You Have to Be Flawed to Be Compelling

I spent a lot of my weekend playing Final Fantasy 10, the cornerstone of my childhood. I re-played a save file of more than 70 hours and contributed to the end of the story, and in the process, I realized something about narrative, about storytelling, about life.

The best characters are often the ones that we know best. That means we know their strengths, but it also means that we know their flaws.

The most compelling heroes are the most flawed heroes. In the Bible, we know that Jesus is Jesus. He is the gold standard of perfection. But what about Peter? What about Paul? These two were arguably the most compelling characters in the Bible and the biggest evangelists of Christianity and the Gospel, yet one denied Jesus and the other killed Christians.

A compelling person has to be flawed. A person doesn’t have to be good and behave well for you to like them — but they must have a “why” and a detailed and emotional backstory to rationalize why they are the way they are. There is simply an allure of transgression we have for our stories and our characters that signals to our intrinsic need for freedom and autonomy.

Maybe deep inside we crave the “wild west” version of lawlessness where we can do whatever we want, not suffer real consequences, and survive for ourselves in the frontier. But perfection is not what we look for when we think of our most compelling characters. In fact, perfection is boring.

If a character never overcomes a challenge, where is the conflict? Where is the story?

To be compelling is defined as “demanding attention”. We are drawn towards works in progress much more than we are the people that seem to have it all together. Think about how much you reach out to the friend that is not doing well and sick compared to the friend that seems to have it all together.

As an adult, when someone else seems to have it all together, I’ve learned that that’s just a sign that you probably don’t know them well enough. We all have secrets and battles we’re fighting, conflicts we’re struggling with that seemingly never get resolved.

Aristotle once said that “a man doesn’t become a hero until he can see the root of his own downfall,” in reference to a tragic hero. Odysseus would not have been a tragic hero had he not had hubris, and neither would Oedipus and Antigone be compelling heroes had their fates not been so unfortunate. In Game of Thrones, Ned Stark’s tragic flaw was his nobility and his blind trust in others.

And yet we are drawn to vulnerability, not only in others in literary characters and our friends but ourselves. Instead of trying to masquerade our problems and pretend like everything is going well, we are more compelling to others, but most importantly ourselves, when we’re vulnerable and honest about what we’re struggling with and what’s going on.

I’m struggling with my job right now. I want to do right by my kids but I feel like a terrible teacher, day in and day out. With the overwhelming rigors of my job, I find it really difficult to keep in touch with family and friends, and can go the whole day before responding to a text of “how are you?” I feel like a terrible friend. I’m struggling to get back into shape as a runner. I don’t exactly act like a Christian in my daily interactions, and I’m struggling to reconcile my faith and my responsibilities.

I have a lot of flaws and a lot of things in my life that just aren’t going well right now. I don’t know if they’ll ever get better because I can’t tell the future, but the point is that it feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders because I can admit to my flaws and shortcomings as a person, teacher, Christian, friend, and family member.

And being flawed makes me a compelling person, and should remind you that you need to be flawed to be compelling, too.

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Previously published on Medium.com.

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