I know a lot of writers like to act like their characters are fully fledged real people who popped fully formed into their head, but they’re not. you invented them. and you should interrogate why you made them the way you did. why do they look like that? why do they have those personality traits? what inspired them? what characters are they similar to? why do you as the author treat them like that?
because you are not infallible. you absorb stereotypes from the world around you. and if you don’t spend time interrogating your thought process, you will spit up reductive bullshit and create bad characters and storylines because of it.
in most cases, there is nothing inherently wrong with a character conforming to a particular stereotype. if you have an actual explanation for why your female character is the team mom or why your villain is gay, okay. there are ways to have those characters that does something for the story you’re telling. but you have to be aware and compensate for the stereotypes in order to avoid perpetuating them.
and even before you do that, you should be asking yourself why? why is the girl the team mom? it might be in character for her, but you picked her personality. why did you pick it? why is the villain gay? does it add anything? a good writer should be able to explain their character choices and how those choices matter to the story they’re trying to tell. if someone asks why the black girl is the only one who dies, and you don’t have a solid answer, you need to change some stuff.
Scooby-Doo is a dog who can talk, which is amazing, and he largely uses his powers of speech to communicate how scared he is of ghosts and monsters, and basically the only thing his owners do is drive him around the country putting him inside various haunted houses and such. I wish I could take Scooby-Doo aside, I want to say to him, these people are not your friends.
recently my friend’s comics professor told her that it’s acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can’t generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister’s screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won’t be able to generate a script that’s any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It’s only ever the jobs we’re unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don’t.
ALT
