Everybody has a story

Requiem for the NPCs

Did you see Monday’s midseason finale of BETTER CALL SAUL? I’m not going to spoil it for you, but wowzas. What an episode.

After the episode aired, a friend and I had a conversation about how good the show is at humanizing all of its characters. Nobody in the show feels like a plot device - functioning solely to move the main characters’ story forward. Regardless of how big their role is or how frequently they pop up in the overall story, everybody in BETTER CALL SAUL has their own agenda and, to borrow a phrase I think about all the time from James Gunn’s 2010 movie SUPER, they have a life going on in-between the panels.

As an introvert (who can summon up the energy needed to be an extrovert when necessary), I spent a lot of my childhood floating between friends - never letting myself get too attached to a clique or group. Part of this was self-preservation - you can’t get hurt by friends if you keep everybody an arm’s length away - and part of this was a crippling lack of self-confidence. Either way, I would watch as friends went on adventures, engaged in social drama, and otherwise lived their lives. I was a voyeur and this would sometimes lead to odd disconnects with reality where it was hard to distinguish between the connections I had with real-life people who went to my school and the teenagers who lived in the shows I watched on television.

I was a weird kid.

It was because of this weirdness and the fact that I grew up on the outskirts of any real social group that I developed a fondness for the idea of a periphery character - somebody who exists at the edges of the story. While I’m happy to say that my self-confidence and social skills have improved dramatically since high school, my interest in the stories of the folks around me has not diminished. I love fiction that plays with this concept - like Frank Grimes from the “Homer’s Enemy” episode of THE SIMPSONS or the wonderful tangent episodes in YOU’RE THE WORST or MYTHIC QUEST, in which half-hours would be spent exploring the backstory of secondary characters. As far as reality goes, I try very hard to understand that everybody I encounter in life is a real person - with a fully-realized life outside of my understanding.

This may seem like a no-brainer that only a serial killer would have to remind themselves of, but I truly believe it’s a skill that many folks have let atrophy in this online world we’re all living in. I see people say things to other folks on social media that are shocking - cruel, ugly, heartless expressions that could never be uttered if you truly believed you were talking to another human being. I see people make sweeping judgments on others based on a minimum of information given to them. I see real hatred casually spewed into the world - hatred to a degree that I feel is only possible when people treat the world around them as a sea of NPCs (non-playable characters).

Everybody has an origin story. Everybody has triumphs and tragedies that have helped define their personality, etched their fears, given them strengths, and carved weaknesses into their soul. Everybody is capable of change. Humanity is fluid and people can surprise you - for better or worse.

This newsletter started out as a way to celebrate the entertainment value of a show I like, but it has also become a personal manifesto. It’s this celebration of the side-character that drives my writing, it’s the idea that everybody has a story that I try my best to drive my life and my actions. It’s a struggle - we’ve been conditioned as a society to be casually cruel - but it’s so damned important to never forget that every single person on this planet is a human being with a lifetime of experience and the capability to do the right thing if nudged in the right direction.

Don’t look at the world around you as filled with NPCs. We’re all side characters in each other’s stories.