Week 10: Characters

Most of the time when you encounter a character on television its the same old soap characters and their unbelievable storylines where nobody is ever happy. They have character names but they are just people and thus do not really help you to connect unless you are going through the same as them. Drama series and the like will throw interesting characters at you until you drown in them. Looking at Heroes which just ended recently had so many characters that you followed and could connect with throughout the story. You cared when characters had bad things happen to them and potentially risked their very being, especially half way through upon discovering that Peter Petrelli was the one who went nuclear and destoryed half the city. His urgency to pull all the other heroes together and formulate a plan, got you hoping he would find a way to prevent the tradegy. Then finding out that is impossible and that the city still explodes is a massive shock to
 the viewer.

In one of the last books I read, Akiras brother is put into a coma while playing a game and the story begins about 10 minutes before he falls under. The rest of the story after that details how Akira struggles with her real life as she gets bullied by the Tennis Team and the trounament thereafter and when she plays as BlackRose inside the game to find out what could put someone into a coma. Most of the time while in the game, you can feel Akiras urgency to discover the darkest 
part of the game while helping her friends with their problems, such as Kite. Her real life however is no cakewalk due to her family falling apart after her brother didn't
 wake up so she has to hold the family together and look after her other baby. It is compelling to
follow Akira to see if she suceeds or what part of her life will go wrong next.

In both of these cases, the characters befall a hardship and then more weigh them down as the story goes along. With the constant misfortunes it is easier for the viewer to pick up on the integrity of the character especially if they can no longer cope with the situation and break down. To be honest, most links with a character are based upon at least one bad thing happening to them. However this is quite difficult if a character doesnt speak such as Link or Mario which
makes it difficult to understand them and their full characters.

In conclusion, it is required for a story to put certain strains on characters and place them in certain situations for the reader/viewer/gamer to understand what they would do and what type of person they are. Without these events, characters are pretty two-dimensional like those Soap 'characters'.