Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
K-On! has characters? I thought they were merely dolls that looked cute singing and playing instruments.
Things I know about K-On:
K-On is a story about friendship and how it changes. It's a rose colored look at high school life. It's about going to new places and meeting new people while never leaving the past behind.
While this applies more to the manga where we do see the girls enter college, the second season of the anime has some really emotional episodes all it's own.
So um... yeah, there are characters in K-On, and they're moderately deep characters too.
This is an either or situation here.
I...I don't see how characters become less deep because they live in a nicer world.
But you guys only GRITTY AND REALISITIC works have artistic merit
don't you know that by now
Not even artistic merit.
Only gritty and realistic works can have characters.
It means their conflicts are banal, inconsequential and for a lack of a better word, shallow. If there is no conflict there is no story.
Not quite, realisitic works can have characters, but gritty can easily devolve into caricatures of society which are merely puppets in a "THE WORLD SUCKS" play.
I...what?
It's hard to have much of a plot with minimal conflict, but that doesn't mean you can't have deep characters.
I am all ears.
You are all ears for what?
I think he's just informing us that he is, in fact, composed entirely of ears.
Seems like a poor time to confess something like that.
I think I've just informed Nyktos that I am interested and intrigued by what he just said and would like for him to delve deeper in what he said about deep characters. Also, I am informing Super Lazuli that I am in fact, not made up of ears, not even the pastry ones.
Well what more is there to say, really? I mean to me a "deep" character is just one who is interesting and...realistic, I guess? Well-developed? One who displays all the little traits that maybe don't quite make sense that we all have. In fact to some extent I'd say a deep character is one who isn't defined entirely by their relationship to the plot. So you don't need a strong plot, or much of a plot at all, to support the character.
True enough.
Complete agreement.
You don't need a plot to support a character but you need a story that at least showcases all of these little bits of a person that you alluded to earlier. I am merely in disbelief that a story with little conflict in a rosy world can showcase all the bits that make a person, good and bad.
I admit I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but I'm not convinced that it can't be done.
I just watched episode 9 of AKB0048 (by accident...kinda), and then episode 1.
I have four series open
what am i doing
Characters need drives, or at least desires they work towards, in order to give them some kind of forward momentum that hooks an audience. Anime reflects on this pretty well; consider how many normal high school anime show there aren't; the majority mix it up with some kind of magical shenanigans. Most people in high school don't really have interesting goals that they're in a position to work towards, because they need to exit the high school context before they're accepted into the world of adult independence. By providing a fantasy element, a writer also has the opportunity to introduce more solid goals to a bunch of teenagers who are mostly doing the nine-to-three because they more or less have to.
The Twelve Kingdoms is a good example of this, even though only a part of the first one or two episodes has anything to do with an actual high school. Most of it is discussed through the character development of Youko, who comes to find that her personality in our world was mostly informed by trying to please everybody and become well-liked as a result, resulting in shallow relationships and a lack of her own drive forward. While that's enough to get by on in our world, it doesn't cut it in the feudal, survivalist world she arrives in, so she learns about the psychological needs of adulthood through sword fights and monkey visions.
Here, the conflicts of violence and the like are just window dressing; the real conflict is between Youko's twisted vision of proper conduct and her psychological needs as a breathing person. That character development could never happen without some kind of conflict to drive it, and character development is a powerful element of most good stories and certainly of good characters. So if we accept that characters require development and that conflict drives development, then it stands to reason that conflict (which requires at least some short-term plot) is a necessity for good characterisation.
Characters and stories without conflict is just them doing stuff, and doing stuff without any sense of tension or risk. That's not quite "real" enough for most people, and I'm not talking about grittiness or accuracy to the world or a timeframe, but the kind of realism that needs to be in the behaviour and development of characters for us to accept it. If a character's behaviour isn't real enough, the whole thing is going to fall flat for most viewers, but conflict provides a catalyst for a character to respond to something both external and internal.
There are really no great, well-remembered stories that don't have conflict. It's the source of all drama and tragedy in both the real world and the fictional one, and we all experience conflict from the beginnings of our lives until the end. Having to decide whether to take your life in the direction you want or the fiscally advantageous direction is one example that most of us probably empathise with, for instance. Conflict is so widespread and such a necessary part of the human condition that we create imitations and emulations of it, from games to social interactions. For instance, particularly amongst young men, it's very common to insult someone else without any kind of seriousness as a joke; it's then polite to accept an insult back made in the same vein. So this is an emulation of conflict used for the sake of masculine social bonding. There is no inherent reason that this kind of social bonding can take that form, but it's where we are in terms of our relationship with conflict.
Both characters and stories absolutely need conflict, because they also need a baseline kind of psychological and behavioural realism, and conflict is so widespread in reality that most of an audience won't accept a lack of conflict as an emulation or expression of the world or people.
I don't think characters need conflict.
But they do need conflict if you want the story to get anywhere. Otherwise, you're basically showing off setting details.
>There are really no great, well-remembered stories that don't have conflict.
Emma by Jane Austen
No conflict whatsoever? No conflict of interests at all? No mismatched romances? No egocentric characters making life hard for their neighbors? Nothing like a character that experiences internal turmoil at all?
Conflict can be as minor as a choice without foreseeable consequences. "If I go to restaurant A rather than restaurant B, I might run into someone I don't want to talk to , but restaurant B sucks" isn't necessarily a riveting character or plot event (although it could be), but it's still a form of conflict. I mean, without conflict, all you have is "I went to the restaurant and ate some food, and then I went home content with my meal". Conflict can be internal, social, political, physical and, on top of that, can be anywhere between petty and major.
and jane austen ain't that good anyway
The atmosphere is interesting. I like how empty most of the scenes are, just focusing on the two main characters and the third guy. It seems like it'll have fantastical elements, but it'd be fine as a slice-of-life show too.
^^Well, if we're talking about those sorts of conflict, K-on is rife with them. Yui struggling with balancing grades and guitar, Mio trying not to be shy, Azu-nyan trying to get the club to focus.
It's not 'My uncle killed my father and is shagging my mother' but it's there.
And yeah, I don't particularly like Austen but Emma -is- a popular book.
Yeah, this whole conflict debate seems rather silly in context, since K-On! does, in fact, have conflicts. Whether or not they're "petty" is a matter of opinion - as is the likableness of the characters, for that matter - and it's plainly incorrect that a character can't be portrayed well just because their setting is idealized.
Who has said otherwise? A character can be portrayed well in an idealized setting, but it is far more difficult for the characters to be deep. To me, a deep character is someone with complex motivations, desires, and all that stuff. A character can be well written, engaging and interesting, but that doesn't necesarily mean it's deep.
No moreso than in a dystopic setting.
I'd disagree, a dystopic setting can showcase more types of emotions than an idyllic one, even though it can be far more removed from reality than the latter.