I respect that but fantasy is my genre of choice. So in terms of fiction, the unreal will always have my heart.
No need to apogolize. It is easy to recognise an attack. When someone puts extra work to understanding, he/she is not attacking. When someone puts extra work to misundersanding he/she is attacking. Extra effort to misunderstanding is sure sign of bad will even if it is under camoflauge. (And quite often camoflauge helps you to recognise an attack. For instance narcissistic personality disorder has some traits that you can learn to see. And some kinds of masking are very common. Projections, proxys...) You put effort to understanding, not misunderstanding. You ask as if characters were fixed. I can't understand this kind of question. Every character can have a place in some story. Maybe this, but that. Maybe on as this arch type but that... All characters are worth of investment, not always but sometmes, not everywhere but somewhere... You are casting your characters to your story. The better you do your casting, the better the story will be.
I appreciate that. I mostly craft my stories through intuition as opposed to an analytical understanding of storytelling. But I feel I've reached the point where I should try and increase the latter. I asked with characters in mind who I would argue are developed, but their behavior and story/plot are somehow unworthy of my investment. For instance, I've never found apathetic and passive characters—no matter how developed they are—to be worth my investment unless the author forces them through significant conflict, which ultimately changes them. I also thought of characters who had earned my investment early on, but through their behaviors, severed that attachment. My point being: underdeveloped characters are one way to fail to earn the readers investment, but not the only way. And I wasn't sure if you agreed with that or not?
