Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="strawpberry" data-source="post: 9399944" data-attributes="member: 7046297">Bryan Lee O'Malley, when the new-ish Scott Pilgrim Netflix series was coming out, discussed how perception of the title character had changed since the books' original publication in 2004-2010 and the movie in 2010. Basically, the character of Scott has always been kind of a bum, not a villain but definitely somebody who makes lazy choices even when it hurts the people around him. Those stories (especially the books) are prone to simply presenting Scott's actions and trusting the audience to interpret him as the flawed character he was intended to be. O'Malley seems to perceive modern audiences, by contrast, as expecting an actively negative presentation of negative character traits, because a neutral presentation will be interpreted as tacit approval rather than tacit condemnation.I suspect including problematic characters needs to be done with care and clarity. There are a lot of people out there who will get called sexist (or racist, or a Nazi) and will thank you for the compliment - so if you're including those themes, you need to be very explicit about the context, or risk people thinking you're writing for the problematic audience, not just about them.</blockquote>