Fans can be weird when it
comes to their favorite characters. Arya Stark made love to Gendry on
Game of Thrones and fans lost it. While it was sort of funny
considering the usual amount of sex on the show, it did bring home
just how emotionally invested people were in the character of Arya
Stark. Keep in mind that people have been watching her since early
adolescence, so to see Arya going full out with Gendry was
discomforting, to say the least. It's not so much because of the
setting, but Arya just wasn't seen as a sexual character before that
scene; it just felt strange to see someone cross that final threshold
into womanhood.
And that discomfort is
something we need to strive for as writers. There are a number of
things that characters do that cause us to feel uncomfortable, but
that's not necessarily a bad thing. Casting dark magic, having sex,
even using an unexpected swear word; there are always going to be
weird thresholds that the audience is not going to want to see
crossed. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it just means that you
have done your job as a writer and have established rules about how
your world works, and that you've consistent with those rules. The
discomfort of your audience is your reward and it can feel sort of
nice.
That's sort of an important
point. There are two ways to do character development: Deep end style
and frog style. Too many writers have been taught that if you want to
develop character you need to do it through crisis; nothing builds
character like tossing the character into an emergency and see what
happens, much like you would toss a kid into the deep end of a pool
in order to teach them how to swim. The problem is that you can't do
this all of them; throwing your characters into crisis after crisis
gets boring and it makes your writing predictable. It also eliminates
any point of reference, and those are necessary for suspension of
disbelief.
On the other hand, there's
frog style. If you heat a frog slowly in a pan of water it will never
feel the rise in temperature; it becomes a major shock to realize
that the frog dies from the heat when you saw it doing pretty well.
Sometimes you need to have the character develop surely and slowly
over a long period of time, and then force the audience to realize
that the character has undergone a major personality change over
time; the realization that a character has changed before your eyes
can be all sorts of fun, especially when the audience has gotten used
to a certain concept.
This is sort of where people
are with Arya. While we've seen her become more than the frightened
little girl of the first season, the changes have been so relatively
gradual compared to the rest of the GoT cast; we've seen her mature
and become a formidable warrior over the seasons. However, we forgot
that she was also maturing and becoming a young woman in her own
right. The sex scene was the culmination of a long character arc, and
one that needed to happen so that the audience would finally see her
as that powerful young woman instead of the girl; it was a necessary
scene in order to put the finishing touches on that character.
It was an uncomfortable
scene to watch not because we disliked the character, but because it
forced us to accept that the character has undergone some major
changes since her introduction, and some of us just weren't ready for
it. Just like our real-world daughters and nieces, we didn't want to
see her cross the threshold into womanhood; no one ever really wants
to think about the sex life of teenagers but it's part of their
growing up. And that's not a bad uncomfortable feeling...it's also
something that we need to use in our own works more.
No comments:
Post a Comment