Kira Nerys

As I keep thinking about character, I keep coming back to Kira Nerys on Star Trek DS9.

She wasn't my favorite character. I was in love with Bashir and wanted to BE Dax, obviously! But Kira is one of the greatest examples of how to write a character of all time, so I wanted to talk about her in more depth.

Kira is a guerilla fighter at the end of a horrific war of occupation. As her enemy finally retreats, a new power steps in to keep the peace. She's understandably a little intense and she doesn't trust these new people, the Federation, any more than she trusted the Cardassians who just left. 

That is A LOT to have preloaded in a character. And we learn it instantly in the first episode, the first minute we meet Kira. We can tell from how she behaves that she's on a hair trigger at all times and has no patience with any softness or nonsense. She gets along with Odo because he was fair and neutral during the occupation. She doesn't like or trust Quark because he's a carpetbagger and war profiteer. 

Every character we write should always come preloaded with things like this. It doesn't have to be negative or painful, but it should be things that do not just define the person but determine how they behave on the day to day.

Sisko is set up beautifully the same way. The pilot to DS9 is an absolute master class in how to introduce characters and how to build them so that their past and present are fully part of everything they do. That work pays off every second of the show that follows. 

Look, I'm building a character who was completely neglected by absentee parents--not unusual for the time period--and raised by the various staff of the property where she grew up. That's going to inform everything she does. She knows a lot of uncommon things for a ten year old Edwardian girl. But she also DOESN'T know a lot of things that others take for granted. How does she feel when she sees parents with small children, cuddling them and cooing? I feel like she might act out in various ways. There are huge holes in her heart, for all the love and care she got from the cook and the groom and all. 

Her background informs everything she does in these stories. She will notice things I wouldn't. She won't notice things I would. Character HAS to include this kind of specificity or the people are blank slates.

I'll try to stay calm about Discovery, but the way those characters had NO backstory and NO traits makes me wild. I'd love to see the show bible. 

For example, writing Tilly as someone who's smart but acts ditsy. I want to know what would make someone that way. She lets things drop about how her mom wanted her to become an officer, but she never wanted that herself. Okay, that's interesting, but how does that make you talk too much and say inappropriate things and be ditsy and childish? 

The thing is, ditsy and childish aren't character traits. They're behaviors. All they gave her was behaviors. The same with Stametts being irritable and rude. Just behaviors. Everything I see in those characters with the exception of Burnham is just behaviors. 

A character should be a full and interesting and complex person with experience that formed them, because there is not one single human on earth or off it who isn't like that. The guy being crabby at the Walmart checkout isn't just being crabby. He got fired earlier that day because he was late to work because the medication he takes for the fused disks in his back made him oversleep, but if he doesn't take it, he won't sleep at all. He injured his back in a car accident avoiding a moose and its baby on the highway and went over an embankment. He's still glad he did it. But it has messed up his life. Every time he sees a mother and a baby, he's glad all over again. He sacrificed himself to save them. But he's also in a lot of pain. And now he's out of work.

Someone who's in pain and crabby about it is INFINITELY more interesting than someone who is just arbitrarily crabby, like Stametts.

Behaviors with no reason for them come across as nonsense. And it's not actually how people work. Someone who is acting like Tilly probably has profound insecurity and feels like she doesn't deserve to be there. Wouldn't that have been a great story to give her? She's brilliant but insecure? She was always the shy one and so people thought she was dumb, so she doubted herself. Fill out that character in interesting ways. But no, when we meet her, she says she's going to be a captain one day. She sounds ambitious. We have no reason not to believe she IS ambitious since we just met her. So her ditsy thing is just jarring--and profoundly unprofessional. Does she really not know how to act on the bridge? Does she actually not have the ability to control what comes out of her mouth??? Those things don't fit with someone ambitious. Honestly I can't imagine anyone graduating from the Academy without the ability to control herself to that degree.

Later (three whole seasons later) we find out that she never wanted to be a captain for herself. It was her mother's ambition for her. But instead of being a satisfying cap to make sense of this character, it means at best that she was self-sabotaging all that time. But we had no way to know that. She just came across as an actual idiot who could not shut up. See how none of the pieces fit together? It was just garbled nonsense, in terms of character. Character has to fit together in a sensible way.

Let alone the incredibly stupid arc where she, an engineering ensign, literally an unqualified person, was made captain for literally no reason at all. I can't even talk about how moronic that was.

A sensible and coherent backstory that immediately informs their every action is so important that it needs to be a rule for every character written. When a character is faced with a choice, what do they do? We only know because we've build in their past and their conflicts and their goals. If we can't tell, or they could do literally anything, then that's a huge problem. 

You don't even need to box yourself in. You can say, "X person has PTSD from their time in Y," without specifying what happened or where or how long or even how long ago it was. Even that helps tell me which way they will react in a crisis.

A former Boston police officer and a mid-career history professor are going to have different attitudes to that drunk and distraught but incoherent 20 year old boy asking them for help. So is a mom with two kids waiting for her at home. So is someone whose teen ran away from home years ago and they've never heard from them since. So is Kira Nerys. I have no idea what Tilly would do because she's not a character. There was an actor with some behaviors. She was an appealing actor so we liked the character. But there's no earthly way to know which way she would jump. 

I really love how there's so much complexity and energy tied up in Kira Nerys and her character. She's angry, she's energetic, she'll tell you to your face if she thinks you're an idiot. She's short-tempered, she's kind, she's religious and devoted to her beliefs. She's utterly capable and fierce. Such a great character. And you know all this in the pilot episode!