I was re-reading “The Power of Myth”, a book containing the transcripts of conversations/interviews between Bill Moyers (a prominent journalist) and John Campbell (a recognized authority on myths and mythical symbolism) at Skywalker Ranch back in 1985 and 1986.

In it, Campbell made the comment that “… the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting …. It is the imperfections that are loveable.” And I will add, that it is those imperfections that make the human being knowable.

Many years ago, I was a semi-addict to the pleasures of the mucks (online role-playing entirely through texting) and was to be found almost nightly on Tapestries. Many was the night that stretched into the dawn hours with me spent typing feverishly as I and someone (or someones) else in some part of the real world as we played our characters together in a shared imaginary world entirely through the written word.

One of the occurrences that occasionally happened in role-playing was when you came across a character who no matter what your character engaged in some form of “conflict” with, no matter your character realistically did, always managed (through his player) to dodge the sucker punch, know that his drink was drugged, or somehow knew that there was a monster behind the about-to-be opened closet door and so was never played as being caught off guard. This was called “power playing” and was roundly considered very poor role-playing.

In clicking through today’s submissions here on Fur Affinity, I happily was directed to a hitherto unknown artist’s page where I found a lively interesting “world” of characters. I always enjoy seeing character reference sheets, since it is fun to see how other artists visually present their characters. This artist (like most other artists here) presented a list of the character’s physical features (height, weight, eye color, etc.) and a thumbnail of the character’s likes & dislikes.

I noticed that almost all characters that appear in the images on these character sheets, in those lists of their physical features and likes & dislikes, are nearly all perfect; a super “hero” of sorts. Physical specimens directly out of bodybuilding magazines, their “bits” immodestly above average, and the calm self-assurance displayed in school or gym shower rooms only by the most feature-lucky.

Now I am not sounding a call for “gritty realism” cause we all get that every day, and most of us (including me) are not worthy of having a character sheet of what we look like sans clothing worth any artist's graphic depiction.

“Real” characters, or characters whose creators want to be accepted by an audience as being “real”, usually have some imperfections, flaws or weaknesses. Superman had Kryptonite, Iron Man (up until recently) had the palladium that was powering his armored suit slowly killing him, and most other super heroes had the vulnerability of their secret identity to worry about. Incidentally, did you notice how Tony Stark (and the screenwriter) shot that old cliché down when Tony publicly announced, “I am Iron Man”?

Therefore, I would like to see two other entries in artist’s listings of their character’s features on their reference sheets.

“Imperfection/flaw in character that the character is aware of“,

and

“Imperfection/flaw in character that everyone else is aware of”.