Anomalous Characters: Understanding Good and Evil Shifts

Anomalous characters can cause spectators to ‘split’ their thoughts of that character based on the actions of that character. In narratives with anomalous characters, writers use a technique whereby they will show a good trait of an antagonist first, misleading the spectator into believing that the character is morally good before they show the character doing something wrong. This causes conflict in the viewer, a sort of splitting where the spectator will try to reason why the character they saw as good is now evil and perhaps even try to motivate as to why the character has taken such action.

The same situation can also be reversed. A character might be perceived as cruel, cold and mean in the beginning until the spectator gains an understanding

In his book, he addresses the questions of “What makes a person at two different times one and the same person? What is necessarily involved in the continued existence of each person over time?” (Parfit 1984:202)

These concepts suggest that an audience member is able to become a different person while viewing a show and that this causes the viewer to prefer a certain character over another, or even to change the way they perceive a character in that moment. This raises questions about how spectators engage with certain characters and highlights the possibility that while one character is being experienced, the spectator may become someone unlike him/herself. The concept that Parfit highlights is that a spectator is able to change how he/she would usually feel in that one moment while they are experiencing a particular situation through a character by perhaps discovering that they are more like one character than they had previously thought or fantasising about being in that particular situation. Exploring the notion of what it would be like to be another person in that moment making those decisions and undertaking those

Often people who become so engrossed in a character that they begin to believe the character is real, are seen as foolish because the viewer should be able to separate themselves from fictional characters. However, if the fictional world and characters are so convincing that they are able to convince viewers that characters are real, it begs the question of how deeply do people today engage with characters?

Previous generations knew that fictional characters such as Superman were fictional and that rather than believing that a man could fly, they believed in his principles and moral compass. That is not the case with some characters today. In popular series in society today, some viewers of shows feel a deep hatred or disdain towards the actor of a certain character from a movie or show, and this dislike manifests in things such as letters of hate and bullying on social networks. This behavior suggests that the spectator cannot establish the difference between character identity and a