We’re watching ‘Firefly’ right now. Well, not this very second, but we’re making our way through the series. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time. This is partially because Nathan Fillion is a gorgeous, sexy man.  And yeah, okay, we might just be Joss Whedon fans. Possibly. Maybe.

But the whole experience has got me thinking about characters. The characters in this series are great. They do what characters are supposed to. They have depth, they defy stereotypes, they have motives and reasons for who and what they are.

All of them. Every single one. And they’re all introduced in the first episode. There’s a problem with this. It’s the same problem the Xmen movies. Now before anyone gets all fan-y on me, we all know our favorites have issues, and these aren’t big flaws that I’m about to point out. I’ll leave things like contrived dialogue and convenient plotting for a different day when I’m feeling masochistic.

The issue, which is really unfortunate because it should be a benefit, is when you introduce so many characters who all have such rich backgrounds, you spend too long delving into back story and examining each individual character.

So…awesome series…one of my favorites…but those twelve or thirteen episodes? Almost all back story. Each one exploring an individual character and giving us very little time to appreciate the world they live in instead. The movie helped that a little, but…

I suffer from something similar in my writing, though I’ve learned to tone it down over the years. One of my first novels has like ten main characters (well, really only nine plus the antagonist), and it’s all sorts of muddled mess because it was so important to me to make each one of them distinct and stand out. And most of the people who have read it stop before they’re done because of exactly that.

So…in daily life we interact with lots of people. When I’m working in an office there are usually twenty, thirty, forty people in my immediate vicinity. I only interact with maybe ten of them on a daily basis, but still. They all have distinct personalities, backgrounds, lifestyles, and I didn’t learn all of those things about them the first day I met them. Or the first week.

But it’s a prerequisite in our fiction. In our books and movies. And if there’s too many of those unique characters, our brains threaten to pop, and/or the story gets labeled as either comic-booky or literary and it has a very small (though frequently rabidly loyal) following.

I guess I’m trying to figure out why that is. I don’t have the answers, or even a very well-formed theory. I’m wondering if anyone else out there does. Thoughts?