The Mythcreant Podcast 516 – Can Characters Be Emotionless?
Emotionless characters seem to abound in spec fic. Robots, aliens, anime boys who never smile, the list goes on. But are those characters really emotionless? Some of their actions certainly seem emotionally motivated. Just as importantly, what would it mean for them to be truly emotionless? This week, we’re tackling the question of character emotions and whether we can truly go without them.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is–
Chris: Chris–
Bunny: and–
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And this is actually gonna be a pretty short episode. We’re asking if characters can be emotionless. The answer is yes, and the rules are so simple. So here are the rules. Write ’em down.
Speak in a monotone. Only say factual statements because you are a rational logic machine. Statistics only, but you can’t say them in any context where they could have an implied emotion.
Oren: [chuckle in background]
Bunny: And because you are a rational logic machine, say “beep boop” now and then. And you can’t have any contractions. It’s as easy as that.
Chris: [chuckle] No contractions.
Bunny: No contractions. That’s how you know someone’s a logic machine.
Oren：Unless the writers, or perhaps the actor, slip up and insert a contraction here or there —
Chris: That doesn’t count.
Oren: — And then some jerk on YouTube 20 years after your show is over does a compilation of all the times Data used a contraction when he wasn’t supposed to.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: That would be bad.
Bunny: Nobody could ever program contractions into a computer. It’s true.
Oren: It’s just impossible.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Oren: Well, first we have to do definition time, which means it’s also sandwich discourse time.
Bunny: Oh, my favorite. Yum. Yum.
Oren: Because we should probably define what we’re talking about when we ask about characters being emotionless, right?
Bunny: Right.
Oren: Because what is an emotion? And that turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
Bunny: Well, it depends what side the bread is on.
Oren: [Still laughing]
Bunny: So emotions are very complicated in the clinical sense, which shouldn’t be too surprising. And as it turns out, characters being emotionless is also more complicated than not using contractions. There are a lot of theories on emotions and stuff about brain states, but I think for the purposes of storytelling, we can mostly say that it’s the biggies like disgust, fear, sadness, or general dispositions, like curiosity.
Oren: I found multiple articles arguing that hunger is an emotion, and now I’m just lost. Now I don’t know what happened.
Chris and Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: Well, the interesting thing is that apparently people vary a lot both in how intense their emotions are, but also in their ability to detect the emotions that they are experiencing. Apparently that is also correlated with all sorts of other inner body sensations.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: So if you can feel your heart beating, you’re also more likely to be able to easily detect what emotion you’re feeling, which–
Oren: Fascinating.
Chris: It is fascinating, which really goes to how fuzzy this category actually is. I wouldn’t call hunger an emotion, but I can see how that line would start to blur a bit.
Oren: Right now I’m feeling mild superiority because I’m so good at figuring out my internal emotions.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]
Bunny: [deadpan] Wow. You’re not a rational logic machine after all.
Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: If Data ever got hungry, that would be the solution to that debate.
Oren: Well, Star Trek does treat hunger as an emotion. Like Data starts to have food desires once he turns on his emotion chip. And also taste. [slightly confused] Taste is an emotion?
Bunny: I don’t think taste is an emotion.
Chris: Or is it that things give him joy ’cause they taste good, whereas before he had no opinion?
Oren: Maybe before he drank the blackest coffee and was like, “all right, that registers as a 9.5 on the bitterness scale. Whatever”.
And then he drank it with his emotion chip in, and he was like, “well, I feel like death now. So that’s nice.”
Bunny: [laughter] [slightly deadpan] My hands will not stop shaking. I cannot just observe this as a fact anymore.
But I guess if you start to think about hunger as desire for something, I could see it being an emotion, but calling hunger itself an emotion, that’s not one I’d heard before.
Oren: I mean the argument isn’t that needing to eat is an emotion. It was specifically that the feeling of desiring food was. And okay, sure. Maybe?
Bunny: I’ll accept that if it’s hangry.
Oren: Yeah. Hangry is an emotion.
Bunny: Hangry is definitely an emotion.
Chris: I don’t know. According to all the Vulcans in Enterprise, anger is not an emotion because they don’t suppress that.
Oren: [Laughing]
Chris: They look angry all the time. That’s the only emotion they express.
Bunny: It’s the “cool” emotion.
Oren: There are a lot of very not mature people on the internet who would agree with you. The Vulcans are fun because they have a built-in escape hatch where they say they’re emotionless, but in canon, they actually have very powerful emotions that they just suppress.
So anytime you see one being emotional, they can be like, “oh, that’s ’cause some of his emotions was slipping through. That they definitely have. That we established in one episode.” So healthy.
Chris: It also reminds of the main character in Blind Sight — which is this terribly edgy book with very, very bad science in it — where the main character is supposed to be emotionless because he got a procedure, which does not actually change your personality at all.
Oren: [sarcastic] No.
Chris: You know, 10 minutes of research on the internet will tell you that. But the one emotion he can apparently feel is anger.
Bunny:Yeah anger is an emotion. Look, we’ve all seen the inside of Riley’s head in Inside Out. And Anger is there. So we could confidently say that’s an emotion.
Oren: Yeah. Don’t erase Louis Black. He’s trying his hardest. He’s really good in that movie.
Oren and Bunny: [chuckle]
Chris: I think that also brings up a question. There’s definitely a big incentive for some people who want to have a character act in really immoral ways to use emotionlessness as an explanation for why they’re doing things. But I think it’s also important to distinguish that you don’t necessarily need emotions to act in moral ways.
Oren: [Agreeing sounds]
Chris: And a person can intellectually prioritize something. Again, this goes back to arguments of empathy. Some people experience empathy more than others as an emotion, but the people who don’t experience empathy as an emotion are still capable of prioritizing the feelings of other people.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Does it make them a serial killer or something?
Oren: The one thing that just is my pet peeve, my personal pet peeve now is any story –usually scifi and occasionally fantasy–where some person or group will be like [sarcastically] “because I lack emotions, I have discovered that actually there’s no such thing as ethics, and I can do whatever I want because everything is equally meaningless.”
Bunny: [resigned laughter]
Oren: At this point, even when it is presented as an idea to be rebutted, it’s just so irritating. It’s just peak “edgy I’m-13-and-this-is-deep” kind of thought process.
Bunny: Right, and being emotionless doesn’t mean that you’re more rational. In fact, you might have a character that’s less rational and less able to navigate situations if they don’t experience emotions.
Emotions are all about facilitating survival. You feel fear when you’re in danger, or disgust if something looks poisonous, or joy that leads you to do healthy behaviors because you get joy as a result of doing them. We use them to make decisions and relationships. That’s how we bond. Like —
Oren: [teasing] Wow, you feel joy after doing something good? I guess you can’t be a true altruist.
Chris: [laughing]
Bunny: [holding back laughter] Excuse me. Yeah. I guess I’m just selfish to the core. I could never give money to charity because it makes me smile to have done something good and really I should just be self-flagellating.
Oren: [teasing] Wow. So selfish.
But on the topic of characters, it is notable that most supposedly emotionless characters have emotions.Part of that is just that when characters get described as emotionless, what they actually mean is that the character is stoic.
Bunny: Or jaded.
Oren: Yeah, or jaded. I looked up a list of 17 emotionless anime characters and 13 of them had descriptions of them having emotions in that list. Sure, they’re more reserved, most of them, than the other characters. But that’s obviously not the same thing as “emotionless”.
Bunny: Emotionless isn’t the same thing as calm or stoic. Emotions are not just strong emotions like chewing the scenery or wailing or yelling or whatever.
We’ve all known scenes where they’ve got a lot of emotional intensity or weight without them being loud and dramatic.
Oren: And then we have characters who are specified to be emotionless, but it’s just kind of hard to write them without any emotions. It’s really hard to argue that Data doesn’t have any emotions. It really feels like he has, if nothing else, curiosity.
And you can argue that well, he’s programmed to want new information, but at that point it’s pot calling the kettle black here. It just feels like you’re talking about the same thing.
Bunny and Chris: [agreeing in the background]
Bunny: At the very least, there are a lot of emotion-like things that I think are close enough that you’d have trouble calling a character who experiences them totally emotionless. Like hostility or suspicion. Those aren’t in the Inside Out cast, but they’re pretty clearly like dispositions are kind of moods. And I doubt that you can have a mood without an emotion. There’s something emotional in that.
Oren: And with Data, it’s interesting because they show that he doesn’t have anger in that he does not do the things we associate with anger. He doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t lash out, he doesn’t retaliate, he doesn’t hurt people because they’ve made him upset.
He doesn’t do any of the things we associate with anger, but he does all of the things we associate with curiosity, which is why it’s hard to deny the idea that he is curious and curiosity is definitely an emotion.
Chris: Well, I do think that any protagonist, especially, is gonna have to have motivation of some kind and want something. And you could easily argue that itself as an emotion. Like Data, for instance. The neat thing about Data is that instead of using his supposedly emotional status to make him edgy, they use it to make him a cinnamon roll–
Bunny: [Laughter] This is the way.
Chris: —where no matter how mean people are to him, he’s perfectly nice back. And very selfless. But he still has priorities as a person that he logically follows. Without any kind of emotion, there would just be no reason to have those priorities. There’s some judgment about “I endeavor to be more human”- which I honestly wish robots would stop doing that, because it just feels weirdly self congratulatory on the part of the human writers — but okay, well why did he make that choice?
Oren: [Laughing in the background]
Chris: That seems like an emotional decision. Or his choice to become part of Starfleet or do any number of other things, right? He has priorities and values and without emotion, without some level of wants, it’s hard to set those priorities in the first place.
Oren: So if you’re starting out to write an emotionless character, I think the first thing to decide is: do you want an actual emotionless character? Do you want that to be part of the story or do you just want someone who is calm and reserved?
Because that second one generally will pass without any note and just be part of the character’s traits. No one’s gonna be like, “huh, I wonder why that character is calm and reserved?” Not that you couldn’t get into it, but it’s certainly not gonna raise any questions.
Bunny: Those are just traits.
Oren: I do think it’s worth comparing data to Seven of Nine because it’s very revealing. ‘Cause Seven of Nine also has a very novel trait, being former-Borg. So outwardly they have some very similar mannerisms, right? Where they talk with a higher vocabulary, with more formal language that makes them sound a bit like robots.
Bunny: Ah, contractions, huh? [laughing]
Chris: They also want to become more human, both of them, and seem to value rationality and science and math and all those other things that are designed to make them more robot-like. But with Seven of Nine you get that novelty from having those traits, but canonically she has emotions. Whereas Data’s not supposed to. I think it becomes really important whenever Seven has any kind of internal arc or relationship arc. Then you can just show Seven caring. You can just show how it affects her emotionally.
You can show her struggle, you can show her having strife. Whereas with Data, whenever that happens they have to like make the other person do all of the emoting. I still remember one episode where he tries to do a relationship, be in a romantic relationship, and his partner shows all the emotion and he is just kind of intellectually trying to figure things out and we have to sort of imagine he kind of cares with the little emotional hints in the acting and the suggestiveness of the situation and other things. But it’s just much harder to put Data in those kinds of internal arcs than it is for Seven.
But they both have some of the interesting traits that are kind of robotic.
Oren: And with Seven, it’s definitely like much more straightforwardly that, yeah, she has emotions, but she doesn’t really know what to do with them because she’s been a Borg for most of her life and now she has a mind of her own instead of just being one node in a collective, which may or may not actually be a collective. There’s a lot of discourse to be had on whether the Borg are actually a collective or not. But anyway —
Bunny: I think there are some questions you can ask in that way, and yeah, I like the idea of someone who has, until recently, not had really emotional experiences now dealing with having emotions again for the first time. That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen that before outside of Seven of Nine.
Oren: There’s a character who does a sort of very similar thing. It’s the Android from Dark Matter.
Now, in her case, it’s more that she’s only sort of just been activated. So she’s sort of figuring things out. It’s not that she doesn’t have… she has emotions, it’s just that she’s not experienced with them. Definitely the best character in that show.
Bunny: And then I think one thing that we should probably mention is that with emotion and reading emotion and having and expressing emotion, some of these things, the way they’re depicted, can be coded as neuro-atypical. These are also traits, like reading someone else’s emotion and struggling to respond the right way to it, is something that people who aren’t neurotypical also sometimes deal with. So that’s something to be aware of when you’re creating a character who struggles with interpreting other people’s emotions or expressing them in the right way.
Oren: I also try to be careful with assumptions that a character can, with a hundred percent accuracy, tell what another person is feeling. Because neurodivergent or not, people express emotions differently. It can just be kind of flattening to be like “all right, well, I could tell that guy was angry ’cause he had the subtle anger cues and those are the same for everybody.”
Bunny and Chris: [chuckle]
Oren: Just allow for a little more uncertainty.
Bunny: You can let your emotionless or semi-emotionless character have trouble navigating society. That probably would happen. There are a lot of expectations for expressing emotion and understanding emotion that are just unspoken cues. And if you had no background in it –if you weren’t human, for example, and didn’t understand human emotions or how they’re expressed, you would’ve a lot of trouble in a social scenario. And I think it’s worth asking for the robot AI characters and the emotionless characters: do they fake emotions? Are they inclined to hide them? Are they any good at that? If they do, do they understand how the people around them experience emotion or do they just completely not understand that?
Chris and Oren: [agreeing in the background]
Bunny: Do they recognize authority? That’s an interesting question.
Oren: It’s also interesting to think about what their motivation is. What makes them do what they do? And again, there can be motivations that are not emotionally based. It’s just that those tend to be the ones that writers reach for.
So if you have an emotionless character, they usually will have some kind of code of ethics that they have decided is good to follow for whatever reason, or some kind of program directive or maybe they’ve picked another person to model their behavior. There are various ways you can explore it.
Chris: I do think that one thing that’s important if you do have a relatively emotionless character in your story–and it could be somebody who’s just really stoic–is how that affects how problems are seen by the reader. Because usually the protagonist caring about something is a signal that readers should care and if a protagonist thinks something is bad or is afraid of a villain, those are all signals to the reader.
So what can happen is if you have a protagonist who just doesn’t care about problems, sometimes that can diminish or completely remove the tension. And if you have a higher-stake arc, this isn’t usually that big of a deal. You can have other important characters say why something matters. If you have a side character that is just explicitly in trouble and readers are attached to that person, that will matter to readers. You have a number of ways to show, even if your character is emotionless and doesn’t feel grief when a person dies, why that would still be bad.
However, if we’re looking at lower-stakes arcs, in particular character arcs…I have sometimes had clients who wanted to do a specific character arc but they wanted that arc to be something where the protagonist doesn’t care and has to learn the value of something. And you can do that, but in some cases, it just won’t feel like it matters. Because your character’s not unhappy because they don’t care. So if you have something where they’re making poor judgements that an outside observer can see, then that’s something that could be a character arc the reader would still care about because we see that they’re making misjudgments and they need to learn better.
But if it’s gonna be something that’s “moral”… A lot of times people like to use a character being emotionless or gaining emotions to sort of teach them morality or human connections and bonds in some way. You just can’t have the problem be so bad that “Ugh, I hate this person because they’re just letting people die in front of them and they need to learn better”.
Actually, this was an issue with Resident Alien. So the first episode of Resident Alien — the first thing that happened, so it’s not really a spoiler — is this alien shows up and then kills a guy. And this is our main character of the show. He just straight up murders somebody, and it’s part of a general ongoing character arc for him where he basically gains human emotions and human preferences and learns not to be amoral, but at the same time, that gave us a very bad introduction to him.
And later we learned this guy was a murderer, but we don’t know that in the first episode. So it’s just extremely off-putting.
Oren: Yeah, don’t worry, we retroactively made it okay.
Bunny: Now the character didn’t know that but…
Oren: It doesn’t help that how much that character understands humans is extremely malleable, depending on what the authors need. And then like we also meet some other members of his species eventually, and they also seem to have emotions. They’re just jerk emotions.
Chris: That’s the problem with emotionless just being an excuse to be edgy.
Oren: It’s not that they don’t have emotions, they’re just assholes.
Bunny: [chuckling] Asshole is an emotion.
Chris: So in that case, you could have them learn the value of something as a kind of slow arc, but you wouldn’t wanna depend on that for your tension. You’d wanna build something that has little higher stakes that readers can care about and use that to create tension and then just have the character arc or something happen at the same time.
Oren: And for those amoral characters who are like “whatever, I don’t understand that it’s wrong to kill people”, usually the obvious play there is to arrange things so that they don’t actually end up killing anybody. That’s just how it turned out.
That’s how you do it. And for some reason they didn’t do that in Resident Alien. I dunno why.
Chris: Just because of how people judge characters and morality at an emotional level, how much harm a character does matters a huge amount when we’re judging if they’ve gone too far. So you can have a character that is ready to kill people, but if you just prevent them from doing it they are much easier to like than the person with the exactly the same inclinations that actually goes through with it.
Oren: If that story had been like, oh, I’m gonna kill that guy and take his body to infiltrate earth, and then he was about to do it and then the guy slipped on the ice and died in an accident, that would’ve been a lot easier to swallow, even though it’s the same character.
Chris: So basically it’s just about doing damage control whenever you have a character that’s super amoral and just trying to keep them from actually doing harm, especially to characters that readers are likely to sympathize with or care about. Sympathy for a character like that can also be reduced ’cause you don’t see them struggle as much. You don’t see them go through anguish.
For Data, he’s still put in many hard positions. Like the guy who, in the whole trial episode, Measure of a Man, where somebody wants to take him apart. Even though Data doesn’t experience — I mean, he does experience emotions, you can tell even though they’re not obvious — we can still sympathize with him when he’s in a really hard place. But again it’s just easier to create sympathy if we can see that the character is affected.
Oren: Here’s a question. This is what I was thinking about and I was like, I’ll explain this in the podcast, and then I realized I don’t really know how. In a prose medium when you don’t have an actor there to help you out, I’m trying to figure out what the differences between writing a character who comes off as stoic or intentionally emotionless versus a character who is just flat.
There’s gotta be a distinction there, but I’m not really sure what it is.
Chris and Bunny: [sounds of agreement]
Bunny: Yeah, that’s tricky. When we talk about emotionless characters, we’re not talking about actors who play their characters poorly.
Chris: Yeah, what I’ve recommended for stoic characters before is showing a difference between what they say and what they do.
Somebody else is grieving and the character doesn’t say “oh, I’m so sorry for your loss” or what have you, but maybe you see them do something without remarking on it to help that other person out In a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s just there.
Oren: And then since they don’t feel good about doing it… BAM. True altruism.
Bunny and Chris: [burst into laughter]
Bunny: Wow, you got ’em.
Oren: [sounding fake-smug] Take that philosophy department.
Bunny: Oof. Ouch. I’ve fallen to the ground.
Chris: If this is your viewpoint character, I do think that you have a lot of room for subtlety if you’re internalizing and showing their thought process. To some extent it goes back to the basic priorities — Data has values that he follows when he’s making logical conclusions — and showing what the person values.
Bunny: And it’s worth noting that with stoic characters there is a difference between actually lacking in emotion and just not emoting. And I think you’re right about either just showing what they do or finding alternate ways of demonstrating a very subtle emotion. A character who’s not stoic might go hug the grieving person. But a character who’s not outwardly emotive might just go silently sit there and offer support through presence rather than physical touch.You could see a stoic character doing that.
Chris: I guess Vulcans are all stoic characters.
Bunny: [laugh]
Chris: That’s what they technically… Or I think there’s been some evolution of the explanation for Vulcans not having emotions, if I understand correctly.
I always understood them as having deep emotions under the surface, which seems to be what recent shows are going with, but that’s not always been the explanation in various shows.
Oren: Well, it’s been a while since I’ve seen TOS, but I think that explanation was there too. I do think that even in, even in the original series, the idea that Vulcans actually had very powerful emotions that they kept in check was present.
Bunny: Well, there was that time that Spock got horny and Kirk had to fight him.
Oren: The pon farr was definitely its own thing. Someone had the idea of “what if Vulcans had to have sex every seven years”, which I’m sure seemed like a good idea at the time.
Bunny: Of all the ideas one could have…it is one of them.
Oren: The idea of Vulcan emotions being very powerful is at least as old as, I don’t know, the original series movies. It’s pretty well established now. I’m a little concerned about this preview clip we got from the new season of Strange New Worlds where they seem to take some kind of medication that turns them into Vulcans and then they immediately all start acting as the classic stoic Vulcan look, which doesn’t seem to be an act, it seems to be that’s what their personality is.
And it’s weird to sort of imply that that is just something you get from Vulcan genes, but maybe there’s maybe there’s context missing that we don’t have yet.
Chris: I assume they had lots of training for that.
Oren: Yeah. Maybe. We’ll see. It certainly didn’t strike me as great when I saw it.
And they also immediately start being down on Spock and it’s like, wait, so you’re telling me–
Chris: It gives them an immediate superiority complex too.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: — that Vulcan prejudice is genetic. That’s a weird thing to establish.
If that is what’s going on, I’m sure in the writer’s mind it’s just a funny joke, but I didn’t love it. I’ll wait. I’ll withhold final judgment until I actually see the episode.
Chris: I will say the whole Vulcan deep emotions under the surface is very convenient for storytelling.
Because they can be mostly emotionless to add novelty during your character interactions, but then when we want that big dramatic plot moment there, that big internal arc, you can suddenly be “now they’re super intense”.
Bunny: Plus you gotta give the Spork shippers something to hold onto.
Oren: We’re almost outta time, but I do wanna mention one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Vulcan, who is actually from Enterprise. She’s a one-off guest star. Her name is V’Lar. She’s from the episode Fallen Heroes. And I really liked her because for the most part, Enterprise’ Vulcans are not good.
They’re not really emotionless so much as they constantly feel smugness and it got to the point where in the fourth season, they even decided to make it a plot point that the Vulcans were acting too emotional and make that like part of the story for better or worse.
But I really liked her. Because the implication that she gave was that she’s old enough and experienced enough to allow herself a little bit of emotion without going overboard.
Bunny. That’s a treat,
Oren: Which I find an interesting concept of the Vulcans being, when they’re younger, they have to really commit to the emotional suppression because otherwise they lose control.
But as they get older, they learn perhaps healthier ways of dealing with it. It’s just kind of a neat idea, you know? It didn’t feel like it broke anything that had been established before, and it was a neat twist on the classic Vulcan archetype. So I really liked that.
That was one of my favorite moments in Enterprise.
Bunny: The last shout-out I wanna do is if you’re depicting a sociopathic or psychopathic character, do your research please.
Oren: Your research may turn out…that’s complicated. I’m not even sure if those are real terms anymore. I’ve seen competing claims on that one.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know either. That’s why I’m saying do your research ’cause I genuinely don’t know. I just know that often those are used as a shorthand for why a character seems emotionless or amoral. And uh, a little bird in my brain is like “that’s not it, folks”.
Chris: Yeah, I’m not sure if those were ever actual scientific terms.
Oren: With that word of warning, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode made you feel an emotion, even hunger, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.