salarta

One of the biggest problems I encounter when discussing fiction online with other people can be summed up as “lack of imagination.”

I have seen many cases of people arguing against complaints as if the way the story or character was written is the only way it could have happened. As if there were no other options.

For example, how Resident Evil 5 treated Jill Valentine. The story builds toward a point where Jill is treated like she’s “not good enough” to be Chris’ partner anymore, and that she should be “replaced” by Sheva. The impetus for this suggestion? That Jill was abducted, her body was used against her wishes to create a biohazard, and then she was controlled with drugs to be Wesker’s puppet that served his goal and killed her own allies. When she’s saved, she’s written as too weak from the P-30 drug to join Chris and Sheva to get some justice for the abuse and horror she endured.

Fans of that game, possibly of Chris, answered by claiming the writers had no control over how P-30 would affect Jill. P-30 was never part of the franchise until RE5. The writers had total control over how it would affect Jill. They could’ve said she’ll be weak 24 hours later, after the game’s ending, for example. But nope. Fans couldn’t imagine P-30 behaving any way other than the writers said it did.

Another case is characters and acceptance or lack of acceptance of them. A lot of people go around saying “X character sucks” or “Y character needs to be killed off.” Again, this amounts to lack of imagination. They see only the writing they’ve been exposed to, and they can’t see any other way to write the character. When complaining about Dreamer’s death on Gifted, I ran into a few people who insisted she “sucked.” Back in 2009, when I first discovered Polaris, I ran into someone who said Polaris should stay in space and get tossed into space limbo to “keep her away from characters that matter.”

Lack of imagination even causes problems in well-meaning ways. There are ways Polaris has been written that get praised because bits and pieces of that writing are good. If it’s the only writing of her out there, or the best writing of her out there, then certain people will praise it highly and blow off complaints about the bad parts. A lot of those people are limiting their view to what’s in front of them. They’re not seeing how much better Polaris could be written, or why accepting certain bad things just cause there’s some good in there can actually be bad for Lorna overall.

There are full-blown haters out there, and people who take the philosophy of “the writer is always right,” and so many other groupings. But to me, it’s the people who aren’t able to imagine something better that can cause the most problems. Even when it’s good intentions, those good intentions can lead to a writer not trying to do any better cause they think what they’re doing is “the best” or “good enough.” It can lead to people who don’t like a character thinking there’s no possible way the character could be worth checking out. Simply accepting what’s put out there and not critically thinking about it leads to character decay.

The importance of imagination is also why I love people making fanart, fanfic, cosplay, etc. They’re people who actively try to imagine what more can be done beyond what official work says.