Today, I explain why it’s not bad writing for characters to make horrible decisions.
This is the Cronin Theory of Pop Culture, a collection of positions I’ve collected over the years that I think hold pretty true.
People are infuriated about the storyline on the FOX medical drama, Doc (about a brilliant doctor, Amy, whose personal life fell apart after the death of her young son. She then was in a car accident that erased all of her memories of the past eight years, including the death of her son), where a new student doctor, Hannah, is trying to destroy Amy’s life with her hacker brother because they wrongly blame Amy for ruining their father’s life, leading to him dying by suicide.
This is obviously a moronic decision on their part (especially since Amy didn’t actually get their father fired, his own erratic behavior did the job, but Amy’s missing memories, the whole hook of the TV series, mean that she doesn’t remember WHY their father left the job, and it was all covered up at the time, so there’s no paper trail).
But people make moronic decisions ALL THE TIME.
Yes, Hannah and her brother are spiteful idiots, and it is infuriating watching them fuck shit up for Amy and her friends, but people can sometimes be, you know, infuriating.
I don’t think Hannah and her brother are written poorly, they’re just destructive morons. So long as the show keeps playing them that way (in other words, Hannah can NOT have a redemption arc), then I think that’s fair enough.
People, though, way too often chalk up stupid decisions by characters as bad writing, and I think that’s unfair. Now, there’s stupid decisions and characters doing things that no one would ever do just for the sake of drama. The LATTER is where bad writing comes into play. When a character who ISN’T an idiot does something idiotic just to further the plot, THAT’s bad writing.
Or when a character does something wildly out of character at JUST the right time to cause drama, THAT’S bad writing.
But some new character acting like an idiot is fair enough, as we don’t know that she’s anything BUT an idiot. Hannah is a destructive fool, but that’s her character as far as we know it (likely colored by her devastation over her father’s destructive end), so that’s fine to me.
Although, okay, fair enough, I’m with you all in that I think this story has probably run its course by now, and they need to start wrapping it up.
It’s not like people in the real world never make bad decisions. I can understand trying to hold fiction as escapism to a higher standard, but you’re absolutely right: it’s not bad writing when a fictional character does it.