BY ALICE FONTANESI
STAFF WRITER
Disclaimer: Spoilers to My Deepest Secret Seasons 2 and 3.
Most traditional heroes have fallen out of style now, and I’m pretty sure just about all of us have created really edgy characters at some point. Most of our heroes are flawed and troubled in many ways, and the traditionally heroic hero is not as popular. But creating actually realistic characters that we can relate to is much harder than it seems these days.
A lot of the time it’s because we lean too far into the bad side of the character, and they end up being awful people for no reason.
But, unlike real life, fiction usually draws a fine line between good and evil. Most media makes it pretty apparent who are the good people. The easiest way to make a nuanced character is creating a reformed villain or fallen hero, but that doesn’t exactly create a realistic character.
A realistic character is someone who could probably exist, and the usual answer to this is making a character who isn’t exactly good or evil. But to define good or evil is never clear itself, so here’s the definition we’ll use. Evil is an adjective to describe actions or a person who does not benefit others’ well-being or disregards others’ feelings. Good would be the opposite of that. Good is an adjective to describe actions or a person who helps.
But in any situation, good and evil can be skewed, and the simple reality is that a good or bad person doesn’t actually exist. So then what makes a character nuanced if good and bad people don’t exist?
Well, perspective is key – to understand the character is to understand their point of view. But that fails when the audience doesn’t care for the character.
This category of badly written characters is usually the one that most early writers fall into. It is also surprisingly used by people who work in the romance genre, especially with enemies-to-lovers.
But having a not so evil and not so good character is not the entirety of a realistic character.
Another aspect of realistic characters is what made them the way that they are. This can justify some of your character’s actions, but the justification of a character can come from their environment. This is often used for characters in apocalypses or just about any bad situation that calls for your survival over everyone else.
My Deepest Secret does an excellent job with their characters to make them realistic and believable. A lot of this comes from the multiple plot twists and the unique writing attached to the story. An example of this is when Yohan takes Emma to run from the police. Up to that point, Yohan was the overall good guy of the story, the only sane character, but we are reminded that he does everything for everyone else when he takes Emma. This subverts expectations, but the story slows down and shows us we should’ve been expecting this. Essentially, it’s a slap in the face, but it’s a well-deserved slap.
Ironically, this also aids Emma’s character. Emma had been revealed to be the villain all along (another really good plot twist), but we’re reminded that she still has morals and is not automatically a villain. This is proven when Emma turns herself in for her and Yohan’s sake. In the context of the plot twist, most stories would’ve failed, but we’ve had the expectation for a while, and it prevents the story from falling apart.
And the story neatly reinforces the fact that the characters are flawed, and serves us sensible and satisfying events for the characters.The way they make you sympathize with the characters is by exploring them.
And this is a solution that I have found for many characters and their overall characterization. Try reflecting more on real life than fiction and allow yourself to sympathize with the characters. If you don’t like your characters, then your audience is not going to like your characters.