Why should I try to create realistic fantasy characters?
One use for fantasy is wish-fulfillment. With that in mind, why is there a need for realism in creating a character in a fantasy novel?
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Realism is just another style, fiction is never reality. With that said, unrealistic characters can make it harder to suspend disbelief, identify with the characters or care about them, regardless of genre. If you are discarding realism, you need to have a good reason.
Most adults don't find characters and plots that are pure wish-fulfillment to be very interesting or compelling. We can all create our own wish-fulfillment fantasies if that's all we're looking for in a book or a story. The dominant impression when you read something like that is that the author is writing just for his own satisfaction.
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All stories are lies the participants conspire in, as opposed to the more harmful type where the liar tries to pass fakery off as the real thing leaving the recipient unaware. Stories are a currency whose only validity is verisimilitude and raw emotional appeal.
What a storyteller does is to agree with the audience to tell a lie. Implicit in that contract is the idea that the lie will be of a quality that means that the audience may even believe the lie despite that they know its true nature. What the audience gets out of this is comfort, or inspiration, or hope. What the storyteller gets out of it is their own business and it varies, although possibly not as much as many would like to pretend.
In the Sci-Fi sitcom Red Dwarf liars Rob Grant and Doug Naylor invented a lie called Better Than Life, it was a game that allowed you to travel in your mind into a completely believable fantasy world in which all your desires were taken care of, the problem being that it killed you. You would become so addicted to this perfect reality that you would never come out to eat or drink, you would never look at objective reality again. These technological lotus eaters would slowly expire of starvation, dissolving in their own filth.
The way the game achieved its pernicious goal was to hide from you. Early models were transparent. They would give you supermodels, ice-cream buffets and palaces of gold, they were the worst of all things, a novelty. So the developers went back and created a new version. You didn't get ostentatious, gaudy and basic wish-fulfillment, the game would burrow into your soul, find your true desires and then pitch them to you in a way that seemed convenient but entirely plausible. If you wanted to identify the fakery you could, the bait and switch is that you never did.
What Grant Naylor was collectively pitching was the idea of the perfect story. A story so satisfying, yet so plausible, that the audience would prefer it to any objective reality. The problem is, it's a sliding scale, the more immediately satisfying something appears to be, the less plausible it seems, because the human condition, as Buddha remarked, is to suffer. On the other hand, the more plausible something seems the less satisfying it is doomed to be. Being a successful liar is all about balancing satisfaction and plausibility in this way.
The idea of lying to yourself in such a delusional manner, daydreaming, is seen as an inevitable but essentially pointless human occupation. The problem comes when people can no longer see reality because of their daydreams, or when they actually try to resolve their daydream into reality, imposing it in any way on others.
The need for verisimilitude caters to the natural cynic in all human beings, if you are a story teller you must defeat this monster that guards the payload of the audience's trust and confidence. Trust and confidence are precious commodities, that's why they need guarding. To discard the mechanisms of palliating the cynicism is just to turn yourself into something no liar wants to be: bad at lying.
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All stories are morality plays. That is, they all deal with moral questions and moral choices. They may express very different moral viewpoints, but to make a satisfying story, they have to speak to the moral concerns, beliefs, or experiences of real readers.
Because stories are fundamentally moral in character, you are free to change the settings and the physical rules of the universe in order to create a stage in which you can contrive a particular morality play. Thus you can come up with just about any physical characteristics you like in a character, but you have to give them a recognizable human moral character.
In fact, the moral character of fantasy characters often tends to be very clear and simple. Think of LOTR or Harry Potter or Star Trek. Their worlds are fantastical but the morality is very straightforward, and the stories are often quite on-the-nose morality plays. Certainly that is not universally true, but I think it is demonstrably true of the most popular examples of the genre.
So, you don't need physical realism, because stories are not about the physical -- that is merely set dressing. But you need moral realism, because stories are always moral at their core.
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To me, this question confuses what "realistic" means when it comes to characters in fantasy.
Characters should be realistic in the sense that they're realistic for the story itself, not necessarily realistic because they conform to our known norms, cultures or behaviours.
In my mind, what readers look for beyond familiarity is consistency, where the events that happen are consistent with the laws of that universe for that particular world, and the people/aliens/creatures involved fit into that universe.
They may not be realistic in this universe, but they better be realistic in theirs.
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