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!