My favorite characters are deft impressionist sketches that are archetypes bordering on caricatures. Cartoons basically. You find them in unusual places. Dickens is literary but his characters are basically cartoons.
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People mistake cartoonish characters for weak or 2d cardboard-cutout characters. Homer Simpson, Cartman, Butters, entire family in Rick and Morty...
cartoons ≠ shallow characterization
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Cartoons are low-dimensional but the dimensions retained are eigen-dimensions.
2d characters are bad because they work with low and *superficial* dimensions like “tall and handsome”
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Cartoons are lean-startup characters when they work
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Some fiction is just high capex.
You have to invest a lot of attention to get into into the characters/milieu before there’s any payoff. I prefer lean startup type fiction. 1-2 pages and you’re into it.
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Good genre milieus are also low capex. Like classic cozy mysteries are set in English country homes or London... they lend themselves to very quick familiarity with the main world elements: trains, libraries, butlers, rigid Victorian machine-like culture...
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Genre pioneers get influential by inventing reusable efficient milieus and character types
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By consuming a lot of cartoonish fiction (both literary and genre) I’ve gradually turned into almost a cartoon character myself. My next project is to build a cartoonish milieu around myself.
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Ideally in a mansion form factor
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Find your eigendimensions, find your inner toon. That’s you cheat your way up the Maslow hierarchy.
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I'm currently reading the Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwall. Each is the same but different and so far, satisfying. British soldier goes on a mission, gets involved in an intrigue, falls in love, kills an improbable number of bad guys before he is free to do it all again.

