Jake wrote:Lucifiel wrote:
Ah I prefer far, far more layers for characters to really be "morally greyish".
I'd say it sounds like you're conflating 'morally grey' with 'well-developed', and 'unambiguously good' and 'unambiguously bad' with 'under-developed'.
While it's true that often, unambiguous characters are under-developed and often, morally-grey characters are better developed, I wouldn't like to say it's always the case by a long stretch. Is Atticus Finch (
To Kill A Mockingbird) an under-developed character? He's hardly the most two-dimensional pathetic example of characterisation the world has seen. Is he morally grey? Not really. Is Frank Castle (
The Punisher) [generally] morally grey? Absolutely. Is he a deep, well-realised character? Eeeeeeeehhhhhno. Last time I saw he was a seething pile of cliché excuses for a psychopath.
(I can understand how such a conflation would come about, since most human beings are selfish and ambiguous and thus characters who behave in a straightforward heroic or evil manner often feel unrealistic.)
This.
No, I would not argue that Saiyuki characters are terribly well-developed. But then again, neither are many of the characters in Journey to the West. San Zang, for example, is a pathetic, whiny, cowardly, miserable excuse for a priest who always concerned, first and foremost, for his own safety, and shows a complete lack of ability to learn from his own mistakes. He experiences zero, and I literally mean ZERO character development across the course of the series. I know it's necessary for the plot - plot enforced stupidity you might say - and I hate how he's portrayed, given how heroic the original San Zang was - but still. Not well-developed at all in any case.
Zhu Ba Jie? Archetype of the greedy, selfish, lazy, lustful bastard that's apparently in there for the selfish little bitch inside all of us to identify with. Since he's supposed to be an archetype, there's not much development or depth there, unfortunately. And worse of all, he's petty. No, scratch that. Worse than that, San Zang's willing to indulge in his pettiness. The White Bone Demon arc makes me want to strangle both the goddamn bastards. Yes, Ba Jie, Wu Kong is superior to you, and no, that does not give you the right to make petty, self-indulgent, jealousy-induced, completely illogical complaints about the validity of his assertions, and San Zang, you are a bleeping brainless dolt to believe him instead of Wu Kong. I'd flip both of you the finger but you're fictional characters. Oh, and Wu Jing. Not standing up for Wu Kong when he needs you the most? I thought you were simply bland, but you're worse than that. You're bland and a coward.
But yes, unfortunately it's true. Sha Wu Jing is a non-entity. No personality whatsoever. The goddamn HORSE is more interesting than him. Yes. Even though he's a horse for the entire book and only gets one shining crowning episode of awesome where he crossdresses, sword dances, attempts to assassinate a demon, and persuades Ba Jie to go back and get Wu Kong.
I mean he's a HORSE DRAGON PRINCE FOR GOD'S SAKE. A total waste of potential in that character, I feel.
----
@Luciel: Regarding cultural concepts, I think that if a work is strong enough, the cultural concepts should be able to come through without the need for lengthy footnotes. In the way characters act, react, talk, etc., the reader should be able to understand, at least on a gut, emotional level, what's going on with the characters and why they're justified in what they think and behave.
For example, drugs in American culture. I come from a country where the penalty for dealing drugs is being hanged to death and I come from a small town where people go to retire. Very little crime. Drugs do not figure prominently in our media at all and the idea of substance abuse is very remote for me. But when I read a story about an American teenager abusing LSD I did not need a lengthy footnote explaining that drug use is not rare, though not especially common, amongst American teenagers, and that drugs are both cheap and accessible. The way the story was written allowed me to come to those conclusions (perhaps not explicitly or coherently), and I was able to follow the storyline and the emotions of the characters involved perfectly well.
If the characters in a story are written well enough, I believe that the readers will be able to follow their motivations and understand the justification behind them.
People will be ethnocentric and judge differences of other cultures negatively, no matter what. The important thing is to portray, subjectively, what it feels like the be in that culture, what emotions, what reactions, what assumptions and cultural norms are revealed through the way characters act and talk; I think that stories, instead of footnotes, should be able to get across those differences in a different, maybe even more effective on an emotional level, way compared to lengthy explanations.
I mean, I haven't read a single book about Japanese culture. But by reading manga, I feel like I understand Japanese culture much much more than, say, international businessmen who learn about Japanese culture through textbooks and news articles. I understand the way they think, their cultural norms, common stereotypes etc. I won't say that my knowledge is completely accurate - merely that it is sufficient for me to understand and appreciate the storylines. And even when I get outraged at, say, the sexism in a manga like Bakuman for instance, I understand that that's the way the culture works.
This doesn't even have to apply to fiction. Consider 9/11, the photo of The Falling Man. The way people reacted to it, and all the other people who jumped from the towers, made me absolutely furious because it seems that people were CONDEMNING the victims for jumping. But I know, from the way they talked, that was because they perceived it as an act of suicide, and that suicide was strongly against their religion. I knew this even without knowing a thing about Christianity apart from the fact that Christians wear crosses and go to church on Sundays and pray to a single god and Jesus is involved somehow.
It's the same thing.
Consider how people write good fantasy, for instance. Tolkien wrote tons and tons and tons of footnotes about the foreign cultural norms of Middle Earth, but do we need to read all those footnotes to truly appreciate the story of Lord of the Rings? Hell. No. The hobbits' cultural norms are clear to us by the way they act and think and react and feel.
When you're writing speculative fiction, you need to write from the perspective of an insider; as if you're narrating the story of a fictional universe to a person who was born and raised in that fictional universe, in order for your story to feel natural. If you need to resort to footnotes to explain stuff, you're a failure as a writer (unless of course you're Terry Pratchett and you're doing it for comedic effect). It's different when you're translating fiction, because there are certain terms and words that are not translatable, and you need footnotes to explain those. Even so, it should be clear from the context, roughly what the words mean and the emotional significance of those words.
In any case, Journey to the West is, at its heart, a simple action/adventure story that just happens to be in the context of a religious pilgrimage. Wu Cheng En apparently wrote it with political activism in mind (hence the rebellious nature of Wu Kong - a symbol of rebellion against the government), but, again, he was not learned in Buddhism at all, and so religious/spiritual interpretations of the text might be missing the mark. Of course, there's no reason why you can't interpret it in those contexts, but it's the same as interpreting, say, Friends or Lost or Lord of the Rings or Dragonball from a religious perspective. And a good action/adventure story should appeal to everyone in spite of culture.
Yes, I realize that Dragonball was inspired by Journey to the West as well. The only thing similar about those two works are the names. Scratch that - the main character's name, to be exact. The rest is completely original.
"works of Shakespeare for students" come with lots and lots of suggestions about possible symbolisms, how to interpret a certain idea
Symbolism and possible interpretations are different things from foreign cultural concepts.
Saiyuki simply an enhanced compilation of certain tales that'd been floating around for a long time, before it was written?
Yes, it is. But the part where the emperor bestowed the name of "San Zang" upon Xuan Zang for services rendered to the empire was purely Wu Cheng En's creation. So yes, he does indeed make mistakes once in a while.
And yes, I believe that most humans are bastards at least some of the time too. So don't worry, you're not alone.
Link please?
So instead i am thinking of just leaving it the way it is... let it stay a narrative and just use the text as it is... so it would be more like a real book, but with the advantages that the technology offers, like background music, sound effect, drawings, animations, visual effects etc..Also it could be voiced... and voicing something that you present in a narrative would be way easier, since you don't need voice actors... you would just need someone to read the narrative. And so at the same time the narrative is read, the text appears so people can decide if they wanna read along with the text or just listen to the narrator...
I keep forgetting that it's old news in parts of Asia... lol.