Good
gad. You know, things happen to people who have had happy endings. Sometimes even dramatic things. You don't have to be betrayed by everyone around you and live out of a cardboard box and be going to therapy forty times a week to be a main character in an interesting plotline. And then these beacons of literary
brilliance wonder why fiction is saturated with wangst, unresolved issues that could be ended in an hour if the characters just got hit with a bucket of icewater, and pointless character drama.
That's what you're preaching as the formula to literary success, dunces.*
grumble* You know, Cori Falls's fics collapsed when she went off into WRH happyland, but that's because she had no plot
other than character drama. Laurell K. Hamilton derailed her books into nothing
but character drama, which is why everything has been stun-locked in sexwangstsex for the last dozen books or so. And
Draco Veritas was the absolute worst Draco Trilogy fic because Voldemort's grand plan was
LITERALLY TO CAUSE HARRY/HERMIONE RELATIONSHIP DRAMA. NO, I WILL NEVER GET OVER THAT.Look, there's nothing wrong with character drama. It works! It can be good! But talking as though it's
the only plot driver possible is utterly ridiculous. Even freaking
creature!Harry fics off of fanfiction.net know better than that. "Hi. You have now been turned into a vaguely French lump of hair and effeminate sex appeal. Go forth and wallow in the heaps of gold in Black Vault #255 for a while, then get down to business."
Sure, characters can struggle because they're overcoming their own weaknesses. They can also struggle because they're getting the kitchen sink thrown at them, and even the most untouchable, centered person would get overwhelmed because just
surviving that mess in one piece would tax human cognitive processes to their limit. Or they can struggle because they're aiming to do something that should be impossible, and the sheer strain of dashing through loophole after loophole, knowing that everything will go straight to blazes the moment they can't find a way around the next obstacle, is enough to drive not just the character, but the
writer, nuts.
"Character drama" does
not have to mean
Lord of the Therapy Logs!