It's Okay for Characters to Be Flawed

 

I've been around fandom spaces and internet discourse for a long time, since I first hit my teenage years at the turn of the millennium. Most talk of anything is, well, frankly rather embarrassing. People making absolute asses out of themselves over shipping preferences, opinions on what games are the best in a series, film franchises, comics, you name it. People will absolutely gaslight themselves as to the meaning of something or other to fit the view they want to ascribe to the subject. Incredibly strange to watch in action. Few are stranger than one particular behavior I've observed over many years.

Some people absolutely refuse to let go of first impressions they'll have about a given character, good or ill. This can tie into the last thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph, where someone wants to brute force a certain take on a given narrative and will mischaracterize things to fit that. But others, I wonder if it's a case of people just not wanting to engage in a narrative or think about it too deeply beyond a surface level, causing them to miss what a work is saying.

This isn't really anything new. We do it in society and language as well. Calling someone a "Scrooge" has been a pejorative for as long as I've been alive, for example, because for whatever reason people latched on to how Scrooge started in A Christmas Carol as opposed to where he ended. In a way, it's a bit of a misnomer. The entire story of Scrooge is one of reckoning, of coming face to face with and accepting where the characters actions would lead him in the future and changing for the better. But pop cultures image of him remains the miserly, penny pincher he starts as. A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption, though many of us refuse to let go of who he was.

Sadly true of reality as well. It's easy to be skeptical of someone who presents as attempting to atone for their actions. Most refuse to buy it out of principle, some of them in turn incorrectly asserting that they do believe in redemption in other conversations. I've done it at times too. After all, there are plenty for whom it is incredibly obvious they're acting repentant simply to weasel out of whatever trouble they've landed in. You see it a lot with online content creators who get caught doing a slur or plagiarizing (the shit with James Somerton and his reaction to the subsequent fall from grace is ongoing as of the time of writing this). Some people really do want to pretend they understand they did wrong to dodge consequences.

Obviously, I get that, that's somewhat understandable. We can't read another persons thoughts or intentions. But in fiction, we have the answers spelled right out on the page or screen. Often, in prose especially, we're privy to their inner thoughts and private actions you would never see in real life unless you shadowed someone all day. Yet, strangely, we seem to ignore development or actions even in stories we make up.

I'm sure you noticed that I've used an image of Johnny Silverhand, rockerboy and terrorist of Cyberpunk 2077 and its tabletop predecessors. It's because he's genuinely a good example of the phenomenon. This all comes with a caveat that Cyberpunk 2077 launched in an absolutely abysmal state that caused more than a few to give up on it at launch, so the first impression never advanced. It's gotten better since the game got fixed and had a superb expansion that brought a ton of people back to the game. But some people still don't allow that early taste to wash out of their mouth.

When you meet Johnny for the first time, it's at the player characters low point. You just got shot in the head, found out you're getting erased from your own body in favor of Silverhands personality construct and you're being framed for the death of the most important figure in the entire Cyberpunk lore. Johnny comes on strong, to put it mildly. Really, he's an outright prick, freaking out himself over the fact that he's suddenly "alive" and in someones head after getting fried by Soulkiller. He attempts to force you to kill yourself. These are usually the moments I notice people can't get past.

I suspect people ran out into the open world immediately and stuck with that impression until they gave up on the games horrifically buggy and broken launch state. I suspect that because the scene in question is discussed and moved beyond pretty quickly. In the very next main story mission in fact. He was, and is, an abrasive asshole, but he's had time to calm down and assess things. Came to the conclusion he and the player character, V, needed each other. He's got unfinished business dating back fifty years and you need to figure out how to stop your brain rot. The relationship resets a bit and moves on from there. None of this is to say that Johnny isn't an asshole. He absolutely is. But the more you play and the more you try to understand him in your dialogue choices, the more you realize that more than any other character, Johnny's the heart and soul of the game. 

There are plenty of standouts in the cast, but Johnny is in the role of a co-protagonist for a reason. V is a small time merc who dreamed of becoming a legend, now faced with their own mortality and forced to take stock of what they've done with their life and if any of it matters. Johnny's been there, nuked Arasaka and already died once because of it. He's a legend, memorialized by his own drink at the Afterlife. Now some semblance of him is back, fifty years later, and stuck in a body he can't control, forced to look upon what's happened to the world he left behind. When all the bluster and snide comments fall away, subtext becomes text.

Early on, there's a sidequest where you end up meeting a superfan of Samurai, Johnny's old band back in the day. Johnny is at times dismissive and mocking of someone holding onto a band that died fifty years ago, but eventually it becomes clear that at least some small part of that is self loathing. In an early moment of honesty, he lets slip that the thing that bothers him most is that after all this time, not a damn thing he ever did made a single difference. For all the defiance, for all he nuked Arasaka Tower, Arasaka just picked itself back up in his wake, corporations solidified their hold even further than they had in 2023 and both Johnny and Samurai became something of an underground legend of resistance, but ultimately a relic. Something peddled in a shitty street stall in the midst of a local market.

Whatever his various reasons, some more important to the why of his actions than just his ideals, in the end he gave his life fighting a malignant power and is forced to come back, long after it's over, and look at the aftermath. He doesn't like what he sees and as flippant as he tries to be, it's clear it bothers him.

He's forced to confront other things, too, like the broken relationships he'd left behind, broken by his own ego and narcissism. An ex lover who'd become colder in the time away. A fellow bandmate that still, fifty years later, hasn't squared away the sudden loss of Johnny or sorted out for himself what Johnny meant to him. You'll learn about his time in corporate military and the reasons he went AWOL, events that explain a fair bit of who he became. In a small patch of debris in an oil field out north, they search for where Johnny's body may have been dumped and find nothing. For everything he did, good or bad, there's nothing to mark his passing, not even a bit of graffiti. He's just gone, his worst nightmare come to life; his life and soul stolen by the corporation he hated more than anything and trapped in a prison of someone elses mind. An ironic fate given how irritable the flashbacks made him seem about the idea of a corporation coming for your very soul.

From there on, depending on your own choices, he decides to make a change. He'd already dedicated himself to helping save your life, so he knows that this is his last ride. If he and V have a good rapport, they try to make amends, to give a more positive goodbye, to the few people Johnny ever called friend. Johnny Silverhand is a bastard, but in life after death he somehow found some measure of peace and closure he never could find alive.

It's gripping and brings to life one of the most complex characters I've seen in a lot of video games. It's incredibly easy to sand off rough edges out of fear of alienating people from a character too much, but Johnnys attitude and flaws are a large part of what makes the game and the events therin work. How can you have a personal reckoning without a lot of personal failures to reckon with? Johnny is deeply off-putting at the start and the journey forward is long and hard. A lesser actor than Keanu Reeves might not have been able to pull off that mix of charismatic bastard that draws people to him despite all of his rotten actions. The journey to being a better person is improved by the fact that he's such a fucked up person. Maybe even the most self centered person can find some small measure of personal peace and improvement, if only at the end. Maybe it's not too late.

Would any of that growth have hit without the contrast of who he is where you start?

I'll tell you one thing that wouldn't have hit, and that's the Temperance ending. Most people prefer The Star, it being the most bittersweet ending for V themself, where they find freedom and maybe love to hold onto in the six months of life they have left, which they'll spend with the nomads outside Night City. It's my second favorite ending. I guess I'm just destined to gravitate to different things than others do, because Temperance is my favorite.

Temperance is the ending where, while stuck in Mikoshi, V discovers that no matter what they do, they'll only get six more months of life if they go back to their body. Only Johnny could stay in it and live a life of any normal length. The neurons are just too damaged, too warped in favor of Johnny. Rocked with grief, V makes peace with the coming end, which in itself is a bitter but fitting end for the character after wrestling with that end all game. Johnny, however, does not want to accept it and in a rare moment of honesty, even says outright that he's scared for V. If you press on, V goes with Alt into the net, itself a metaphorical afterlife in this game, and Johnny is left alone in V's body.

What follows is an epilogue where you realize pretty quickly that Johnny wasn't blowing smoke about wanting to change. Over the course of twenty minutes, it becomes clear that he understands the weight of the second chance he's been given. Sometimes talks to himself as if V were still with him. He's mellowed out, given up vices and distanced himself from the crusades he'd spent his first life on. He spends a little time with a young man for whom he acts as something of a mentor, buys a guitar and visits V's grave. In the end, he leaves the guitar with the young boy, boards a bus and leaves Night City behind. 

A constant metaphor in the game is that Night City drains you until there's nothing left. It's consistent across a good chunk of the games sidequests and side gigs, where you meet or deal with people who the city has sucked dry. That's why the only endings that are even remotely positive are the endings in which you leave it behind. It's the same for Johnny. Night City took everything from his first life. For his second, he's leaving on a bus to the unknown.

It's a cap to everything that happened with Johnny Silverhand, whether you believe the construct really is his soul or just data, and in many ways is something of the happiest ending if you believe at all in redemption. Even the nastiest rocker in the world found the will to become something different. Bittersweet, of course, with V still dead, but honestly V's a walking corpse no matter what ending you pick. Even The Star, with a small ray of hope, is at best a stay of execution. Temperence gives us a Johnny that has another shot at life, to do something. So he leaves. Much like The Star, the where and the what don't matter as much, it's all possibility beyond the city limits.

The further Johnny starts from where he ends, the more the transformation means. We're with him the entire game. For all his faults, by the end he's V's ride or die. The rough edges were needed.

At the time of this writing, there have been some other controversies over similar topics. Netflix just dropped a live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. As tends to happen with Netflix adaptations, the story got cut to the bone to fit into the eye rolling streaming standard of eight episode seasons. One thing that got changed caused a bit of an uproar, and it was the sexism Sokka had ingrained in him from the Water Tribes culture. In the original show, he's forced to grapple with this when a group of warrior women hand his ass to him, training and learning alongside them and casting aside hid old prejudices. It's a character flaw, one the show makes a point to show him grow from as a part of his journey. The live action changes it entirely, removing the sexism, sanding the rough edges away. That trait that Sokka has to grow from? Gone. He's shallower because of it.

Another character I'd get no end of shit about is Tifa Lockheart of Final Fantasy VII, appropriate because the second game in the remake/sequel trilogy, Rebirth, just came out. At times I feel like I've watched through actual decades as fandom seemed to almost warp her character, to not understand it. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that they seem almost unwilling to engage with her flaws or even be honest about them. 

There's a tweet I saw the other day where a games journalist mused on Tifa being emotionally intelligent, among other platitudes. When I saw that, I thought about the scene from Remake where, next to a man who had just lost his friends and was actively grieving after the drop of the Sector 7 plate, she remarks that maybe they deserved this. In the most recent game, she repeats some of the actions she'd done from the original, keeping secrets and generally keeping distance from truths she doesn't want to deal with. Emotionally intelligent is not the phrase I'd use. Seriously, I've felt like I've been gaslit by other people for twenty seven years in regards to this character. I don't see the path where the Tifa presented in any of the games reaches the Tifa that exists in peoples heads.

This is somehow a controversial take, but Tifa is a deeply flawed person. She's got an absolute inability to confront things she's uncomfortable with to the point of avoidance, prone to keeping secrets no one asked her to and honestly rather selfish. That last one usually raises an eyebrow or two, but I genuinely wonder if anyone confused by that take paid attention to the lifestream event near the end of the original game at all. It's entirely about her confronting her actions up to that point, outright admitting that she kept from addressing that Clouds memories were not lining up with reality. She doesn't even address it when a friend dies. She only admits to it when Sephiroth forced her to while Cloud was in the midst of a mental breakdown. The reason? She was afraid the truth would take Cloud away from her

It also forces her to come to terms with the lies she's been telling herself the whole game, specifically about how close she and Cloud were as kids. When you actually look at it, Tifa is a deconstruction of the childhood friend trope so popular in Japan. It was lost on a lot of us back in the day, given Final Fantasy VII came out around when anime was really just taking root here in America. We hadn't been exposed enough to be overly familiar with Japanese tropes. But these days it feels almost painfully obvious. 

They lived in the same town, sure, and a teenage Cloud had a crush on her, but that was as deep as it went. Cloud was ostracized in their hometown in large part because the townspeople blamed him for Tifa getting herself hurt by her own grief fueled actions. The water tower, the basis for Tifas fantasies of the two being childhood friends, is the first time they had any real connection at all and that scene itself has both of them on different wavelengths. He's trying to impress her by leaving to become a SOLDIER, while in response she wishes him to become a hero who could rescue her, an image he twists in knots to try to live up to even when teenage infatuation fades.

In the lifestream, Tifa comes to terms with different parts of herself and wants to be better, but if you go by the way fandom talks about it and numerous other scenes you sure as shit wouldn't know it. I'm not fond of Tifa. She has elements of characters I love, one of which is the fact that she's a strong punch lady representing the usual monk class of the series job system. Obviously she's hot. But that I don't like her personality doesn't necessarily mean I think she's a terrible character. Most of her actual depth comes from those numerous flaws. It's quite literally her entire character arc in the original game. If you take all that away she's just kind of there, pining over Cloud despite not really understanding him and eventually slap fighting Scarlett on top of the Junon canon.

By the way, I know this is a digression just for me to bitch, but can I take a minute to talk about that? About how Tifa, a martial artist, gets into a slap fight with an executive on top of a canon above a large ass drop to oblivion? Said executive having no real reason to go out there or think she'd win in a hand to hand fight with a punch chick? She'd more likely take pot shots with a gun for safety. Why would Tifa get into a slap fight? One right hook to the head and Scarlett's plummeting to her death without much fuss. Was someone on the dev team horny when they came up with that catfight and no one said no? Always been the stupidest moment of the original game and one I sincerely hope does not make it into whatever is done with the third of the new trilogy. It never made either of them look good.

Sorry, I know, this is overlong as it is, that whole scene always annoyed me. Even as a teenager going through puberty I wondered why the hell Tifa didn't roundhouse Scarlett into the abyss. If she'd done that I'd probably be one of her millions of stans.

Anyway, yeah, fanfiction is where I saw a lot of the off interpretations take hold back when I read a ton of FFVII fanfic back in the aughts. Hell, that's it's own conversation. The way that a lot of fanfiction writers will often absorb ideas from other fanfiction which eventually evolves into a kind of shared headcanon. Sometimes if you read enough you can forget what was actually in the source material and what was fanon. I saw this happen a fair bit with Dragonball Z and Teen Titans fanfiction in the aughts. It's an interesting phenomenon to think about, but I've digressed too much already.

So yeah, over the years I've seen a lot of people in fandom circles say all the time that they want more complex characters, for negative traits to grow from. But it always feels like the second you give them, people start trying to find ways around them. Why? It's harder to love a character, I guess, if they think or do gross shit, even if they grow out of it. Easier to explain it away or just not deal with it. It's strange behavior, really. When you think about it, overcoming those flaws is a part of what made them into the characters people love in the first place.

People really need to get it in their head that no character is, or should be, perfect. I see a lot of nonsense opinions about Superman all the time, he's too perfect, you can't relate to him. Never mind that Superman has flaws as well and I'd argue a vast majority of stories with him, especially the best ones, test his morals and ideals, not his powers. Even Superman has flaws.

Maybe everyone just wants some trash main characters who are never wrong about something. You see it a lot in a bunch of semi-popular manga. I kind of get it. I enjoy trash sometimes. Sometimes you're just in the mood for trash, shit that you know isn't good but dammit, it hits some kind of sweet spot. Om nom, delicious trash.

But for fucks sake, I wish people would stop trying to make every character that, whether it be through gaslighting in discussions, arguments or through fanfiction. Conflict and the growth that comes from it is what makes most stories interesting. I need a lot of the good shit in addition to the trash, I need a well balanced quality diet, stop trying to make everything trash!

Does The Rock Still Remember How To Act Human?

So we're a couple months out from WrestleMania and The Rock is somehow in the mix of it all. That's been quite the surprise, largely because Dwayne Johnson's never had much time for wrestling or its fans these last twenty years. After his last brief full time stint back in 2003, he popped up for one match at WrestleMania the next year and then spent the next seven years distancing himself from the industry as he threw himself full time into Hollywood. He came back in 2011, basically walking in and taking some main event spots, which should sound familiar if you're paying attention to current angles, then after a total of five matches and maybe a dozen TV appearances fucked back off, going years at a time between appearances.

At the time of writing we're about a week removed from his insertion into the road to WrestleMania. Last Friday, he'd seemed to just walk in and take a main event spot from a regular worker, which CM Punk was sure to note looked a lot like what happened a decade ago. Last night saw a swerve, with Cody demanding his rightful title match as the winner of the Royal Rumble, while Rock seemed to lean heel for the first time in twenty years, since as far back as the Hollywood Rock character that closed his full time association with the ring.

Some friends in a wrestling discord I'm in disagreed with me, but overall I wasn't impressed. I'm not all that sure Rock still knows how to be the kind of heel he used to be. As I said to others, okay just doesn't cut it when you're discussing someone frequently described as one of the best talkers the business has ever seen.

Maybe I'm poisoned. The nostalgia for the Rock had worn off me a while ago and I finally got sick of him last Friday. But while the nostalgia doesn't have the hold it did on me anymore, I remember how he used to be. It's not a flattering comparison.

Rock was an important part of my formative years as a wrestling fan, debuting the very same year I first got into the hobby as a nine year old. To tell the truth, by the year 2000 he'd even eclipsed Stone Cold Steve Austin as my favorite wrestler. Back then, he was cool personified. Unflappable, endlessly confident and with perhaps the quickest wit in the game, he'd give promos so engaging and filled with energy it was worth it to tune in just for the talking. Expensive shirts, sunglasses and boundless drive. He could, and did, cut momentum out from under more than one superstar with a single promo.

Then he left and at some point seemed to forget what wit looked like.

We can go on all day about Rocks time in Hollywood and it would not be a conversation that was overly kind to him. Bluntly stated, his filmography is a dogs ass, the few worthwhile portions being as part of a franchise he isn't the star of and ten minutes at the start of a Will Ferrel movie satirizing the only sort of character he plays these days, the cool tough guy. Somehow John Cena, The Enemy of smart wrestling fans a decade ago, and Dave Batista racked up better filmographies than Dwayne ever had in a fraction of the time. No amount of box office receipts can change that. But worse still, looking at those films, you realize something that carries over to any return he's made to wrestling.

He's over-relied on his natural charisma and connection to fans. In some ways, abused it even.

When Rock first came back in 2011, it seemed fresh and exciting. He'd been away a long time and his first promo back had seemed electric. The prodigal son coming home. But much like a bad sequel can sometimes color the prior films, everything that came after wasn't kind to that promo. If you were paying attention, it was like Rock was reading from a template, a script. Fitting, I guess. It started with Kung Pao Bitch and sort of became a trend with him, every promo needed some kind of new catchphrase, usually one or two adjectives or noun followed by the word bitch. Some dumb new call and response with the crowd. Pointing at his arm to show goosebumps, which he did so often it feels like his version of John Cena talking to the cameraman on his way to the ring.

Then it became obvious when the dueling promos happened. Something was wrong. In the old days, The Rock never lost on the mic. But boy oh boy, was it clear it wasn't the old days anymore and his new schtick wasn't cutting it. The man was getting smoked out there. Miz got more than a few good digs in, which Rock made easy for him by phoning in half his "appearances" by satellite. Then the feud with Cena started in earnest.

One night, face to face on the road to WrestleMania, they had a war of words. The Rock lost, pretty badly. Near the end of the faceoff, John pointed out that Rock had written notes on his forearm for his promo. He might as well have won the feud right there. Rock never used to use promo notes like that, relying on his quick wit and ad libbing. Now he needed the equivalent of a teleprompter. Who's the last guy reading off a teleprompter you thought was cool? It shot some of the credibility he held as a talker and you could see the result right in front of you. Rock was shook. Scripted? Ad libbed? No one can say for sure, but the man looked genuinely annoyed, rattled, and his subsequent lost rhythm suggests it wasn't entirely planned. He stuttered briefly on the mic, trying to get some momentum back, and hit his "if you smell what the Rock is cooking" to try and bring it home. 

I hadn't seen it happen before or since. I've seen a ton of Rocks movies. He's not that great an actor. The Rock has been leaking cool ever since that night.

Then he stuck around a little longer and had a feud with CM Punk on the way to a rematch with Cena. If the stuff with Cena was bad, the Punk promo battles didn't go much better. Rock couldn't hang with Philly Phil at all really. It was kind of sad to watch. One night, Punk hit Rock with "your arms are just too short to box with god". Rocks response? Some witty riposte? Observation? Turning the line back on him? Nah. "Let me tell you something, you're not god."

Thanks for coming, Dwayne, good talk. The man we once thought was the coolest guy in the world, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm not sure when it happened, but Dwayne Johnson got complacent with regards to his skill at talking and never really tried again. It was a lot of the same sort of trite pablum whether on screen or on his instagram or wherever else he could drop a video. And he was always shilling something. If it wasn't a movie it's some new venture of his, like his latest, a line of whiskey. Thanks Dwayne, you want to sell me gold, next? Jeff Jarrett's already tried that one but maybe you'll have better luck. If he wasn't shilling, he was pandering.

Even last night, I didn't feel any of the old magic despite Rock leaning heel for the first time in twenty years. His big catchphrase or insult of the night was "Cody Crybabies" for the fans who were incredibly upset he'd walked in and seemingly took another mans main event spot. I guess the Rock is five now. Or maybe he always was. He hit the "it doesn't matter if you like it or not". Pretty rote stuff.

The big moment where he finally leaned into it a bit came much later. Cody came out and asserted his right to the title match. Rocks cousin, Roman Reigns, brought up Cody's father Dusty Rhodes, because it seems like everyone's got Dustys name in their mouth, and Cody fired back with a comment about their family. So Dwayne puffed up and did some "you don't talk about my family" shit, then slapped Cody. It was the most intimidating he'd looked in a long time.

It was also just him playing Luke Hobbs again, a character that's the most Rock that ever Rocked. The facial expression, the quiet glower and puff up. I recognized it immediately. All that he missed was to flex out of a cast. He just slipped into tough guy mode, because that's the only place he can go now. It used to be he would have just ethered the other guy with words, but that Rock was eroded over twenty years and this is just what we're left with. A big, sweaty wall of meat surrounding a Terminator endoskeleton, programmed to pander and shill and sometimes puff up and act like a big tough strong man. The sort you see blabber on in the UFC. You know, utterly unimaginative, lame individuals who can't dream up a semi-intelligent way to insult someone. If Rock started calling people betas he'd complete the transformation.

I won't get into his ego plays or any of the other stuff that soured me on him. I don't think it matters. But maybe it's time for us all to admit the Rock isn't cool anymore. He hasn't been in twenty years. After last night, I'm not sure there's much of the old Rock left in him. There's something sad about that, about him becoming a Machine Organism Designed Only for Shilling.

But maybe that makes for a good chance to be done with Dwayne Johnson, as a wrestler or otherwise. What's even left to hold on to? It's not like we'll miss out on any great films, that's for damn sure.