Exchange of Realities

One of the greatest human drives is towards perfection. We fuss for hours over our projects, work for weeks on getting that one task or creation just so. The researcher who chases away ‘distractions’, the various ‘zillas that crop up at events like weddings or prom or graduation—they’re looking for perfection. Everything has to be higher, faster, prettier, closer to the ideal.

It’s easy, in fiction, to want to take advantage of the lowered barriers between the creator and the in-world perfection of the creation. And for people who want to live through their characters, or just to get away from the flaws of this world, it’s particularly common; who doesn’t want to be perfect or surrounded by perfection? And yet, by creating this perfection and turning it loose, we devalue many of the things that make the world and the characters in it worth dealing with.

Think for a moment about the perfect person. She (or he, but I see a lot more of this pedestaling in female characters) is smart, charming in every way, capable; she is strong, observant, wise. Everyone who sees her loves her, and even those who profess to hate her merely do so through envy that they could never be one such as she. She never fails, never jumps to the wrong conclusions, never makes so much as the slightest mistake; any flaws or weaknesses she might have are minor, mostly there so the perfection won’t be overwhelming (as that itself is imperfect), and rarely if ever an actual inconvenience.

And she is dead boring, impossible to empathize with, and generally annoying. If she is one perfect person in an imperfect world, her concern about those poor flawed people comes off as condescension and not sympathy. Where there is no failure, there is no tension through risk of failure. Where there are no mistakes, there are no recoveries, no hurried improvisation, no wrong things done for the right reasons. Where there is a perfect understanding of the world, there is no temptation, no hesitance, no worrying about self-worth. We can’t use her as a role model; she’s something we could never so much as dream of being. Neither can we learn from her; most of what we need to learn is making up for our own flaws or recovering from our mistakes, and how can we get that from someone who embodies neither? Even pretending to be her, after a while, starts feeling uncomfortably like over-escapism. Sure, we could worship her, but where’s the fun in that? So instead we shove her away to look for someone more on our level, and seethe as behind us she perfectly understands and takes no offense, not even giving us the satisfaction of the little irritation we lesser beings would show.

What about perfect societies? They have their own issues. Sure, you can explain why they’re perfect, but that’s only going to be interesting for so long, and when it’s lost is fascination (assuming we can believe the reasoning), there’s nothing left. After all, there aren’t nasty little issues like isms or crime, conflict or poverty, illness or illogic. It’s perfect, everyone’s happy, and nothing ever goes wrong. Where’s the conflict? Where’s the story? What could it do, aside from either be struck at by lesser beings (until it comes up with the perfect solution) or to attempt to spread its perfection whether its neighbors want it or not—and if the latter comes to a fight, who would you root for? The army of Sues and Stus, or the people whose lives they’re trying to rewrite?

And as for the perfect belief system, where all the answers are clear, the contradictions exist only as a teaching aid, and everything is obviously true—that’s improbable even in the most fantastic of settings. For one thing, it wouldn’t be able to coexist with other systems and still hold any sort of dramatic interest, because who but the foolish would deny its impeccable logic? For another, it couldn’t really be a belief system, as belief can’t exist without doubt. (Undoubted belief is called knowledge. It works differently.) And last, why would anyone with an eye to the world want to read about it or play with it if there aren’t any fiddly bits to search for, to feel our way through, or to try to grow into and fit with our mental processes?

Lastly, perfection is subjective; what you call perfect, I might call lacking in color, and someone else might call fatally flawed. We can’t show it, only tell it, and who wants to sit through a lecture on how Great and Wonderful and Flawless X is?

In sum, it is my opinion that fictional worlds should not contain perfection unless the creator is willing to deal wholeheartedly with its consequences.