#also selfishness is not inherently a bad or immoral trait it is simply a character trait

[tagathaofcamelotandwoodsbeyond]

I am not a huge Euphoria fan but the comparisons I could draw between Cassie’s character and Sophie are so interesting. Two very selfish characters in the sense that they have a hard time seeing or prioritizing others, who rely heavily on their blonde haired beauty to get what they want, and who also have deeply warped ideas about love and are willing to put their relationships with their best friends at risk for the promise that love can fix all their problems. They rely so heavily on that idea that true loves kiss is going to save them from the deeply flawed people that they are and don’t really see the people they claim to love as whole people, just tools to get to a happy ending. Also the way they view their beauty as a weapon and a tool to be wielded whenever they want something.

[greylagwriting]

The Color Wheel

One resource I’ve never seen in conjunction with character creation is the color wheel, or color pie, of Magic: the Gathering.

MtG is a trading card game where each card is at least one of the above colors, with each one having differing traits, playstyles, and philosophy. Assigning fictional characters (especially your own) to the color pie is a fun activity, and one that may help greatly with character development. Most characters are more than one color, however, and I’d encourage everyone to see what color(s) their characters, philosophies, and groups embody. In addition, many character start out as one or more colors, but add or reject others along their journey.

If you want, you could send me a short description and see what color something might fall into.

Under the cut are a few paragraphs from the MtG Wiki about each color, with emphasis by me:

White puts value in the group, the community, and its civilization as a whole. White believes that suffering is a by-product of individuals not prioritizing the good of the group. White's ultimate goal is peace—a world where there is no unnecessary suffering, a world where life is as good as it can be for each individual, a world where everyone gets along and no one seeks to disturb the bonds of unity that White had worked so long to forge. To govern and protect its community, White makes use of and puts value in a number of broad concepts; morality (ethics, grace, truth), order (law, discipline, duty), uniformity (conformity, religion), and structure (government, planning, reason). White is a color commonly associated with good and justice, but if left unchecked or if everyone is not working toward the same unified goal, White can become authoritarian, inflexible, and capable of sacrificing a small group for the sake of a larger one. Everything necessary to preserve the laws, rules, and governance that White created.

Blue is the color that wants perfection and looks on the world and sees opportunity to achieve that, figuring out what you could achieve with the right education, experience, and tools. For Blue, life is one of constant discovery as you keep seeking to better yourself. This way of living requires the right attitude. You have to be open to possibilities, but also not too hasty in action. Blue is methodical and exact and recognizes that there are many forces, even some that come from within, that lead an individual astray. It is better to think one's options out carefully and select correctly than to rush to a decision. Implicitly, in that general world view, blue believes in tabula rasa: every one of us is born a blank slate with the potential to become anything. One need only understand how, to make the change. 

So with this ill-formed goal before it, Blue reasons that if it is to make itself better, it must become capable of everything it could be capable of, for that is to "merely add" to its own capabilities. Blue believes it can't possibly be bad to acquire the potential for any conscious action. Thus, Blue, believing it is capable of changing anything if it understands the change, and believing it is imperative that it acquire every capability it could have, concludes that it is imperative that it understand change. As such, blue is the color most interested in technology and wants the latest and greatest version of whatever it is using. Moreover, blue decides that it must understand everything; for truly, understanding can only improve one's effectiveness in any task. To gain understanding, blue must acquire knowledge. Since knowledge itself will inform every other decision, blue forms its principle goal: omniscience, the knowledge of all.

Black doesn't see anything as fundamentally immoral. To black, the only measure of right and wrong should be whether or not it leads to success. Black is open to opportunities and strategies rejected by others as taboo or forbidden—death, torment, infection, betrayal. Black characters will do anything to ensure their own well-being even at the expense of others; to black, anything less only allows others to do the same. Thus, black does everything possible to gain the only commodity that can secure it from weakness, and ensure its ability to get whatever it needs or wants—power.

Although if taken to extremes, black's selfishness and lack of ethical restraint can result in tragedy, at its most basic level black is not inherently evil. It has a very cynical world view, and its core philosophy is that of self-determination and release from society-imposed limitations. Black has an ally in blue, as it appreciates its subtlety and use of cold logic. Black is also allied with red, respecting its desire to do things on its own terms. However, black's disregard for other members of the group, spirituality/religion, and the sanctity of life opposes it with green and white.

Above all else, Red values freedom. It wants to do what it wants, when it wants, to whom it wants, and nobody can tell it otherwise. In summary, Red thinks that all you have to do is listen to your heart and simply act accordingly, letting your emotions guide you. Red loves life much more than any other color and so it believes that all people must live to its fullest. Red believes that life is an adventure, that it would be much more fun if everyone stopped caring about rules, laws, and personal appearances and just spent their time indulging their desires through experience. Red doesn't live its life questioning choices it has made, and lives in the moment; Red is spontaneous and embraces every adventure put before it. Red is the color of immediate action and immediate gratification. If it wants something, it will act on its impulses and take it, regardless of the consequences. Red embraces relationships and knows passion and loyalty and camaraderie and lust. When Red bonds with another, it bonds strongly and fiercely. To outsiders, Red might seem a bit chaotic; that's only because others can't see what's in red's heart. Red sees order of any kind as pointlessly inhibiting, believing that only through embracing anarchy could everyone really be free to enjoy life to the fullest with no regrets.

Green doesn't want to change the world, it wants everybody to accept the world as it is. Green is convinced that the world already got everything right. Green tries to coexist with it instead of trying to change it, regulate it, norm it, or take advantage of it. Green is the color of nature and interdependence. It believes that the natural order is a thing of beauty and has all the answers to life's problems, that obeying the natural order alone is the best way to exist and thus favors a simplistic way of living in harmony with the rest of the world. This can often lead to it being perceived as a pacifistic color, as it does not seek to make conflict with the other colors as long as they leave it alone and do not disrespect nature. However, it is fierce when it feels threatened and can be predatory and aggressive if its instincts dictate. Green believes each individual is born with all the potential they need, that it's imprinted in its genes. That everyone was born with a role and that the goal is to recognize it and then embrace it, and thus do what they were destined to do. But that role interconnects with the web of life, and thus everyone has to learn how you fit into the larger picture. We are not alone, we are a part of a complex system full of interdependency. Green truly believes that every individual has to bother to sit back and understand the bigger picture and don't get so caught up in the details of their lives.

[lj-writes]

Rey is selfish and flawed (and that’s a good thing)

I immensely enjoyed Mara( @jewishcomeradebot)’s recent Rey-centric meta (link with my addition), and the central thing I appreciate about her take on Rey is that she doesn’t posit Rey as this vaguely positive altruistic figure. Rather her read of Rey is fiercely self-interested and focused on her own desire, a rare perspective in fandom. Mara’s posts helped me bring Rey into clear focus as a character for the first time.

I think people’s perception of Rey is distorted in part because we tend to attribute altruism as the primary virtue for women, both real and fictional. This is reflected in the characterizations of the Star Wars heroines as well: Leia and Padmé are defined by their dedication to the well-being of others, or the greater good. They have things they want for themselves, primarily close relationships such as romance, but their primary driving motivations are to save others through armed struggle or politics.

I get that female characters being driven primarily by larger galactical matters rather than romance was and to an extent is still revolutionary. I don’t mean to detract from anyone’s love of characters like Leia and Padmé, and I love them myself. In fact, it is almost impossible not to love them because there is nothing controversial about them and what bad things did come out of their decisions (such as Padmé marrying Anakin post-Sand People massacre) came out of the men in their lives being trash.

That said, I am also dissatisfied by heroine motivations that basically go, “she loves the entire UNIVERSE and wants what’s best for it.” It’s a continuation of the old stereotypes of women being selfless nurturers, just with more politics and guns. While the politics and guns are arguably progressive, these arcs are in stark contrast to those of male protagonists who get to want things for themselves.

Luke is a good case in point. His goal was primarily for himself, to leave Tatooine and to become “a Jedi like my father before me.” He ended up helping the Rebellion and defeating the Empire along the way, but it was his personal goal to claim his heritage and realize himself as a Jedi that his story revolved around. Anakin’s ultimate goal was to keep his loved ones safe, which can be framed altruistically but in the end turned out to be about himself and his trauma, not the people he said he loved. Luke’s goal could also have turned out badly if he had chosen his desire to connect with his father over the desire to be a true Jedi and joined Vader. Anakin’s goal could have turned out well if he had chosen to let go of his need to control Padmé’s fate and overcome Palpatine’s temptation.

Luke and Anakin’s self-interested goals were thus morally neutral and could have gone either way depending on their choices, unlike Leia's and Padmé’s goals which were inherently moral. Framed more precisely, Luke's and Anakin’s goals had conflicts built into them that led to a moral dilemma, such as “do I kill my father or join him?” Leia and Padmé, on the other hand, were never seriously morally conflicted. The boys choose between good and evil, but the girls are all good.

In Jyn from Rogue One we see a female protagonist with a conflicted goal, but with a thumb, no scratch that, a giant boulder on the scale. Jyn wants to stay away from the Empire that destroyed her life, but behind her trauma and cynicism she wants to reconnect with her father and the love she once knew as a child. Well guess what? We’re going to shut down her desire to run away by blackmailing her and taking away her agency. Also her dad was working for the Rebels all along. Saw, her foster dad, also wants her to save the Rebellion. And, with her father gone, it is only through the Rebellion that she will carry on his legacy and find the love and connection she yearns for. Yay for choice!

So while Jyn has the appearance of a conflicted goal that she wants for herself, the actual story pushes her toward the altruistic choice for the greater good. If anything Jyn has even less choice than Leia and Padmé, who at least chose their paths and did not have to be strong-armed. Leia’s and Padmé’s choices were in the distant background, however, and the stories did not hinge on their moral choices like they did on Luke’s and Anakin’s. As far as the stories are concerned Leia and Padmé doing the right things are simple constants.

In this tradition it’s no wonder that a lot of us have trouble seeing Rey as wanting something for herself and striving for her own goal. The proud but chequered tradition of SW women, to say nothing of the cultural background that casts women as either caring angels or depraved villains, predisposes us to see her as another altruistic, or driven-to-be-altruistic, heroine in Leia’s, Padmé’s, or even Jyn’s mold.

Rey’s actual goals are very different from Leia’s or Padmé’s, however. Much like a younger Luke she dreams of heroism and admires the legends of the galaxy including Luke and Han, but her primary goal was not to reconnect with her heritage by becoming a hero herself. In fact she had no reason to believe, though the fandom may have, she had any kind of heritage or famous parents. If heroism were her primary goal she would have jumped at the chance to leave Jakku and join the Resistance, but instead what does she want to do after she was forced to leave? She wants to go back. She doesn’t want to be special, nor does she believe she is. She just wants her parents back. A special destiny was thrust upon her against her will, not because she sought it out.

The character whose driving motivation is most like Rey’s is Anakin Skywalker, the “Chosen One” who was taken from his mother and spent a lifetime aching from the loss. Anakin may have been a hero, but that was a job he did because he was told to, not because he was driven to it by his own needs and desires. His underlying desire was to love and be loved again, and after being separated from his mother he found that in Padmé. When his own fears and Palpatine’s deception led him to dread losing Padmé, he chose to take Palpatine’s offer of ultimate power to avoid losing his loved ones ever again.

Rey’s goal, then, like Anakin’s, is a) something she wants for herself and b) something that could be moral or immoral depending on her choice. It is not an altruistic and inherently good goal but a self-interested, morally neutral one. This is the Star Wars heroine who is the protagonist of her own story with the agency to match, and not a helplessly good inspiration and role model.

That is not to say her arc was necessarily handled well. The events of TFA take away her ability to return to Jakku by having her knocked out and kidnapped by the bad guy, much like RO did to Jyn’s ability to avoid the Empire-Rebellion conflict by having her jailbroken, knocked out, and kidnapped by the good guys.

Obviously both TFA and RO would have been boring stories if Rey and Jyn were simply allowed to return/disappear, but the stories could have been designed differently so the heroines had opportunities to make actual choices while still engaging with the plot. Rey, like Finn, could have returned to the fight of her own free will. The Rebels could have dangled a potential lead to finding Jyn’s father to lure her in. Creators make choices when they tell stories, and they chose to advance--or fail to advance--these female protagonists’ stories by using tired kidnap plots.

Thankfully Rey did get the chance to make a choice at the climax of TFA, when she chose to take up the lightsaber and fight Kylo Ren instead of using Finn as a distraction to run away and find the Millennium Falcon on her own. Of course the outcome was hardly in doubt; she was clearly an important character with newly emerging Force powers, her kindness toward others was an established trait, and her preexisting bond with Finn had grown nearly unbreakable when he came back for her. No one thought Rey might turn her back and run, and so there was no suspense.

From an in-story perspective, however, it was still a choice and a difficult one for her. Ren is a powerful Force user, one she had just managed to get away from, one who had tortured her, whom she had watched murder his own father and cruelly cut Finn down. Her mysterious Force abilities, which allowed her to push him out of her mind and escape him, were a source of uncertainty and fear. She had vowed to Maz never to touch Luke’s lightsaber again after it gave her traumatic visions.

Most of all, there was her prior drive to go back to Jakku where her parents could find her. She would never have a chance of seeing them again if she were killed or captured here, or if the duel simply took too long and the planet exploded with them on it. Given her history and personal goal, running for it while she could was actually a pretty logical choice.

So why did she stay and fight? Had she given up on her goal to reunite with her parents and belong with people who loved her?

I would say her goal was still constant, the path to reaching it had simply shifted. To borrow from Maz, the belonging Rey sought was not behind her on Jakku, it was ahead, and she had found it in Finn. Finn was the first person in memory to ask her if she was all right, the one she begged to stay with her, the one who came back for her. He was the love and belonging she had sought. He was worth fighting and dying for.

This is another distinction between a self-interested goal and an altruistic one, by the way, and why Rey’s story doesn’t revolve around Finn or Anakin’s around Padmé even if Finn and Padmé, respectively, were key to their goals. Story-wise Rey’s goal isn’t to do whatever it takes to defend Finn. Rather she is doing whatever she can to defend Finn because she is pursuing her own goal through him--to be loved and cherished as she never got to be as a child. Under the right circumstances the person to fulfill her goal could shift, as it shifted from her parents to Finn, and potentially could shift again. And that is a key point of TLJ, as I will discuss below.

So how do we know Rey’s path to her goal shifted from her parents to Finn? Two points: First, after the ground opened up, separating her and Ren, she ran to find Finn but not to escape with him or seek help. She lay down to, for all intents and purposes, die with him. She did not try to find the Falcon, did not try to carry Finn away, did not try to attract the attention of passing vessels while the planet disintegrated around them. She felt for his heartbeat, wept over him, then lay down on his chest sobbing in a way that reminded me of nothing so much as Juliet collapsing on top of Romeo.

The second point is that after she and Finn were rescued and she was free to go back to Jakku if she wished, she instead went to Ahch-To to bring Luke back. And why? She’s helping the Resistance, sure, as she was before, but how does that tie into her established goal?

I think TFA was heavily setting up a deep emotional bond between Luke and Rey, with her literally dreaming about his island, her Force vision when she touched Anakin’s lightsaber, her immediately thinking of Luke when Maz said the belonging she sought lay ahead and not behind, and their incredibly emotional meeting at the end.

However, since TLJ borked all that, I now think Rey was helping the Resistance primarily for Finn much as he helped them for her sake. This way Rey’s departure still ties into her story goal and makes her a protagonist, not a passive plot point that bounces around whereever she’s told to go. This way Rey becomes a self-interested character with potential for moral conflict, and not yet another entirely altruistic, inherently good heroine who does whatever is in the greater good.

Think about it. Finn is injured and needs intensive medical care. He has nowhere else to go, no one else both willing and able to take care of him and protect him. The FO if possible hates him worse than they did before for his role in destroying their superweapon. Yet the Resistance is a target too, and they need Luke. Finn and the Resistance are on the same storm-tossed boat now, and if Rey is to think about any kind of future with Finn she has to save the Resistance first.

If you view TLJ in this frame, this is the movie where Rey has an actual self-interested goal and takes actions that could be morally complex. If we posit that her goal is consistent from the end of TFA and she hasn’t become a completely different person between one movie and the next, she still wants the same thing as she did at the end of TFA: Save the Resistance and protect Finn. She thought Luke was key to that, but he refused.

In her desperation she turned to Kylo Ren because, again, she has a self-interested goal--be with Finn--that could lead to moral or immoral outcomes depending on her choices. She’s not being an all-good and all-altruistic figure whose sole wish is to save Ben’s soul or the universe as we expect of our heroines. Rather she is desperate to achieve her goal and willing to push the moral boundaries in service of it.

I can also answer the criticisms of Rey being out-of-character. Daisy Ridley has said in a cast interview that she played Rey as always thinking of Han on some level, which seems at odds with her playing nice with Han’s murderer. On the other hand, what did Han die trying to do? Redeem his son.

Therefore I read Daisy’s comment to mean that Rey is still grieving Han--it’s only been a few days since she watched him murdered, after all--and wants to believe that he did not die in vain. If she can turn his son, then she can prove that Han was right and his life was not wasted.

But why should that grief take the form of being so solicitous to Kylo Ren, the man who not only killed Han but hurt her and Finn so badly, in addition to numerous other crimes? Isn’t that out of character for Rey, who is so strong and a fighter, who fought back in rage at the end of TFA?

Rey is not primarily a fighter, though. Those are the parts we remember the most vividly, but she is primarily a survivor who adapts to her circumstances. That means employing whatever means necessary to survive, including fighting if the need arises, but also being passive and accommodating if that serves better.

We have in fact watched Rey be passive in the face of numerous wrongs done to her in her interactions with a character who shaped her life: Unkar Plutt. I mean my Reylutt ship manifesto (link) may have been a joke, but her interactions with Plutt do a great deal to foreshadow her interactions with Kylo Ren. Plutt was an abusive authority figure who kept her on starvation rations and systematically exploited her, but she still stayed with him for over a decade in seeming passivity. We see her visibly swallow down her rage when he cut her portions yet again and can only imagine how many times she had to do so over the years. The only time we see her fight back physically was when he used violence first by sending his goons to seize BB-8.

The thing is, much like saying someone can’t be a victim of abuse if they fight back, it’s also inaccurate and hurtful to say the only “right” way to react to abuse is by visibly fighting back, or, worse, that you’re not really a victim unless you’re angry. A lot of victims are forced to stay passive, for the sake of their own physical and psychological safety, in the face of mistreatment because that is oftentimes how abuse works. Rey, especially in her early years, could not have survived as she did if she were always dwelling on how she was being treated and lashing out. She had to take a variety of strategies including passive waiting and patience in the face of injustices, not just fighting back against immediate threats, to survive deprivation and exploitation.

How is this relevant to her scenes with Kylo Ren? When she was actively defending herself with Force and violence he was an immediate threat to her, to the Resistance, and to Finn. In the Force(d) Bond situation, on the other hand, she had no way to get away from him but at the same time he did not know where she was and could not get to her. Raging at him might be satisfying, but was hardly practical especially as he became increasingly useful to her. She had, after all, a lot of practice burying her resentment for the sake of survival and her own goal of reuniting with her family. Once the threat moved from acute to a “merely” persistent thing, a different set of reflexes took over.

Another fact about abuse is that the victim may traumatically bond with their aggressor. It is how people psychologically survives at times, gaining a sense of control in a situtation where they have very little, believing that you can be safe and not be hurt anymore by gaining your tormentor’s approval and love. Subjectively it can feel a lot like love, too, because this is a powerful psychological mechanism for our survival and, in the immediate situation, our subjective mental well-being. It’s one of those things that make the unbearable bearable.

This was another way that Rey’s personal, selfish goal could have led to an immoral or unhealthy outcome: She could have mistaken Kylo’s manipulation and her own traumatic bond to him as the love and belonging she sought, and chosen to stay with him at the end of the movie.

In this Rey closely parallels Anakin, who accepted Palpatine’s offer of power as a substitute for love and so became Palpatine’s servant. Her overriding goal of knowing love and safety once again had transferred once before already, from waiting for her family on Jakku to protecting Finn and reuniting with him. Could it transfer once again, as self-interested rather than selfless goals can, this time to a fundamentally destructive relationship that only had a facade of love and belonging?

I think this was the reason, little as I may like it, that Rey was separated from Finn for most of the movie and why Luke treated her so poorly. If she hadn’t been isolated from Finn, or had been nurtured better by Luke, she would have been much more centered and healthier and there would have been no suspense about the outcome when she reached out to Kylo on board the Supremacy. I would dispute how well it worked, but I think that was the intention. 

Ultimately Rey made the right choice, as we know. The point as far as this essay is concerned, though, is that she COULD have made the wrong choice as Anakin did in the pursuit of her own goal. This makes Rey the first Star Wars heroine in the theatrical releases with a genuine moral choice to make, who is not all-good and all-nurturing and therefore morally unassailable like Leia and Padmé, and who is not strong-armed both by her “friends” and the story to make the right choice as Jyn was.

Like Anakin and Luke before her, Rey is a selfish and flawed character. Her self-interested goals and her own complex psychological profile lead her to genuine moral choices and mistaken judgments. Flawed execution aside, that is a very good thing indeed. To me it’s more progress than any amount of guns and politics.

Rey ultimately failed in her mission, as Luke warned, though she at least managed to return to the Resistance with her conscience and freedom intact and to save it. Now she is faced with the reality that she has to be the Jedi and hero. Luke is gone, Kylo is the Big Bad, and she can’t look to anyone to solve her problems for her.

What’s more, Finn himself, who had asked her to leave with him in the first place, now has a new commitment to the Resistance/Rebellion and possibly a personal and emotional commitment to someone new. As John Boyega who plays Finn has said, the look she gives Finn and Rose says it all.

These developments point to interesting directions to take the character. I hope Episode IX carries Rey’s development forward with better writing and challenges her harder, developing her more and having the story hinge on her moral--or immoral--choices.