Another bit of storycraft commentary up at Noble Cobra Magazine. This time discussing some thoughts I had about heroic or righteous characters doing ‘mean’ or off-color things in fiction: pranks, unwanted jokes, nasty tricks, that sort of thing, and how it can be used for characterization purposes (and yes, more Fruits Basket, since that’s on my mind).

Even the most righteous of characters has a right to be a little mean or off-color sometimes.

There is a memorable incident in Owen Wister’s The Virginian in which the titular cowboy, who is at core a rigorously righteous character, is attending a dance for the frontier community of the Wyoming territory. The infant children of the attendees are safely snoozing away in a side room while the adults enjoy the festivities, and through a combination of alcohol and frustrated pride (the pretty new school marm doesn’t want to dance with him), the Virginian and a companion get the idea to swap the babies’ jackets and bonnets around to confuse their identities. The result, as intended, is that when the parents come to take them home, they all end up with the wrong little bundles of joy. A fact that isn’t discovered until the next morning.

Naturally, this prompts a massive panic among the parental classes and a frantic re-convening of the guests to sort it out (finally resulting in a closed-door scientific investigation by the mothers from which the men are strictly excluded).

It is only after everything is settled and the men of the community are beginning to conceal smiles that the Virginian owns up to the prank. There wasn’t really any purpose or point behind it, it was ultimately just for his own amusement. He apologizes, and with everything is settled and the worry over, quite a few people end up laughing about it and he’s so forthright that no one has the heart to be too angry with him.

On paper, it’s rather cruel and reckless (and that’s how most characters who aren’t present regard it). But it’s also very funny and a bit of a shot at the sometimes overly-serious way the frontier women take family life: a reminder that, even with more women flowing in, this is still the West where hard and fast rules of polite society don’t always apply.

It’s a bit of a lost art in storytelling to let your heroic characters do things that are a little mean, a little off-color. To let them push a little beyond the line. These days it sometimes seems to me as if the cast of the average show or movie are the ‘What to Do’ side of a ‘Do / Don’t’ illustration; you can crack jokes, break the rules, and so on, but don’t you dare do anything uncouth or that the best people might consider offensive. The only time you can do that is as a mark of your essential wrongness, the need to grow. Never as a character trait, or just because you wanted to, at least not if you want to remain the good guy (like, I remember the bit in Arrested Development where an old lady making a mildly racist comment was enough to mark her as deserving of death, such is how rigidly serious we take our unwritten codes of conduct).

Or take another example, this one from the manga and anime Fruits Basket...

Read the rest here.