Fiction is disappointing in its portrayal of…people’s weirdness. Just how weird people really are in real life.
So many books have all their characters be incredibly normal and I’m like ????? You guys can go outside and not run into someone who is even slightly strange? Or act like “quirks” are only for characters who are explicitly supposed to be eccentric instead of just…people being people.
like, my neighbor sunbathes in his driveway in his underwear and builds coffins in his spare time. My OTHER neighbor just sets things on fire whenever he needs to relax so at random times he’ll be out burning his deck furniture or something. I knew a guy in high school who woke up every morning at 3am and could lip sync flawlessly to every veggietales song. I knew a girl who collected hand sanitizer and wore bright, glittery green eyesore alligator earrings after she got her ears pierced. our family friend back in Tennessee owns six pugs and an unbridled pug obsession. My brother (13) aspires to be a hobo and calls himself Moped the Cheapskate. My grandma reads ya novels (she loved six of crows btw), determined that she was a ravenclaw through the internet, is responsible for me learning my first curse word, and flips off trump when she’s watching him on TV. one of my high school friends was a conspiracy theorist who did intense research about chemtrails. a member of my squad when I was like 14 was referred to by us only as Poodle. the guy who taught my public speaking class in high school moderated a doomsday prepper forum and would talk wistfully about how he would like a bunker. I used to work out with a guy who worshiped Thor smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. today my best friend literally just ate dirt while we were hanging out and I can only be just like “whatever, he eats leaves, the little packets that say do not eat, and food off the floor of restaurants, how could a little dirt hurt him?” because that’s just what he does he just…eats things
The sad thing is that almost everyone I know would be The Weird One if they were part of the cast of a book?? But it isnt weird to be weird or eccentric or the opposite of normal. people are just…that way. books drop any somewhat unusual quality as a marker that a person is “eccentric” and I promise you can’t make your characters too weird
Because I write down people that I meet and hear of: my dad met a lady at his work who claimed to be psychic and talked at length about how ghosts would watch her shower (“I hope you like what you’re seeing!” she would tell them) and about the ghost-seeing party she was planning. He talked to a woman who was a sonographer and who had an enormous tattoo of a dragon all the way up her leg and thigh. “Organs move. Babies don’t,” was her wisdom. He met a guy with a phobia of glitter. People are weird. There’s no excuse to make stock characters and people who are average and without quirks. To me it just makes them seem undeveloped because EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING.
People are just weird. let them be weird pls
