let’s talk about this obsession with "relatable" characters. somewhere along the way, the highest compliment a book could receive became, "this character is literally me.” and if a text isn’t relatable, it’s dismissed as irrelevant. but literature doesn’t need to be relatable to be valuable. this mindset also reduces reading to a performance of trauma. if a character is broken or tragic, people immediately turn them into mirrors of their own sadness. but that's just romanticization. you don’t need to appropriate a character’s suffering to look vulnerable. many of the greatest works in literature are anything but relatable. moby dick is full of obsessive monologues about a whale. paradise lost stretches into long, difficult speeches. most readers won’t see themselves there. and yet, these works matter because they open doors into worlds beyond our own, articulating experiences we’ve never lived but can imagine. literature doesn’t exist just to mirror us. it creates windows. when we reduce it to relatability, we shrink it to the size of our own reflection, forgetting that its true power is to take us elsewhere.
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