YOUR CHARACTERS WILL MASTER THE UNIVERSE IF THEY HAVE THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

Image Credit: Netflix

This is the fourth part of our series on character relationships. Part I (the dangers of the Zero-Body Problem).  Part II (the limitations / uses of the Two-Body Problem).  Part III (notes on character relationships). 

When a protagonist character system has two meaningful relationships (as opposed to just one or none), I call this the Three-Body Problem.   

My argument: characters are best understood as relationships.  And the best characters have a Three Body Problem minimum — two meaningful relationships plus the relationship with themselves.  

In my homebrew the Three-Body Character Relationship System is, characterologically speaking, fiction’s equivalent of a Golden Ratio.  It is the ideal we should all strive for. 

When you give your protagonist the ideal minimum of two meaningful relationships you create the conditions for your reader to connect fully to your character and for the transportative (and transformative) magic of fiction to reach ignition.  When done right, protagonists with the ideal minimum of two meaningful relationships (plus the one with the self) will achieve limbic resonance / materialize in our heads and hearts / become human enough.

Why is three the magic number, the minimum supreme?  Is it that the social Kwisatz Haderach inside all our brains doesn't really start warping space-time until that social spice minimum is reached?  Is it that our predictive social simulation engine needs three coordinates to function properly — to condense fact from the vapor of nuance —to Blue Fairy our wood Pinocchio characters into real people?  Or is that just the way narrative works in this dimension?¹ For the answer absolute you’ll have to consult the Creatix or the brain-cog mentats over in Building 46, but I suspect the complexity that the Three-Body Problem generates in physics maps nicely over — and is the quickest, most efficient way to represent — the complex disorderly unpredictable nature of the human being.  

Whatever the reason: to create the most convincing compelling characters, writers need to achieve the Three-Body Problem minimum.  In other words: two well-chosen non-repeating meaningful relationships that will help illuminate the protagonist’s character (in every meaning of the word) and grant reader insight into said character’s humanity.  

Each relationship opens a window into a character’s life/world/soul — the clearer and better designed the window, the better and more useful the view.  The better positioned the windows, the deeper or broader the view — the more sightline you give the reader.  Which is why you need to choose your character’s meaningful relationships with these imperatives in mind. 

Consider a personal example: the protagonist of my novel, Oscar.  He’s a huge nerd who ranks very low on the plátano index, who knows more about Gil-Galad than he does the Dominican Republic.  And yet when I designed his Three-Body system I intentionally didn’t give Oscar a meaningful relationship that connected to his beloved nerdiness (not at the start).  Because, in my view, Oscar’s nerdiness was something that inspired him but also, in the 80s Jersey world he inhabited, was something that isolated him, and I underscored that isolation through my choice of his meaningful relationships.  It was only later and imperfectly that he found someone who mirrored his obsessions in a very closeted-way: Yunior. 

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Some Principles For Creating Three-Body Character Relationship Systems

—Make sure your protagonist has two meaningful relationships minimum — a meaningful relationship is one around which the protagonist has organized themselves (their identities) — for better or worse.  They are the protagonist’s moons, with all the gravitational entanglement that implies. 

—The meaningful relationships should not overlap or repeat. 

—The meaningful relationship might not have anything in common beyond the protagonist, might never be in the same room or timeline as each other, and yet they should resonate with one another in invisible and unconscious ways; the couplet (or more) should express together a certain rough magic, produce fascination, have swing.  

How do you know that the meaningfuls have swing?  Tends to be a matter of titration (trying out combos), intuition, and because you’ve read a lot of fiction and have a ton of models.  If you can generate endless scenarios and problems for your character because of their two meaningfuls, then chances are they have swing.

—To improve your skills, you should diagram the meaningful relationships of your favorite protagonists in books and screens, differentiating between meaningful relationships and situationships — a term I use to describe A) a character whose relationship with the protagonist is either localized or specific to a moment or a place or B) a character whose plot/conflict function is stronger than their characterlogical impact.  Movies and TV shows are awesome for this type of learning because their visuality makes mapping easy.  

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When done right what the Three-Body relationship system gives: 

First: the two relationship views or angles combine with the protagonist’s own view of themselves to give the protagonist character literal depth, three-dimensionality and because of the parallax shift a sense of motion, of lifelike-ness.  (I’m using visual metaphors here because they accurately convey how these things work for me inside my reading head.)

Second: the two relationships grant the character some unpredictability, some undecidability, conflict — in other words, good human texture.  Back to my example: Oscar’s two meaningfuls are his mother and his sister.  A reader might not be aware of the question but it will nevertheless be there as they read: is Oscar more the person he is with his mother or with his sister — both?  Neither?  Or are these relationships something else altogether? 

Third: when you design characters along the Three-Body Problem Imperative you can build a contradiction right into the system.  Crude example: a thief whose two meaningfuls are a better thief and a complete Catholic do-gooder. 

When you only got one view of a character (the Two-Body Problem) it's hard for there to be Human texture and you’ll have to work harder to build in contradictions and conflicts. 

Fourth: because they are inherently complex and unpredictable, Three-Body Relationship Systems can easily sustain longer stories, novels, and multi-book series that are built into the Three-Body Problem.  A Three-Body relationship system can take on any number of configurations throughout the tale — in one chapter Oscar can be more mom-oriented, in another more sister oriented, in another close to both, in another close to neither, etc, etc.  And because relationships (when done right) are never static, change over the course of one’s life, new configurations are being born all the time and consequently a sense of dynamism is added to the tale and the characters for free.   

Fifth: The Two-Body Problem is the Tell of character relationship systems.  Because there is not another meaningful relationship to contrast or contradict the primary relationship we must accept the primary relationship and its vision of our protagonist character as nigh absolute.  Reader participation is low to nil — hard to participate with an absolute. 

In contrast, the Three-Body Problem is the Show of the character relationship system.  I, the reader, must decide from page to page, scene to scene, what these relationships are saying together (in their concatenation) about the protagonist. 

In other words: Three-Body Problem protagonists (when done right) invite the reader to participate, trust the reader to co-create.  Both in the manner I just described and in another important way: the gaps between the meaningful relationships and the character’s sense of themselves become hyperdiegetic².  They become rich sites of speculative, abductive, or intuitive creativity.  When the meaningful relationships are well organized, these gaps will tantalize and readers won’t be able to resist filling in the blanks or deciding that in these seams lurks unknown desires or occluded aspects of the self.        

These six small axes are no small matter, folks.  Anytime you give your readers opportunities to participate in the work, to co-create, you the writer are summoning literature’s deepest, blackest, and most beautiful magic.

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In my homebrew the least compelling protagonists, the most obvious failures to launch, come to grief precisely because they flub the Three-Body minimum.  The best, on the other hand, always achieve the Three-Body Problem minimum.  Some fine examples that come to mind:

Sethe in Beloved with Denver and Baby Suggs and Paul D (plus, of course Beloved herself). 

Dana in Kindred with Kevin and Rufus.  

T’Challa from Black Panther, befitting his status as King and Black Panther, has a Cuban link of meaningful relationships: Nakia, Okoye Shuri, his mother Ramonda, his father in the ancestral plane, plus some important situationships like M’Baku and that CIA character Martin Freeman played. 

(Killmonger presents an interesting case.  As the central hidden crack in the Black Panther’s legacy, he’s too important to be a situationship.  But as the supervillain antagonist of a superhero movie, Killmonger literally personifies the movie’s conflict.  The Antagonist is its own category in a way, which for our current taxonomy could be best described as a meaningful situationship.)    

Finally check out how the relationship system in Star Wars helps to frame a character’s centrality or their symbolic marginalization.

Luke Skywalker has a Three-Body with Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.  A Three-Body R2DN / C3PO.  A Three-Body with his dead father and Obi Wan Kenobi.  A Three-Body with Han Solo and Princess Leia.  A Three-Body with Obi-Wan and Darth Vader (displaced). 

Han Solo has a Three-Body with Chewbacca and his passengers.  But his character doesn’t really gain the depth that will make him a fan favorite until he achieves a Three-Body with Luke and Leia. 

Leia has a Three-Body with the Empire (Grand Moff Tarken, Dark Vader) and the Rebellion (Obi Wan and others).  A Three-Body with Obi-Wan and her rescuers.  A Three-Body with Han and Luke.   

And Chewbacca?  His only meaningful relationship is with Han Solo, who alone understands the Wookie.  Poor Chewbacca is kept a Tonto-esque sidekick by his constricted set of relationships.  What saves Chewbacca and helps to obscure his marginalization is that A) he’s awesome and B) his plus one is the most popular hero in the original trilogy.    

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As I’ve been stressing the Three-Body Character Relationship system describes a minimum.  In truth most novels (or tv series) feature protagonists with four or five meaningful relationships, plus a host of other minor relationships and situationships to round things out.  Epic novels and multigenerational family sagas weave even more elaborate relational tapestries; as we saw with the Star Wars example, their protagonist will often have multiple Three-Bodies. 

Finally, I'll leave you with this:  the Three-Body Problem Imperative is an attempt at guidance and a way of understanding how compelling characters are constructed.  Nothing I argue for is ever authoritative.  You have your own homebrew; if mine helps you with yours, cool.  If not, please ignore it. 

Alright that’s it for me.  Stay in words!

1. “It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course -- thousands in fact -- but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted.” From Clive Barker’s Imagica.

2. Matt Hills coined the concept of hyperdiegesis,  “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nonetheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension.”[8] To use a cliché, a hyperdiegesis is like revealing only the tip of the iceberg. By presenting a well-defined, intricate, and coherent space, audiences are left to imagine a larger world and deeper mythology. For example, Derek Johnson observes that the fictional institutions of Star Trek (The Federation), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Watcher’s Council), 24 (CTU), and Lost (Dharma Initiative) suggest an extensive expanse that can be filled in either through fan fiction or transmedia storytelling.  (https://sites.middlebury.edu/mediacp/2009/06/17/the-art-of-worldbuilding/)