the case against relatable characters

Somewhere along the way, “relatable” became one of the highest compliments we could pay a character. Audiences want to see themselves; producers want protagonists who test well; writers are advised to give everyone recognizable wounds, ordinary desires, and redeeming flaws.

But recognition is not the same as engagement. I have never been a murderous Scottish king, a delusional Southern belle, or a Danish prince contemplating revenge, yet Macbeth, Blanche DuBois, and Hamlet remain ferociously compelling. Great characters do not need to resemble us. They need to reveal something we cannot stop looking at.

The demand for relatability can shrink character into a demographic questionnaire: Is this person likable? Are their choices understandable? Would an audience want to have coffee with them? Those questions reward familiarity and punish extremity — the very quality drama depends on.

Medea is not compelling because we relate to murdering one’s children; she is compelling because Euripides takes a recognizable wound — betrayal — and follows it beyond the limits most of us would ever cross. The distance between her behavior and ours does not weaken the play. It creates the terror. We recognize the spark without needing to identify with the fire.

Relatability can also become a polite word for reassurance. We ask characters to confirm that our feelings, values, and lives are normal. But theatre has another, more dangerous function: it introduces us to people whose logic unsettles our own. Richard III seduces an audience while announcing his villainy. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche lies, manipulates, performs, and collapses, yet Tennessee Williams refuses to reduce her to either victim or fraud. These characters do not offer the comfort of self-recognition. They ask us to inhabit a consciousness we may distrust — and discover that understanding someone is not the same as approving of them.

Writers sometimes confuse “relatable” with “specific,” though the two are nearly opposites. A generalized character is designed to include everyone; a specific character risks excluding almost everyone. Yet specificity is what gives an audience a way in. We may not share Willy Loman’s profession, generation, or delusions, but the precise shape of his hunger — to be well liked, to leave proof that his life mattered — makes him legible. Likewise, few spectators share Hedda Gabler’s exact circumstances, but her boredom, appetite for control, and horror of confinement are rendered with such precision that she becomes disturbingly comprehensible. The more singular the character, the less they need to be broadly “relatable.”

This does not mean characters should be arbitrary, opaque, or emotionally inaccessible. The alternative to relatability is not nonsense; it is coherence. A character’s actions must feel inevitable within that character’s private system of desire, fear, vanity, and self-deception. We do not need to think, “I would do that.” We need to think, “Of course they would do that.” When Nora walks out at the end of A Doll’s House, the action shocked its first audiences not because it was universally recognizable, but because Ibsen had made it the unavoidable conclusion of her awakening. Dramatic truth lives not in similarity but in earned necessity.

So perhaps writers should stop asking whether a character is relatable and ask harder questions. Is the character alive? Are they surprising without being random? Do they possess a logic powerful enough to challenge ours? Can they make us curious about a life we would never choose?

The best characters do not function as mirrors held at a flattering angle. They are windows, trapdoors, and sometimes interrogators. They enlarge our understanding not by saying, “This is you,” but by insisting, “This is human too.”