Part 2: Creating a Character
Part 2
a. Abandoning stereotypes
If you’ve made it this far, it’s probably because you want to write one or more characters who are connected to the environment.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, 2011
Congratulations, you’ve just stepped into a wonderful creative realm—one that’s also a minefield, where biases, clichés and narrative constraints are just waiting for an opportunity to pop into our heads.
Practical leads
Here’s a little exercise. Think of one of your projects. Fill in this quiz. Don’t worry, nobody’s watching.
If you’ve ticked all the boxes: don’t panic. It's the case for most of today's fiction
⚠ Warning: glamorization and heroization
The problem is that, whatever the reasons behind this avoidance strategy, it can easily lead to the glamorisation and heroisation of characters who exacerbate these issues:
BIASES/RISKS
Characters whose behaviour and speech are overwhelmingly ecocidal, yet are glamorised and heroised
Conspiracy theorists who are glamorised and heroised
Characters who behave in predatory ways (towards natural resources, animals, women, etc.) are glamorised and heroised
A character’s masculinity is associated with their consumption of oil or red meat
Warning, cliché:
Eco-friend?
Building a character connected to environmental issues doesn’t mean ‘creating an eco-warrior’ (the word ‘eco-warrior’ is, incidentally, so loaded with connotations that it’s often best avoided – we’ll come back to that later). It simply means that one or more of their connections to the environment feature in the plot. Yet, for most characters in our fiction, these connections simply don’t exist.
Warning, cliché:
A telling example that crops up frequently in projects pitched to broadcasters (according to the broadcasters themselves): a procedural series featuring an unlikely police duo – a gruff, older white male ‘boomer’ cop paired with a young, idealistic and modern female officer. Between interrogations or the discovery of bodies, in light-hearted scenes, she makes comments to him about the greenhouse gas emissions caused by intensive cattle farming whenever he eats red meat. He replies: ‘Oh, you’re getting on my nerves, just let me have my barbecue.’ You don’t need a PhD in cognitive science to realise that even if a character with environmental awareness appears, the audience’s sympathies will tend to lie with the gruff old cop.
In a world where environmental issues are incredibly anxiety-inducing, there’s often a sense of ‘relief’ in ridiculing and caricaturing characters with an environmental conscience… and turning them into figures who provoke rejection.
Here is a list of the most common pitfalls, along with practical ways to avoid them.
Pitfalls
Possible solutions
Clichés, caricatures, stereotypes
Examples of counter-roles
A disengaged hippie with an unrealistic outlook
A character who has adopted a lifestyle and behaviours that reveal their sensibility and their views, but without expressing them
Idealistic and naïve
A character who takes action, with pragmatic environmental awareness
Sinister
A funny and cheerful character
A rigid, radical and stressful character
A character who is radical in their lifestyle but not proselytising, who does not comment on on their lifestyle, serene
Moralising
A character who acts but says nothing
Desperate
A calm and cheerful person, both in their environmental awareness and their actions
Privileged, detached / aloof elite
A middle-class and working-class
Anti-progress (back to candlelight)
A sensitive character who nevertheless lives a contemporary daily life (telephone, etc.)
Violent
A character who suffers violence (more realistic)
Essentialisation
Complexity
One-dimensional characterisation
Just like the ‘TV gay’ of the 2000s, the environmentally conscious character of the 2020s is reduced to this single trait. Whenever they open their mouth, it’s to say something eco-friendly. Whenever they do something, it’s eco-friendly.
Rich characterisation
Being environmentally conscious doesn’t mean you can’t talk about anything else, have other passions or other goals.
Just one character:
Just like the ‘TV gay’ of the 2000s, the environmentally conscious character is often the only one in the story to be so, because ‘two is too many’. This prevents any reflection on the fact that different sensibilities can coexist, and even conflict. When a character is the only one in the story who cares about environmental issues, they are reduced to this single characterisation. They become nothing more than a militant and intellectual mouthpiece.
When environmentalism is embodied by a ‘conscious’ character who bears the full moral weight of the narrative, they do the work that the rest of the film fails to do. This character is there to point out what is wrong, to highlight the inconsistencies, to articulate the urgency. The more he speaks, the more the rest of the narrative can continue as before. Ecology then becomes a peripheral discourse.
Several characters:
Sensitive to environmental issues, with different profiles that set them apart from one another:
Not concerned with the same issues
Different behaviours
Different lifestyles
Different ambivalences
Do not share the same views on solutions
Do not share the same views on the methods for reaching solutions
Here, highlight the plurality of legitimate perspectives.
Militant purity
The character acts virtuously at all times, on every level, and makes no concessions.
In short, they are beyond reproach.
It is impossible to identify with him. He encourages everyone to adopt his radical stance.
Ambivalence and contradiction
Show ambivalence.
One can be environmentally conscious and still fly, campaign against pesticides and feed your cat kibble made from overfished fish.
Making radicalism appealing
A character can adopt a radical lifestyle without adopting a patronising tone. They can simply show that they have gained a sense of calm and practical skills as a result.
Point to note: radicalism is not violence.
Individualism
The collective
Contemporary fiction loves the lone hero.
A hero or heroine who single-handedly resolves all the problems and can rely only on themselves to get out of perilous situations.
The fight for the environment also relies on collective action, and this collective spirit can be a powerful dramatic force.
Teams, solidarity, organised groups, and intergenerational alliances…
A character who focuses their efforts on making individual changes in their daily life, without questioning how the world works.
Not settling for individual responsibility and highlighting the systemic aspect
When responsibility is pinpointed (industrial, political…) and environmental issues become a shared conflict, condition or constraint, the narrative ceases to be prescriptive.
The geek who saves the world thanks to a discovery that will solve everything (such as clen energy).
Collaborative efforts where skills complement one another.
b. Audience engagement to a character
How can we be sure that a character will be perceived positively or negatively by the audience? We cannot be sure. No character will ever elicit 100% support.
However, cognitive science has identified the following key factors that influence audience engagement.
The importance of values
Did you know?
Our beliefs
Our beliefs are driven not only by the truth, but also by our need for social and identity coherence. And what forges a social and identity fabric is, above all, values. Even more so than age or gender.
Aligning with the character’s values
For a viewer to buy into a message (a behaviour, a norm, etc.), they must first buy into the character who embodies that norm – the messenger.
All behavioural studies prove this: we are more receptive to a message conveyed by someone who shares our values.
Schwartz’s Wheel of Values helps to visualise the different families of human values.
A message will therefore not resonate with the same audience depending on whether it is conveyed by a scientist, an artist, a member of the armed forces or an elected representative.
Linking environmental issues to national security concerns, for example, can be far more convincing to some people than discussing them in terms of protecting life.
Schwartz’s Wheel of Values
Diversifying the values of environmentally conscious characters
To have an impact, there must be a ‘match’ between the values embodied by a character and those of the audience. If environmental issues are only championed by characters associated with a single set of values, the message will reach only a fraction of the audience.
Yet this is currently the case in our narrative fiction. Sensitivity to environmental issues is almost always associated with character types who share the same values. This means that the message will only be received by a small proportion of viewers.
Warning, cliché:
Hippies?
Characters who are environmentally conscious are not just those who are inclined towards kindness and universalism (otherwise known as hippies).
Warning, cliché:
Our values evolve
Our values, like those of our characters, are not set in stone.
Certain events or states of mind can push us towards one set of values or another.
Anxiety, for example, or severe mental exhaustion, can push us towards values of order and security.
Practical leads
→ Use Schwartz’s Wheel of Values to associate environmental awareness with characters whose values do not fit the environmentalist stereotype, to avoid limiting the benefits of adopting different behaviours to a particular group of people.
📌 Character ideas
Building empathy
Empathy vs sympathy
We’re not telling you anything new here: the confusion between these two terms is widespread and also rather annoying, as it’s possible to feel empathy for unsympathetic characters – and vice versa.
In practical terms, sympathy is a rational endorsement. A character who is funny, heroic, admired by others, possesses a particular skill, has a moving backstory, or is the victim of injustice will often be someone we feel sympathy for.
Empathy, on the other hand, is much more difficult to understand and master. It comes from a mix of factors, ranging from physical appearance (childlike features, thick hair, etc.) to characteristics (clumsiness, inconsistency, subversiveness), and sometimes involving familiar everyday situations (struggling to assemble a piece of furniture). The anti-hero, for example, elicits a great deal of empathy (Homer Simpson).
In short, a character who evokes empathy is one who resembles us, but is just a little bit better (except for Homer Simpson).
Conversely, a perfect character cannot evoke empathy, as we cannot identify with the level of sacrifice they make.
And of course, forget about the naysayers and the preachy types. They’re empathy-killers.
In terms of emotional engagement, empathy is more powerful than sympathy. A character for whom we feel empathy can take us to the edge of our Overton window and push it further. It is therefore an essential tool for us.
⚠ Warning:
The pitfall of pity
Empathy is not pity. If our character has to struggle to elicit empathy, we must never simply lay out their problems, but show them actively fighting and achieving some victories. They must also fight to retain their dignity.
If the character remains passive and merely endures, we shift from empathy to pity, therefore identification and engagement disappear. The protagonist becomes merely a victim and no longer a role model.
Did you know?
Empathy
Empathy is the phenomenon of suffering with an unsympathetic character whose suffering we understand, which triggers empathy.
See for example Jean Valjean as a thief at the beginning of Les Misérables, King Lear whom the fear of being betrayed isolates, Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale who has always been humiliated in her relationships…
Be careful with your choice of words!
Certain words provoke rejection: ‘climate’, ‘global warming’, ‘environment’, ‘ecology’, ‘activist’, ‘environmental struggle’, ‘CO2’, ‘petrol car’, ‘emissions reduction’…
An experiment conducted by Jean-François Bonnefond involved presenting articles on global warming to staunch climate sceptics. The same articles were then ‘stripped’ of certain words: ‘ecology’, ‘environment’, ‘global warming’, ‘climate’, ‘vegetarianism’. The result: the articles were accepted much more widely.
(This applies to our scripts, our dialogues, but also… to our sales materials, editor’s note)
Subversive stance > mainstream stance
In fiction, outsiders elicit empathy. Clumsiness and awkwardness are endearing. The viewer will naturally want to support a character who is rejected. Thus, a character whose speech, behaviour or opinions are perceived as minority or subversive (in relation to those around them, the political context, etc.) will always generate more support than the opposite.
Consequently, framing a love of the environment and the behaviours that go with it as subversive will always be more powerful than constant messaging.
If we return to the example mentioned above of the old policeman and the young vegetarian policewoman, we can see just how much all the elements in place work against the environmental message. It comes across as moralising and prescriptive, with environmental awareness portrayed as a deprivation. The old policeman, on the other hand, is on the side of subversion and speaking his mind.
c. Highlighting the ambivalences
A character might take public transport on a Saturday and fly on a Sunday. They might weep over a beached whale yet ride an old petrol scooter without a second thought. They might refuse to use pesticides in their vegetable patch yet buy Spanish strawberries in January.
These are everyday attitudes, consistent from the perspective of the person experiencing them, yet contradictory from the perspective of an outside observer.
This cognitive dissonance is the most fertile ground for drama, precisely because it is not a moral failing but an ordinary human condition.
Ambivalence, hypocrisy or greenwashing?
Not all contradictions are equal. Whilst most illustrate ambivalence or internal conflicts that reflect the complexity of our times, others, on the other hand, amount to mere hypocrisy or greenwashing and deserve to be treated as such.
Self-righteous characters – those who make sensitive statements but shy away from action as soon as the cost becomes too high for their liking, and those who boast about ordering a vegetarian meal on a first-class flight from Paris to Tokyo – also deserve to be (bluntly) exposed.
Practical leads
Whilst giving ammunition to those who criticise environmentalists may seem counter-intuitive, we are still entitled to poke fun at contradictory environmentalists. However, to avoid essentialisation, balance these negative figures with other positive, environmentally conscious characters within the same narrative.
d. The antagonists
Antagonists, too, deserve a fair and realistic portrayal. Caricaturing these characters immediately highlights the author’s intent. This can lead to the rejection of an entire work. They must therefore be developed with the same care and rigour as the protagonists.
Everything stated above applies equally to antagonists, otherwise the author’s message risks being perceived as black-and-white and didactic.
In practical terms, this simply means that we must be able to see a complete idiot on a bike on screen.
⚠ Warning:
Reducing the debate to a generational conflict
Older people are at least as eco-conscious as everyone else! A study by Parlons Climat shows that older people are, in fact, far from lagging behind when it comes to environmental issues ;)
e. Transformational character arcs: writing change
Change is now!
Normalising characters who evolve, who change their perspectives or attitudes, is also useful to depolarise issues. Serial storytelling is particularly well-suited to this, as it allows these developments to unfold over time. You don’t need to be born with certain values to adopt them. Portraying someone who changes gradually and reaps the benefits can make change seem desirable and credible. Portraying change can have a real impact, far more powerful than a character who is committed but remains static in their opinions and values.
The stages of change:
Prochaska and Di Clemente’s Circle: the path to change
Pre-contemplation
No intention to change behavior
Relapse
Back to old habits
Contemplation
Awareness of the problem
Maintenance
Maintaining new habits
Preparation
Intention to take action to change behavior
Action
Implementing actions to change behavior