Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2010-02-04 05:21 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2010-02-04 05:21 pm
[ SECRET POST #1126 ]
⌈ Secret Post #1126 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 078 secrets from Secret Submission Post #161.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 4 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - take it to comments ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
i have nothing new to add, listen to be ramble into the empty tubes of the internet
So, your main point is not that Riza is not a well-written character because she is static, but that she is not a well-written character because she isn't portrayed with enough depth. Okay, that's pretty much all I wanted to clear up. You were using some terms interchangeably in a way that fudged me up for quite a while.
Complexity doesn't necessarily imply dynamism in a character. Depth and initiative don't necessarily imply change. What you're saying is that the depth and initiative are missing in the manga version of Riza. Yes, yes, and yes. I agree unequivocally with you. I was just taking issue with how you implied in the post that well-written = dynamic, and static = badly written, when you had meant depth & initiative = complex = well-written. Just me raising my hackles.
That said: Riza seems to me to be beloved more because she is admirable and relatable, than because she reflects anything approaching the complexity and often contradictoryt and irrational behavior that characterizes real humans.
The ironic thing is that much of what she does is really damn confusing (and sometimes irritating) precisely because it comes off as contradictory. We don't know why she does what she does partly because of lack of detail, but also partly because we just don't know how she gets from Point A to Point B in a logical, rational manner. Just something I find interesting. I find her character to be inherently . . . badly presented, mostly. She's more of a plot device than a character; this is true of most of the secondary characters in the FMA manga.
As for the last point, the word "strong" carries a different connotation. When people use the word "strong" to talk about a character, they are usually referring to the character as a person and not necessarily the character as she is written. It was just something that kept tripping me up all over the place in your post, as I had to mentally replace every "strong" with "well-written." (I think the other anon up there had the same issue.) Just a clarification issue. I think your post would've been clearer if you had stuck to one term.
Re: i have nothing new to add, listen to be ramble into the empty tubes of the internet
And I think you might be right about my use of the word "strong," although I didn't expect it to be confusing. In my usual circles, I don't think my use of the word in this context would have been misunderstood, so it just didn't occur to me that others might read what I said in a different way.
I try my best to treat fandomsecrets as a general forum, and so I make efforts to use language in a way that would be commonly understood, but obviously I misjudged in this case. I will definitely be more thoughtful the next time I talk about strong characters, since it obviously doesn't mean the same thing to everyone that it does to me.