It’s hard to express to someone else exactly what problem I have with what you just wrote but I will try…
It shouldn’t be left up to the audience to reason out or create theories to explain/support a character’s actions. It’s a failure of the writers to communicate their intentions if they’re living it so open to interpretation. It’s not a question of making a character ambiguous because that would still require communicating that that character is ambiguous.
And of course, your reason/explanation is fundamentally an apologia of sorts and intrinsically, it is flawed: because it’s not so much something from canon, as a hypothesis a certain section of the audience makes to align with what they think canon should portray, it can be challenged by elements within the same canon. For example, “what's the point? Why show worry and concern? It wouldn't change anything. It would be useless” pretty much devolves back to the old argument of why Mai is moved to save Zuko in a way she wasn’t moved to save Tom-Tom. The “It would just stress her out and annoy her companions and make Azula dislike her” contradicts the moments in the story where Mai has been nonchalant to the point of insolence to Azula.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 08:49 am (UTC)It shouldn’t be left up to the audience to reason out or create theories to explain/support a character’s actions. It’s a failure of the writers to communicate their intentions if they’re living it so open to interpretation. It’s not a question of making a character ambiguous because that would still require communicating that that character is ambiguous.
And of course, your reason/explanation is fundamentally an apologia of sorts and intrinsically, it is flawed: because it’s not so much something from canon, as a hypothesis a certain section of the audience makes to align with what they think canon should portray, it can be challenged by elements within the same canon. For example, “what's the point? Why show worry and concern? It wouldn't change anything. It would be useless” pretty much devolves back to the old argument of why Mai is moved to save Zuko in a way she wasn’t moved to save Tom-Tom. The “It would just stress her out and annoy her companions and make Azula dislike her” contradicts the moments in the story where Mai has been nonchalant to the point of insolence to Azula.