: Re: Can ‘Stupid’ Characters Make Plot Narratives Memorable? Characters in movies ‘28 Days Later’, ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ made terrible impulsive choices that cost

@Megan928

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I would say there always is a way to make your plot slightly more logical than stretching the limits of human behaviour. Forcing your characters to make very obvious and foreseeable mistakes without being under pressure makes your story somewhat forced an unnatural, which isn't exactly a bad thing depending on what you are going for (for example, a highly symbolic story could benefit from exploiting its somewhat surrealistic nature with unnatural behaviour), but for most stories, it will just look dumb. The rest of the story resulting from that scene may be fascinating, but that doesn't make the scene less bad, and I think you should look for alternative excuses for your story if you want it to be perfect.

People do crumble under stress. We have seen it happen many times. Sometimes security protocols are badly designed, and we have seen it happen many times. Hell, sometimes people are simply careless and make mistakes like the ones you have mentioned, out of lazyness or even arrogance. The main difference here is nobody wants to hear about the dumbass who didn't put on the hazmat suit because he though he was too hard for that puny giant supermurderretrovirus that should have never been engineered in the first place (which again, we did in real life, with insufficient security measures, because we humans are idiots); these people are real, but frustrating, and more often than not, people don't really like being frustrated in fiction by the same kind of idiots who frustrate them on a daily basis.

Curiously, we often say these stupid characters are cheap plot devices to further the story, and that they have been put there by the author as an unrealistic excuse to drive the story forward, but truth is some of the most dramatic arcs in human story have been exactly that, as if we held fictional characters to higher standards of realism than real people! Ironic, isn't it?

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