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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6008090" data-attributes="member: 4937">I disagree.  I know what is taught about story telling, but a character doesn't need 'flaws' to be interesting.  A character just needs a personality.  Did you notice your appeal to hyperbole in that?  You provided only two alternatives - a character who is so superhuman as to be incapable of losing, and one that has flaws.   Even without appealing to Kryptonite, Superman is capable of losing, ground that has been well and interestingly explored in graphic novels like Red Son and Superman: Peace on Earth.  Neither story is possible or as revealing if Superman is a character with flaws in the usual sense of the word.  If I create a character along the lines of Buckaroo Bonzai or Doc Savage, capable in every field of human endeavor, then would you say he is flawed because he only benches 450 lb. rather than the more superhuman 4500 lb?Did it never occur to you that a character could be interesting precisely because of the character's lack of obvious or meaningful flaws?  Sometimes a character serves to provide a study in contrast, telling us who we are by providing us an example of what we are not.  That doesn't make the character any less interesting.  Likewise, sometimes characters serve to tell us who we inspire to be, even if we are not that.  Sometimes characters are simply interesting as escapist wish fulfillment, which goes back to at least Heracles who is pretty much good at everything the Greeks admired. Really?  I don't agree.  While I love stories about underdogs succeeding against long odds, it's hard to deny that there is an appeal to the heroic as well.  It's great when the underdog team wins, but we also like to root for the clear champion - that dynastic team or player that inspires awe because, at least in their field, they seem to have no flaw or equal.  Sure, we may watch tennis to see Pete Sampras or Roger Federar lose, but we also watch to see them win as expected.  It's heroic when an underdog hockey team wins, but mostly we tune in where we expect the favorites to win.Every good story is about a character overcoming adversity, but not every story is about a character overcoming the hardships imposed by his own limitations.  There are all sorts of conflicts in narrative, and most of them are not 'Man against Himself'.  Often a story is interesting because the hero succeeds at all, when such long odds were against it that we can hardly imagine that anyone could of succeeded.  In such cases, the story is about a character whose flaws don't really matter to the narrative.  If the character survives being cast away at see, we can enjoy the story for the character's seemingly perfect competance without regard to whether as a dad, he might be something of a jerk, or that he's in truth a bit of a misanthrope, or even that, in another circumstance he might be drunk.  For the purposes of the story, especially if it is a fictional character, he is hypercompotent.It's precisely the sort of things which are common sense, where it is most worth having a discussion.</blockquote>

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