop me because I’m contractually obligated to make the show where the heroes win, but I’m going to get several monologues out of this.”
Chris: For me, the point at which I noticed that villains have too much candy is when the protagonist suddenly are worse at things, suddenly become less competent whenever they’re around that villain to make the villain look good, right? The villain gets in their last word and the protagonist is just speechless in response. Or, the protagonist forgets how to do something, so the villain can point it out. Something like that in a normal scene, the protagonist would have a verbal response, or remember something, or do something well. But suddenly they can’t. So, I think in Nancy Drew, Constance—is I think here name[?]—
Oren: Yeah. That was frustrating.
Chris: She’s a very, very frustrating villain. She’s a witch that apparently Nancy Drew is descended from and in all of their interactions you can just tell the writer just loves this villain, because she always gets that last word in and somehow her plans can never be undone, unlike all of the other villains. She’s always got ahead of them. And again, some of that can be fine. Getting one over on the protagonist can raise tension. But, at the end of the story, usually the villain is supposed to lose. And even if the villain wins, usually we’re doing a tragedy and it’s not about the villains winning; it’s about how the protagonist did something wrong. So, the focus is not on the villain. If the story is really all about how the villain wins, because the villain is super cool, there’s usually something wrong there and maybe you wanted to make that villain your main character.
Oren: Right. Well, in the case of that character specifically: Constance. Part of the issue is that writing for Nancy Drew goes steadily downhill as the show continues. And by the time of Constance, it’s just not very good. And so, they have a really hard time giving Constance plans that actually work. Her plans are all really bad, but they have to work otherwise the show can’t keep going. And so, they just kind of work anyway. And so, you can tell that this is not a good plan and it’s just succeeding by a for real fiat and it’s annoying and it makes you feel like they’re saying the character is cooler than they actually are.
Chris: But we also had—man—there was this one villain. The villains in Maiden Abyss, this anime that we did not finish also. You could tell that the writer loved them way too much and some of them were very gross, [for example] child torturing.
Oren: That was the guy I was making fun of with the child torturing. It’s like, he’s torturing children. That’s bad, I guess. Like, okay, I do hate him now, but this was supposed to be a villain with something to say? But there’s really nothing to say about that; it’s not a complicated subject.
Chris: And also, the protagonists have to struggle very, very hard against him. But they are still never allowed to defeat him. They just get a false victory and move on. And then we’re like, “oh, but don’t you know? He was fine; this was all part of his plan.” It’s just.. shut up.
Bunny: Puppeteer villains are—
Chris: I wanted to kill that guy. Personally, with my bare hands.
Bunny: Ah, but that means they’re doing something right, Chris, because you’re not supposed to like the villain.
Chris: No! I don’t love to hate him—I hate him!
Bunny: See, what people don’t understand when they make that argument is that there’s a difference between hating the villain and hating the villain as a character in the story. If you want to stop reading the story because the villain is bad, then that’s not good. That’s not the kind of dislike we want.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Puppeteers and puppeteer villains are maybe the worst kind of over-candied characters just because by definition, they remove everyone’s agency.
Chris: Yeah. Like, was it Black Swan in Wanderers?
Oren: Oh, yeah. In Wanderers, goddammit! God, I hated that.
Chris: Black Swan is this—okay, this also combines the trope of having the little cute character be secretly a puppeteer, because in the Wanderers, there’s this AI that only communicates through this—is it like a little phone, or something?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It has little light pulses or something. And it’s clearly designed and fashioned in a way where it’s supposed to be cute, but we could tell almost immediately from the beginning of the story that this Black Swan was a puppeteer doing everything.
Bunny: Look, it’s an AI called Black Swan.
Chris: And, of course, [the] author loves it and—yeah, that was not great. But again, the purpose of a villain, they’re supposed to get bad karma and then that bad karma is supposed to balance out at the end of the story when they get their comeuppance, okay? So, if you don’t balance the karma, if you don’t do your karmic counting and you just leave them with that bad karma tab: that’s going to be really unsatisfying and perhaps make the audience want to strangle them with their bare hands.
Oren: It’s like being in a role-playing game and the GM just gets way too into their NPCs. It’s like, that’s not what the story’s about. Calm down, right?
Chris: Which, again, same goes for some of the other things we were talking about. That kind of social validation that often comes with candied characters. Even if you get a character who is, okay—they’re nice to other characters; they’re humble; we get them to struggle enough in the story, the last thing to look out for is—just when you start to kind of make things feel unnatural or derail things just to give them more social admiration. Just like the funeral scene, where everybody’s balling… Star Trek: Voyager actually has one of those in it, does Babylon 5 have that too?
Oren: Yes. That was in my article where I was pointing out that Sheridan and Janeway are basically the same character.
Chris: They’re basically the same character. They both have the funeral scene with people gushing.
Bunny: The Sherlock show, as well, we can’t forget that.
Chris: Ah, yeah. But, the backstory reveal: this is a key one, again, that I very commonly see with candied characters, because the thing about a backstory reveal is oftentimes, [the] audience doesn’t care. Like, no one cares, okay? If you reveal that this character has a backstory where they used to be a rebel, or they used to work for the other side—it only matters if it affects the plot in some way. And you can tell that the storyteller really likes this character if it doesn’t actually change anything, but it’s delivered in the story as though it’s a really big twist or a really big deal.
Bunny: Be impressed!
Chris: I don’t care, and—
Bunny: Be impressed, Chris!
Chris: But, it’s an important moment for the storyteller because the storyteller absolutely loves this character and it’s a way of giving that character more candy.
Oren: This was why—hot take—this is why all the attempts to do a Wizard of Oz prologue with the wizard as the main character are doomed to fail, because the whole point of the wizard is that he’s a clown and that he only succeeds because everyone in the Emerald City is even more of a clown than him. So, trying to make him seem like a cool protagonist… No, that will never work. He’s a loser; that’s the whole point of the story. Alright, and now that we’ve successfully established that very important factoid of the Wizard of Oz, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode gave you some vicarious candy, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons (who have the correct amount of candy, just to be clear). First is Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek—we will talk to you next week.