So Ive Been Thinking About Rational Vs. Irrational Character Decisions.

So I’ve been thinking about rational vs. irrational character decisions.

An irrational decision is great when your story is driven by your character’s personal flaws and struggles, and for crafting situations where your audience knows that these decisions are unavoidable because they are perfectly in character. Having your characters be perfectly able to solve their problems if they weren’t, y’know, themselves, is so very hard-hitting, and can be a fantastic part of a narrative.

The downfall with irrational decisions is that it can make situations seem less dire or make your antagonists seem less dangerous. If your characters are falling over themselves and their own personal issues, then it’s hard to show how the external problems in your story pose a serious threat, because you can’t demonstrate how they’re hard to deal with if your characters aren’t making solidly competent attempts in the first place.

Rational decisions are great for stories where most of your problems are external, like your characters trying to build a spaceship or infiltrate the bad guy’s lair. It’s also key to any horror writing, where you need your characters to be competent in order for your danger to be credible; if your audience spends the entire time wondering why your protagonists aren’t doing very obvious things to solve their problems, it’ll be a lot harder to get a properly spooky atmosphere going. But if your characters are only ever making the most optimal, logical choices without ever struggling, they won’t be very compelling, so just like with irrational decision-making, there’s a time and a place for this.

Ideally, you want some combination of both rational and irrational character choices. And maybe even more importantly, whatever choice a character’s making needs to be one that makes sense for them given everything you’ve already shown in the narrative so far. If the decision feels forced or contrived, then it doesn’t matter if it’s rational or not, because it’s not a choice that fits with the rest of the story.

But, yeah, ultimately, both types of character decisions are useful tools, and it’s less about one or the other being right, and more about both of these tools being useful for different types of situations.

An under-talked about part of Columbo is the way it presents non-murderers. Most episodes have at least a few scenes where Columbo talks to people involved in the case who, you know, aren't the ones who killed the victim, and in those scenes to see a multitude of ways people handle grief (or, if not grief exactly, the simple shock of someone you know no longer being around). I'm watching one of my favorite episodes right now, the one with Leonard Nimoy as the killer, and Columbo is interviewing one of the victim's co-workers, a nurse, and she just keeps going on an on about how much better the victim was morally than her - how the victim really cared about healing people as opposed to herself, who only wants to advance her career. And in this brief, minute-long interaction you get both the comic relief of Columbo quickly realizing this woman will provide almost no useful information but being unable to get her to stop talking without being rude, and a very clear illustration of how the victim was inspiring to others and how this co-worker in particular not only admired her, but feels inadequate for not living up to her. It's a very short interaction, easy to ignore in the scope of the episode (Leonard Nimoy gives SUCH a good performance as a villain it'd be hard to talk about anything else), but it all adds a humanity to the episode that would be sorely missing without it. If you didn't care about the murder before, you sure as hell do now, and you know Columbo is a better person than the killer because he actually cares about the effect these murders have on people enough not to coldly shut down a grieving friend of the victim when she's rambling on about her feelings.

Anyway, I know this is a hot take for Tumblr, but Columbo is really great.

New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.

Genocide experts warn that India is about to genocide the Shompen people

Who are the Shompen?

The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.

Why is there risk of genocide?

India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".

Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”

The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.

This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.

The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).

And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.

Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”

On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

How to help

The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:

Survival International

The Shompen face obliteration: they urgently need your support

Take action for the Shompen now! The Shompen are one of the most isolated tribes on Earth. They live on Great Nicobar island in India, and

From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.

Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.

Sources:

India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.

‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.

Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.

The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.

[Maps] Environmental path cleared for Great Nicobar mega project, 10 Oct 2022. Mongabay.

Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it