[ SECRET POST #2064 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2064 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 075 secrets from Secret Submission Post #295.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. http://i46.tinypic.com/zvsex4.jpg

[st_jane_ambulance]

Same here. I'll sometimes sympathize or empathize with them, but I'm not sure that's the same thing.

[(Anonymous)]

I can't say I've found a character that's a carbon copy of me, or that I'm the type of person who believes I actually am a fictional character, but I've come across characters now and then who have mannerisms and experiences similar to my own, so I feel I can relate.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think there's a right and a wrong way personally I think both are legit. Some media I have no characters I identify with and I still love the show/whatever and the characters. And some media I have one, and it's always just one, character I identify with overall.


I don't think it's inserting yourself into the characters skin. I think, in my case anyway, it's an empathy for their personailty traits or way of viewing the world. It's not always good traits either. I don't think I am the character I just get how they operate and it resonates with me.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, same here. I'm also not that great with empathy in real life, and in fiction it's even worse - I like media because it's exciting and I want to know all the intricacies of the storyline, not because I identify with or empathise emotionally with any of the characters. The closest I get is just, "That character is pretty cool and I want to see more about them, and that character shares a few traits with me..."

So... don't worry! You're not doing it 'wrong', and you're not alone :P.

[intrigueing]

Well, people don't identify with a character in his/her entirety, It's more like...you understand something about them on a personal level because you've been there before and have thought the exact things they are shown thinking and have made choices with rationales that they have made with the same rationales. That kind of thing. It's more like recognizing parts of yourself in a character in a very familiar way.

All fictional characters obviously have some element of this, otherwise they'd be incomprehensible and inhuman and unable to relate to or understand, but people say they identify with a character when this recognition is particularly specific or deep. Basically, if a character is talking about something personal and fundamental about themselves and you can go "I know exactly what that feels like" from your own personal experience, you may be able to say you identify with that character. You may not, because other aspects of the character may be completely different from your own life and personality, but you might.

[(Anonymous)]

I tend to do the exact opposite (pretend I'm one of the characters) and find it very hard to not do it and keep enjoying the work --which makes cringe comedies particularly unbearable; I feel like it's me being humiliated!--, but I can imagine what you mean.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you tried reading Terry Pratchett at all? He's really good at writing ... well, everybody. Kids, old men, young women, middle-aged men, dogs, gods, little old ladies ...

If I don't see some of my own characteristics or experiences in a character, I see my friends. Like Slings and Arrows, I didn't see myself in any of the characters, but I related to a lot of the experiences of the acting troupe and recognized some of my friends and past directors in the characters.

[htebazytook]

We humans are able to empathize with other humans, you see, even fictional ones!

[gethenian]

I don't think you're doing it wrong... or if you are, I am, too. I've only found two characters I truly "identify with." Two. In the entirety of fiction. In 28 years of being an obsessively avid excapist, shall we say. Other characters... I LIKE them. Sometimes I feel a sense that I UNDERSTAND them more than usually well... like, I totally grok their muse, you know? But identify with? As in, seeing myself reflected in someone else's world? Just twice, in Pierre Gringoire from Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, and Judah Low from Iron Council by China Mieville.

Identifying with is different than sympathizing or empathizing with a character, I've always thought. Identifying with a character is more like... you have this revelation that once upon a time, someone, somewhere, had the ability to understand things about you that are so essential to who you are, so deeply ingrained into the fabric of your identity, you can't describe them or turn them into a list of virtues and vices and qualities and opinions. You can try, yes, and you can even get a pretty good approximation if you're thorough and thoughtful about it, but even then, people are so very rarely that honest with themselves, much less with other people, that's a difficult thing to do and harder still to share. Identifying with a character is when someone else has already done all of that for you and shown you who you'd be if you lived in another world.

In my case, I would either [spoilers] abandon my wife to rape and death in order to run away with her pet goat and spend my life writing allegorical plays and poems, or I would create a golem made of TIME ITSELF in order to immortalize an IDEA, killing hundreds in the process and dooming thousands more to remain bound and motionless in a single moment until the end of the world, and then get unceremoniously shot by a hooker.

...yeah, if we're honest, I'm not a particularly stable person. But at least I don't halfass it. XD

[cloud_riven]

Are you confusing identifying with projecting?

I mean, identifying, or relating, just means you get where someone is coming from, or to feel somewhat similar to them. Hence all the folk who say they're just like Hermione Granger, Sherlock Holmes, an audience surrogate, etc. I'm not saying they aren't, but there are traits in those characters people can see in themselves.

They don't even have to be similar to you. If you understand and feel one character's rage at someone who flipped loyalty or something for instance, then you've probably identified with the character.

[fingalsanteater]

I always identify with the wrong characters- the characters who share my faults- so maybe your way is better.

Oh, and your secret made me laugh.

I'm imagining you pressing your nose against a plexiglass wall. On the other side are fictional characters milling about, lounging around. Just hanging out, playing games and drinking coffee and reading books. Another fan enters on your side and presses herself against the wall. She seeps through microscopic imperfections in the glass-- she squeezes herself between the micro chasms between atoms. She appears on the on the other side, brushes herself off and turns to give her favorite character a high five. But, still you stand, seperate and unable to press through. You pound your fists against the glass; you yell and scream. You are ignored. You must make it through yourself. But you can not transport there. Not until you understand. And you don't.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't often identify with a character but very few characters in fiction are like me, especially in the cases of television and movies, they tend to have the same 3 or 4 character personality types they use over and over again and I am like none of them. Especially since I'm a woman and the portrayal of women is never even close to how I am.

But I do like inserting myself in stories, it keeps me more actively engaged.

[(Anonymous)]

If you're doing it wrong, OP, then I am, too. But you know what? I enjoy reading books the way I read them. We're not all built the same, and that's okay.

[tamabonotchi]

I can't think of a time I've thought "I know that feel" with a character, so I always think I don't identify with characters.
And then I see people on tumblr always saying how they identify with different characters and I can't relate.

[unicornherds]

Naw man you're not doing it wrong. Honestly there's no "wrong way" to enjoy fandom or media - it's a very individual interpretation type of thing. There are a lot of people who do identify with characters and a lot of people who talk about that, but you can be sure there are a ton of us who don't.

[(Anonymous)]

Identifying with a character is inherently a personal reaction, so I'll provide mine.

When I found a character on TV I could identify with more than anyone else before or since, it was because I saw a lot of myself in that character. She had a number of neuroses and character traits that I also share, and thus I could identify with her because, for 16 episodes, I felt that the story could have been written about me. It's not about inserting yourself into their skin, it's about realising that that skin also fits you pretty snugly.

In essence, it's crossing the plexiglass line between watching characters on TV and feeling as though you're watching a fanfic of your own life. And if that fanfic is better than your own life it can become something to aspire to.

(Of course, it doesn't always work out perfectly - I'm male and she's not, and the supporting cast has characters whose equivalents I haven't met yet..)

[feotakahari]

I was considering making a secret in regard to this. Video games like Spec Ops: The Line like to guilt the player for the choices the protagonist makes, but this always feels weird to me, because I'm not the protagonist. Conversely, when people complain about how some version of a story "ruins the fantasy" (e.g. a season of Digimon in which Digimon tamers are common, and therefore viewers can't fantasize about being one of a few special people who can tame Digimon), I find it jarring and a little creepy that someone cares more about their self-insert fantasy than about the story they're basing it off of.

On a side note, this feeds directly into my style of writing. Because I don't really empathize with my characters, I can treat a cheating housewife, a cowardly salesman, and a homicidal cult leader as if they're all equal, none of them inherently deserving of praise or contempt. I like to think my cold neutrality brings something new to the table. (OP, I don't know if you write at all, but I'd encourage you to give it a try--you might have a knack for it.)

[(Anonymous)]

I...feel like half the people here (OP included) are over-complicating something that's very simple.

To identify with something means that you see something in it that reminds you of an aspect of yourself. That's it. That's all it is. It doesn't mean you have some magical revelation or that it allows for an alternate version of you or that there's a "fanfic about your life" or that you think you are that character or that you want to live in that character's skin/world.

Say there's a character that's an activist feminist, and you're an activist feminist. You think, "oh, that's cool; someone wrote a character that shares my point of view." There! You just identified with the character. You may not empathize or sympathize with the character; you may not worry about what's going to happen to the character. You may be completely emotionally detached. It doesn't matter, because that's something different.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a little creeped out by how many people are like, "Nope, never identified with a character, don't usually feel empathy or anything either, etc."

Stories are supposed to make you identify with the characters on some level. At the very least, there should be some kind of empathy, some kind of moment where the character experiences an emotion with the clarity that you have felt it before as well. Maybe you never trekked across Middle Earth and wound up stranded in Gondor, but maybe you did wind up all alone in another city or state or country, with your best friend half a world away. Maybe you never had a vicious witch make you write "I shall not tell lies" with a pen that cut the words into your own hand and wrote them in your blood, but certainly at some point in your life, you were subjected to an unfair authority, you were called a liar while being honest, or at the very least, were bullied by someone who had more power than you.

Things like that.

Stories are supposed to create an emotional resonance. That's literally the whole point of stories, has been since the Greeks (or at least, that's about when people put the idea into words). True, some stories are crap (and, oddly enough, even in crap stories, there can be the occasional moment of emotional resonance). If you never actually relate to a character on some level, why do you keep reading? If it's just fiction and not worth dwelling on once the last page is turned, then what was the point of that little diversion? You could've watched some reality tv.

[ninety6tears]

I think "identifying" with a character is used to describe everything from self-insertion to slightly empathizing.

[enjoythesilence]

The only character I have truly related to was Darlene Conner from Roseanne. I was fourteen and going through a crippling depression for a reason I couldn't even figure out and I didn't have any friends. Darlene went through the exact same thing, even at the same age. So while I can't speak for others, the reason why I related to her had nothing to do with wanting to be her but rather that we were so alike that I didn't feel so alone and it really got me through that terrible year in my life.

/chulstorybrah.

[streetcake]

To me identifying with a character means that the character may have traits that I also have. Like, a character who panics when under pressure may be a character I can relate to because I'm the same way.

It's not necessary to identify with characters, but I think people make a big deal out of it because it's easier to understand characters and their motivations/feelings when you relate to them. Plus I tend to get a lot more invested in characters if I can relate to them in some way.

[childings.livejournal.com]

Usually characters that I "identify" with are characters who react to situations the same way I would see myself reacting. Either that, or they are dealing with a situation similar to one I have dealt with in the past, or am currently dealing with. There really isn't a character out there who is exactly like me in every way and I think most people would say the same thing -- that's not what it means to "identify" with a character.

[(Anonymous)]

The way I've always understood it, "identification" has very little to do with inserting yourself into the action or imagining that you ARE the character, and more to do with how you picture that character's inner life. So, I might think I have nothing in common with a character, that we're nothing alike, and that they're very firmly on the other side of the plexiglass (as you put it)...and yet, without being consciously aware of it, I might, say, get angry on that character's behalf, or assume they'll react to something the way I would, or feel the same way I feel.

That said, I don't think you're doing it wrong. There's no right way to do this.