So I'm not the only one irked by seeing modern characters popping up in period dramas. I don't know who writes the Movie Media Hub posts on Facebook, but I'm with them on this point. Not specifically feminist characters, though: any character whose function is to spout modern attitudes a few centuries ahead of their time.

I disagree about why such characters are inserted into stories. There are multiple reasons. Most obviously, it's a way for a lazy writer to get laughs. "Heh heh, it's Victorian times but Holmes just said 'OK Boomer'." Ursula K Le Guin griped about fantasy writers who put contemporary American slang into their heroes' mouths:

"...Since fantasy is seldom taken seriously at this particular era in this country, they are afraid to take it seriously. They don’t want to be caught believing in their own creations, getting all worked up about imaginary things; and so their humor becomes self-mocking, self-destructive. Their gods and heroes keep turning aside to look out of the book at you and whisper, “See, we're really just plain folks." '

It happens because some audiences are easily pleased. They are asking, as Oscar Wilde put it, for art "to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity."

Anachronism is also a quick and easy way to get the audience on-side with a character. How can you not root for the guy who's denouncing slavery in the 18th century? Well, there were indeed plenty of people denouncing slavery back then, and a good thing too, but if you are going to put them in a script they shouldn't talk like 21st century characters. Unlike us today, they exist in a world where it apparently wasn't obvious to everyone that enslaving another human being was a monstrous crime. And even if you get the mindset and the dialogue right, it's still a lazy way to create rooting interest. Consider first whether you need to start with a hero whose every attitude is right-on. We were talking about the superfluity of likeable characters in a recent post and, as a great storyteller once pointed out, it is more satisfying to see one sinner that repenteth than ninety-nine decent characters who need no repentance.

Mainly, though, I detest this trope because of its cultural chauvinism. If somebody is interested in a story with an historical and/or non-Western setting, what is the point of inserting modern Western characters? You may say we can't fully know how people in such settings would see the world. Equally, we can't all be as selfless as the Buddha but that doesn't stop us giving money to charity. We make an effort at all sorts of things we can't hope to do perfectly, so why not storytelling or roleplaying? We do know that a farmer in medieval Iceland won't share the attitudes of people at a TED talk. If we want the farmer to make a stand for something we believe in today, we should look for a way he'd credibly conceive of and frame that in the context of his times. In writing or playing such a character, we can find stepping stones that help us imagine their interior life, for example using a process that Robert Graves called analeptic mimesis, effectively taking what you know of a time and place and dreaming it back into existence. That is true even in a fantasy story, as long as it's a fantasy setting where somebody has thought out some of the culture and economics that shape it.

In his book Medieval Horizons, Dr Ian Mortimer contrasts historical accuracy with historical authenticity:

"We impose our own prejudices on the past and reinvent it as 'how it must have been' to conform with our outlook. To appeal to a modern audience, therefore, a medieval heroine in a book or film must be shown as having control over her own life. Alternatively, she must appear constantly fighting her oppressors. Male peasants must similarly include at least once plucky, Robin Hood-like character who leads the others in defying authority. The result is a reproduction of modern society draped in medieval clothing." 

It might be an interesting exercise to write a modern drama but insert one character with the (imagined) attitudes of somebody from the 23rd century. Presumably even the least demanding audience member would spot something amiss then. And how would they take to having their currently fashionable beliefs scorned as antediluvian and even toxic by some supercilious git from the future?

Of course, your tastes may vary. Looking for fiction or games set in the early 19th century, do you want Middlemarch and War & Peace -- or, alternatively, are you looking for Bridgerton? Taking an imaginative leap into another society, or just dressing-up in period costume? Now you know where I stand. Still, those Regency greatcoats are jolly tempting.

We were talking recently about alignment, and because I don't believe in those concepts I've never been very interested in heroes and villains, either in games or in fiction. The kind of fantasy stories I grew up with featured characters like Cugel, Elric, and Conan. No nursery-room ethical posturing for those guys. They did what they did for their own reasons. We could sympathize, even root for them and despise their foes, but there was never any suggestion of objective cosmic goodness.

I expect the same of player-characters in roleplaying games. Some have been very decent -- or have tried to be, as it's never easy doing good in a realistically complex world -- and some have been murderous and sought to justify it. The important thing is none of them were fairytale saints or pantomime villains. They acted from the motives that make real people do things.

That's why this post ("Why Most of my TTRPG Characters are Dislikeable") resonates with me. Personally, while I think likeability is not an important trait in a character, I don't set out to make my PCs dislikeable. I just want them to be interesting and feel genuine. Often in fiction I'm drawn to characters like Walter White, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, Zachary Smith and Vic Mackey. But I also like Spock, Kirk and McCoy. Steve Rogers too. And Robin (both of them) in Robin of Sherwood -- because Robin fights for justice without being "good" in a soppy children's story way, and the Sheriff is his and our adversary and definitely not a nice guy without being "evil". The drama benefits from those characters and that world feeling real, not nursemaided along by a partisan narrator.

It was a Victorian setting, and the player-characters had pursued a mad scientist to the top of the world. (There's something about mad scientists and the Arctic.) They trounced her hirelings, broke up her lab, put paid to her callous experiments, then one of the characters snapped. 'We'll never bring her to trial,' he said before giving her both barrels of his shotgun.

That summary execution might seem shocking, but I've been hardened by years of refereeing. We had one player-character whose thing was butchering 'witches' -- a term he seemingly applied to any woman with a scheme in the pre-industrial era. On Tekumel I've seen captives hurled in their hundreds into the fiery pits of sacrifice, and slaves slaughtered to pay a demon for a minor gift.

Most horrible of all (it still makes my flesh creep) was the time in Crossgate when the characters got hold of their longtime enemy Lord Belvoir, who had unwisely stopped at the manor house without his men. It was Twelfth Night, but what they did made Lavinia's fate in Titus Andronicus look tame. They truly got medieval on his ass -- but then, it's Legend, so 'medieval' is exactly right. Isaac Babel would have recognized it:

'I'll put it this way. With shooting you just get rid of the person. Shooting lets him off easy, and it lets you off easy too. With shooting you'll never get down to the soul -- where it is in somebody, how it shows itself. So I don't spare myself. More than once I've stamped on a foe for an hour or more. You see, I want to get to know what life is like, what it's really all about.'

As the referee, it's not my job to comment on the characters' deeds. Nothing should be out of bounds. Roleplaying, like art in general, should be free to go anywhere, and in refereeing I have to be like God, who never has anything to say when a child is raped or a man has his hands macheted off. After the game it's a different matter, and then I will sometimes confess that the PCs' moral attitudes give me a shudder. I regard capital punishment as barbaric and vigilantes as scum. Vigilantes who dress up their killings as justice are committing plain murder.

Naturally the players get prickly about that. They don't want to be thought of as murder hoboes. They see themselves as heroes -- and so they should. If you're in character, of course you think you're in the right. Hitler believed he was a good guy just as much as Gandhi did.


'I'm not the Red Skull,' one player retorted, 'I'm Judge Dredd.' If the judges of Mega-City One existed in real life, they'd be the goon squad of somebody like Ramzan Kadyrov, not stalwart defenders of civilized society. But let's face it, pretty much all cops in drama are rule-bending, violent, arbitrary, partial, unstable and dangerous. Stories have their own rules and (one of the big mistakes a beginning writer can make, this) likeability is overrated. Player-characters should be interesting, they don't have to be likeable -- at least, they don't have to be likeable to civilians in a comfortable 21st century democracy.

A murder hobo PC is boring. They'll shoot every NPC in the face and they do that because the player's imagination is too limited to see the NPCs as real people. But characters who wreak terrible violence because of their own sense of justice, however warped and self-righteous that may be, can be very interesting indeed. They're Bond, or Dredd, or the Punisher, or Philip Jennings. There's an inner contradiction that has to go somewhere, and the player is inhabiting the character thoroughly which means they're on an interesting journey too. Consider for example E M Forster's self-analysis of his time in Egypt:

'I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudice, but in ten months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pump-shitting [pissing] or eating or laughing or anythinging—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian towards the native. It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.'

Forster had found in himself a knee-jerk racism that horrified him. He didn't go so far as murdering anyone, of course, but it was nonetheless a darkness within that he came face to face with and, with his scrupulous honesty, confessed to. Roleplaying lets us do the same and come away knowing ourselves and being better people for it. Or so I hope of my more violently inclined players, anyway.

A while back I ran a few excerpts from The Mage of Dust and Bone, a fantasy novel set in the Fabled Lands world (well, sort of). I wrote the opening chapters for Jamie to continue with, the same process we used for The Wrong Side of the Galaxy, but in this case the thing refused to get up off the slab. Should've used AC instead of DC, I guess.

The lead character was Forge Burntholm, a young wizard, and the first part of the story had some flashbacks to his apprenticeship at Dweomer, which in the novel was not a university town but a crumbling fortress where a single Archmage taught a handful of students. The Fabled Lands literary agent wasn't happy that in those flashbacks I made Forge quite a bully. "He's too unlikeable," he complained. On that subject, I agree with this piece by Celia Walden:

“One of the tricks of the books,” says Anthony Horowitz, “is to make [James Bond] likeable.” I couldn’t agree less. As a philandering, cold-blooded killer, with – as Horowitz accepts – “unfortunate attitudes towards women, gays, Jews and foreigners” – Bond can and should never be made likeable.

My thinking with Mage ran something like this. Wizardry is all about power and force of will, so not addressing the abuse of power would have seemed like a cop-out. JK Rowling has already done the nice version of wizard school so I wanted to show Forge behaving badly in his mid-teens, more out of boredom and the urge to flex his magical muscle than out of malice. Then he is abruptly forced to face the consequences of his behaviour when some magic goes wrong in a very horrible way. The older Forge is already shaken by that experience. He's chastened. He's trying to be a better person - but people don't change overnight, so as the story unfolds he's still struggling with that change rather than suddenly turning into Ron Weasley.

When it comes to fiction, likeability is over-rated. I prefer the interesting characters myself, especially the outrageous ones. We all find Han more compelling than Luke, don't we? Check out this chapter from the novel and then have your say...

To round off our excerpt from The Mage of Dust and Bone, here's where Forge first sets off to study at Dweomer. I liked the idea of magic being about power, and power of course corrupts, which is where I was going with it. But the Fabled Lands agent (probably correctly) deemed that young readers want likeable characters. I find likeability is over-rated - and in any case Fabled Lands LLP hasn't got the resources to pay for this to get written - but just in case it should ever get completed and published, I've stuck to this flashback because it contains no real spoilers.