Writing On writing intelligent characters.

[Jemini]

I have always been aware there are a lot of myths in regards to intelligence, but bringing up the subject in another thread and sharing my experience with it has shown me in terms of the responses that people's immersion in the myths is worse than I thought.

Therefore, I decided I would share this video from a psyche-oriented channel on Youtube that goes over some traits strongly associated with people who are genuinely really smart.

Pay the most attention to the part right at the beginning where it says smart people tend to think they're average and no smarter than anyone else. Meanwhile, the people who boast about their intelligence are usually fairly average in reality. It's the paradoxical reality that's most likely the origin of most of the misunderstanding in regards to intelligence. It's the result of average people who think they're smart figuring that real smart people think the same way they do. Well, this is wrong. It couldn't be farther from the truth.

In order to help out in getting a better idea of what real intelligent people look like, I'll also go into a few good examples from fiction that you can consider.

Ferdinand (Ascendance of a Bookworm):

This man might very well be the single #1 most intelligent character in fiction so far as I'm aware. He is severely limited in his impact on the world by the fact that he had a horrible case of "evil step-mother" syndrome, but despite the harsh oppression he faced he still managed to pretty much manipulate the entire kingdom to his favor more or less without leaving the temple.

Mine (Ascendance of a Bookworm):

She is not as intelligent as Ferdinand, but she is still REALLY high up there on the intelligence scale. (This is good, because she's the MC of the series, and it's helpful if there's another person above the MC in their own specialty for the sake of balancing out the character.) She as that natural curiosity down pat... err... no, who am I kidding. She takes it to such a ridiculous excess that even Ferdinand calls her a book-loving gremlin, as do several fans of the series. She also has that attitude where she does not get set back by her failures (and she has a lot of failures) but she gets back up after them and tries new approaches to her problems until something finally works.

She gets better results than Ferdinand, but most of this is because she is 1. Supported by her previous-life knowledge, 2. Does not face the same obstacles as Ferdinand because most of her obstacles have been cleared for her, and 3. She has Ferdinand for a mentor actually helping her to gain knowledge and training faster.

Rudeus Greyrat (Mushoku Tensei):

He's a perfect example of a genuinely intelligent character who absolutely does not regard himself as being intelligent. There are several times through the series where he arrives at conclusions that are not obvious to anyone but him, but after he says them the audience can sorta piece together the fact that he did indeed have the information necessary to arrive at that conclusion and it wasn't an author cheat to give it to him.

He gets help from a lot of people along his journey, and he faces failure again and again. But, he's somehow able to keep a positive attitude through it and aside from feeding his vices (mostly to do with perversion) he tends to avoid unnecessary actions that would get him in trouble. (Let's face it, his perversion vices get him into enough trouble, so it's good he doesn't do panicky stupid things in bad situations that would create even more trouble.)

There is even a scene around mid series where he's called out as being a genius. His reaction to this call-out is exactly the reaction a true genius would have to this sort of call-out. He is genuinely confused at why this person's calling him a genius. Because, after all, from his perspective he's no different at all from anybody else. He can only see the spots where he failed in his life due to stupid mistakes, and he knows for a fact there are people who are stronger and better than him in the world. So, to him, that means he's nothing great. This is not a self-esteem issue... (well, maybe you can argue it is,) this is actually a very normal and relatable trait shared by all genuinely intelligent people in the world.

(I had more character examples in mind when I started writing this, but now they've completely skipped my mind. I guess I'm exhausted from writing out explanations on 3 characters, so I'll leave it at that for now.)

 

[SailusGebel]

 

[TotallyHuman]

Maybe, but I still stan Ainz-sama

 

[Zirrboy]

Intelligence is what you want it to be, even more so in fiction.
The line between genius and bs the author makes work isn't just thin but highly subjective.
A well structured thought process makes the result an "obvious conclusion" if you want to doubt.

Maybe, but I still stan Ainz-sama

 

[Ranty-cat]

I think Kim Dokja is the most intelligent fictional character.

 

[CupcakeNinja]

Ah, so I'm not intelligent. I'm simply more intelligent than most everyone i know personally.

Good to know. I guess in the bigger picture i really do only survive on my looks. I've been told so before, but to be actually faced with the reality of my own mediocrity...eh. I'm cool with it. At least I'm sexy.

I think Kim Dokja is the most intelligent fictional character.

But what color is his Bugatti?

 

[Love4NovelGuy]

The thing about intelligence and wisdom is that they are vague af.

Those who are ‘intelligent’ can rack up tons of information at once, have good memory, and are able to problem solve faster than others.

Similarly, even if you’re not intelligent, you can be wise through patience and perspective. Being able to look beyond your own knowledge and attain more by putting yourself in another’s shoes.

It’s why in the Manwha called Peerless Dad, the main character can be the best leader despite not being particularly intelligent. The decision maker that’s able to maximise the use of knowledge gained

 

[Jemini]

Intelligence is what you want it to be, even more so in fiction.
The line between genius and bs the author makes work isn't just thin but highly subjective.
A well structured thought process makes the result an "obvious conclusion" if you want to doubt.

The point is, if you're going to write a character who's supposedly intelligent, you might as well put in the effort to write them like a real intelligent person with the traits and behaviors observed in real intelligent people IRL. It will make things more believable, and exchanging out the ass-hole always proclaiming his own brilliance while talking down on all the stupid people as is the bad stereotype for the more humble attitudes of real smart people who tend to not stand out because they themselves do not think so highly of themselves is an excellent first step.

A real smart person has a humble attitude but gets a lot of results worth bragging about while having an attitude of "but this is just normal, isn't it? Couldn't anybody have figured out this stuff if they just thought about it a little?" Genuinely confused as to why everyone's making a big deal of the things they did.

EDIT:

On this notion, the 3 example characters demonstrate where, even within this general character trait of smart people, there's still a wide scope of ways it can manifest.

Ferdinand:

He is literally the single most intelligent person in the world. Everyone else is less intelligent than him. The way he somehow rationalizes his own perspective that everyone else has equal intelligence to him but are not able to achieve the things he does is that he sorts them all into 2 categories. Fools and lazy people. (These categories are not mutually exclusive, you can be in both.)

Fools are people who are not dumb, but they did something unwise in the moment, and somehow they keep doing unwise things. A lazy person is just someone who's not applying themselves as effectively as they otherwise could.

Encountering Mine seems to have only re-enforced this perspective of his. Mine has an intelligence that is only mildly below his. However, she has another one of the 7 traits mentioned in the video to an extreme degree. She will always march to her own tune rather than go with the flow, and she does so to such an extreme degree that a lot of her actions seriously come off as foolish from Ferdinand's perspective. However, the results she achieves are undeniable. So, she's in his "fool" category, but she's also undeniably intelligent.

Mine:

She has memories from Earth. She chalks everyone else being unable to measure up to her as the quality of education in this world simply not being up to standard. This gives her a the very productive response in which she teaches and guides the people around her in order to improve their abilities, bringing other people up to something closer to her level, and thus seemingly lending credence to her smart-person philosophy that everyone else is as smart as she is and just has to apply themselves more... and actually, she's so effective at this, that the audience is tempted to agree with her.

Rudeus:

He justifies his opinion that everyone else is equally as intelligent as he is because he only compares himself to people who are as good or better than he is, and he doesn't even seem to be aware of the people who are not as good as he is. He casually assumes the people who are not better than him are at around the same level as he is, but it truly is more accurate to say that he's simply not aware of the people who are less intelligent than him.

 

[gaylolis]

so i'm just curious, if we can't really understand what an intelligent character is doing / thinking, does it mean we're stupid or is it the author's lack of clarity and delivery?

in my case, i'm not of the sharpest mind and i do shy away from 'difficult' stories.

but yea, from this post, i knew a character is actually NOT (or not necessarily) intelligent if the author outright describes them as so.

 

[CarburetorThompson]

Intelligence is what you want it to be, even more so in fiction.
The line between genius and bs the author makes work isn't just thin but highly subjective.
A well structured thought process makes the result an "obvious conclusion" if you want to doubt.

Exactly a smart character doesn’t need to be smart, other characters just have to act like they are.

 

[rain-090]

Intelligence is what you want it to be, even more so in fiction.
The line between genius and bs the author makes work isn't just thin but highly subjective.
A well structured thought process makes the result an "obvious conclusion" if you want to doubt.

Ainz is actually somewhat smart, he is even trying to learn how to govern better

 

[TotallyHuman]

Ainz is actually somewhat smart, he is even trying to learn how to govern better

nono, what are you talking about? The Supreme One has infi:ite wisdom, he even plans 10000 years ahead!

 

[Jemini]

so i'm just curious, if we can't really understand what an intelligent character is doing / thinking, does it mean we're stupid or is it the author's lack of clarity and delivery?

in my case, i'm not of the sharpest mind and i do shy away from 'difficult' stories.

but yea, from this post, i knew a character is actually NOT (or not necessarily) intelligent if the author outright describes them as so.

It's absolutely the writer's fault, 100% of the time. The only wiggle room in that statement is whether it's deliberate because the author doesn't want you finding out, if it's deliberate because the author doesn't know how to write an intelligent character and is just hand-waving things away, or if it's because the writer is just really bad at explaining things.

If the writer really knows what they're doing though (usually requires the author to be as smart, smarter than, or less smart but still within 1 standard deviation of intelligence of the smart character they are writing,) then the author should be able to explain the intelligent character's thought process enough that it is rather clear to the audience what the intelligent character is doing.

This is not a writing style that has entirely taken off though, and is usually only employed by actual intelligent writers who are frustrated with all these characters who the author just says are smart but don't really act it. Reason being, explaining the thought process de-mistifies it, and being able to follow the explanation makes it so the omniscient audience doesn't actually perceive the feat of intelligence being as great as it really would be to come up with something like that from an in-world perspective. (This is mainly due to a lack of EQ (emotional intelligence) an empathy among the audience.)

This is an issue that was suffered in "The Genius Prince's Guide to Raising a Nation Out of Debt." This series seems to commit the sin of both showing AND telling that the character is intelligent. Because, for anyone with the EQ to put yourself in the character's shoes and limit your perspective to only what's known in-world rather than what the omiscient audience knows, Wein actually does come off as pretty darn intelligent and capable. However, because the author tells in addition to showing, other characters call him intelligent instead of the audience getting the chance to arrive at that conclusion themselves, AND because the audience is given that omniscient perspective, the little character flaws Wein has and the few points where his plans don't go 100% perfectly lead the audience to conclude he's really not all that intelligent after all.

(Wein was one of those other characters I was intending to mention in the OP, but the issues with how he comes off to a lower EQ audience used to the bad tropes of poorly written so-called intelligent characters make it so it's probably a good thing I forgot about him while writing that one up.)

 

[CupcakeNinja]

The point is, if you're going to write a character who's supposedly intelligent, you might as well put in the effort to write them like a real intelligent person with the traits and behaviors observed in real intelligent people IRL. It will make things more believable, and exchanging out the ass-hole always proclaiming his own brilliance while talking down on all the stupid people as is the bad stereotype for the more humble attitudes of real smart people who tend to not stand out because they themselves do not think so highly of themselves is an excellent first step.

A real smart person has a humble attitude but gets a lot of results worth bragging about while having an attitude of "but this is just normal, isn't it? Couldn't anybody have figured out this stuff if they just thought about it a little?" Genuinely confused as to why everyone's making a big deal of the things they did.

EDIT:

On this notion, the 3 example characters demonstrate where, even within this general character trait of smart people, there's still a wide scope of ways it can manifest.

Ferdinand:

He is literally the single most intelligent person in the world. Everyone else is less intelligent than him. The way he somehow rationalizes his own perspective that everyone else has equal intelligence to him but are not able to achieve the things he does is that he sorts them all into 2 categories. Fools and lazy people. (These categories are not mutually exclusive, you can be in both.)

Fools are people who are not dumb, but they did something unwise in the moment, and somehow they keep doing unwise things. A lazy person is just someone who's not applying themselves as effectively as they otherwise could.

Encountering Mine seems to have only re-enforced this perspective of his. Mine has an intelligence that is only mildly below his. However, she has another one of the 7 traits mentioned in the video to an extreme degree. She will always march to her own tune rather than go with the flow, and she does so to such an extreme degree that a lot of her actions seriously come off as foolish from Ferdinand's perspective. However, the results she achieves are undeniable. So, she's in his "fool" category, but she's also undeniably intelligent.

Mine:

She has memories from Earth. She chalks everyone else being unable to measure up to her as the quality of education in this world simply not being up to standard. This gives her a the very productive response in which she teaches and guides the people around her in order to improve their abilities, bringing other people up to something closer to her level, and thus seemingly lending credence to her smart-person philosophy that everyone else is as smart as she is and just has to apply themselves more... and actually, she's so effective at this, that the audience is tempted to agree with her.

Rudeus:

He justifies his opinion that everyone else is equally as intelligent as he is because he only compares himself to people who are as good or better than he is, and he doesn't even seem to be aware of the people who are not as good as he is. He casually assumes the people who are not better than him are at around the same level as he is, but it truly is more accurate to say that he's simply not aware of the people who are less intelligent than him.

you know, there are plenty of intelligent people who ARE assholes, tho. So its not as if its even unrealistic. If being intelligent is just about being able to more easily acquire and apply knowledge than the common schmuck, then personality has nothing to do with whether you can be categorized as intelligent or not.

i kept seein' how you talked about "a real intelligent person" is usually more humble and whatnot. Which im not sure on the statistics of that, so i cant say a larger number of them tend to actually be humble to the extent of saying "usually" they're that way...but while a lot of smart people are like that, there's probably just as many who're right cunts. So yeah. Im fine with smart characters being assholes, doesnt give me the feeling that its some made-up trope. Over-used, maybe

 

[TotallyHuman]

you know, there are plenty of intelligent people who ARE assholes, tho. So its not as if its even unrealistic. If being intelligent is just about being able to more easily acquire and apply knowledge than the common schmuck, then personality has nothing to do with whether you can be categorized as intelligent or not.

i kept seein' how you talked about "a real intelligent person" is usually more humble and whatnot. Which im not sure on the statistics of that, so i cant say a larger number of them tend to actually be humble to the extent of saying "usually" they're that way...but while a lot of smart people are like that, there's probably just as many who're right cunts. So yeah. Im fine with smart characters being assholes, doesnt give me the feeling that its some made-up trope. Over-used, maybe

Speaking of which, there is a characteristic that does seem to have a well-established reputation for the "real intelligent people"

For decades, scientists have known that eminently creative individuals have a much higher rate of manic depression, or bipolar disorder, than does the general population

From here which I didn't bother to read

 

[CupcakeNinja]

Speaking of which, there is a characteristic that does seem to have a well-established reputation for the "real intelligent people"

From here which I didn't bother to read

ignorance is bliss and all that.

Cows and sheep are perfectly happy being fed and cared for when they cant understand they're gonna end up on my dinner plate.

Its only when you're smart enough to realize how fucked the situation you're in is that you start worrying,

 

[TotallyHuman]

ignorance is bliss and all that.

Cows and sheep are perfectly happy being fed and cared for when they cant understand they're gonna end up on my dinner plate.

Its only when you're smart enough to realize how fucked the situation you're in is that you start worrying,

Cows and sheep on farms where they get to graze their grass on ranches enjoying relative freedom and safety until they get more or less painlessly killed off - maybe. Cows and sheep on industrial enterprises that produce meat for burgers? Doubtful. Very very very doubtful

 

[Jemini]

you know, there are plenty of intelligent people who ARE assholes, tho. So its not as if its even unrealistic. If being intelligent is just about being able to more easily acquire and apply knowledge than the common schmuck, then personality has nothing to do with whether you can be categorized as intelligent or not.

i kept seein' how you talked about "a real intelligent person" is usually more humble and whatnot. Which im not sure on the statistics of that, so i cant say a larger number of them tend to actually be humble to the extent of saying "usually" they're that way...but while a lot of smart people are like that, there's probably just as many who're right cunts. So yeah. Im fine with smart characters being assholes, doesnt give me the feeling that its some made-up trope. Over-used, maybe

Being an asshole in general cuts you off from sources of information. This, in turn, means that said person is not using the most optimal strategy to feed their driving need to know more things in order to satisfy the natural curiosity that is one of the defining traits of intelligent people.

It's possible for them to be an asshole to specific people, or to be an asshole only some of the time (in the case of those with bipolar disorder), but if they are an asshole in general then they're not actually a genuinely intelligent person. Maybe they have a high IQ and the capability of gaining intelligence, but their powerful brain is either in an immature state or just stunted due to some kind of disorder.

They will usually not be very successful, either due to a direct cause of their ass-hole nature causing them to loose connections and thus sabotaging themselves or due to an indirect common cause of whatever mental disorder they have that's causing them to act like an asshole also hampering their ability to be successful.

High-performance and successful intelligent people almost universally come off as humble.

 

[Zirrboy]

The point is, if you're going to write a character who's supposedly intelligent, you might as well put in the effort to write them like a real intelligent person with the traits and behaviors observed in real intelligent people IRL. It will make things more believable, and exchanging out the ass-hole always proclaiming his own brilliance while talking down on all the stupid people as is the bad stereotype for the more humble attitudes of real smart people who tend to not stand out because they themselves do not think so highly of themselves is an excellent first step.

A real smart person has a humble attitude but gets a lot of results worth bragging about while having an attitude of "but this is just normal, isn't it? Couldn't anybody have figured out this stuff if they just thought about it a little?" Genuinely confused as to why everyone's making a big deal of the things they did.

Three things.
If this is such an overwhelmingly common trait in intelligent people it makes a character relevantly less realistic, where does all this content on the traits of intelligence come from? The people themselves don't toot their own horn by definition, the others would rather praise themselves.
Putting humility on a pedestal is self-defeating.

The second thing is a repetition of my original post. Intelligence is a concept too elusive and spongy to establish it against someone's will. If I want to doubt someone's capabilities because I don't like them (for example because they're self-important, arrogant asshats), I can move around the goalpost until they no longer reach it, and because everyone's doing the "but that's not actually what intelligence is about" thing, nobody can fault me without room for doubt. Putting people up works in much the same way.
All the statistics touched upon in the video have had to define their own metric of what intelligence is and the results are as indicative as your unconditional agreement with that premise.

The third is that realism has no value of its own in writing. Hubris is perhaps the most straightforward flaw to give a competent character.
You could reasonably argue that it's overused or that you simply don't like it, but I'll be honest: None of the descriptions you included made me want to read the respective works and I dislike arrogant "geniuses" myself.

 

[TotallyHuman]

Being an asshole in general cuts you off from sources of information. This, in turn, means that said person is not using the most optimal strategy to feed their driving need to know more things in order to satisfy the natural curiosity that is one of the defining traits of intelligent people.

With all due respect that sounds a bit... how should I put it, it doesn't feel like a legit argument pro your position. I think it was called strawman but I don't really know. It's like "imagine this thing. What do you mean it exists in reality, I said imagine. Yes, in this imaginary thing it wouldn't work thus I am right".
Besides, the ability to acquire knowledge from written sources of information is something I would say more characteristic of an intelligent person than something like being humble or sociable.
A person who is an asshole is thus absolutely capable of acquiring knowledge, even if they cannot hold a conversation

It's possible for them to be an asshole to specific people, or to be an asshole only some of the time (in the case of those with bipolar disorder), but if they are an asshole in general then they're not actually a genuinely intelligent person. Maybe they have a high IQ and the capability of gaining intelligence, but their powerful brain is either in an immature state or just stunted due to some kind of disorder.

But being knowledgeable is not the same as being intelligent nor are either the same with being successful in whatever you define for success.
Like Ted Kaczynsky who is serving a life sentence for domestic terrorism, having prior isolated himself from society and gone off to live in the Montana Mountains despite being a genius and holding a PHD in math at Harvard at a young age. Is he an asshole? Well, if a domestic terrorist isn't, then who is? (tho he be based) Is he successful? Is he intelligent? It takes only to read "The industrial society and its future" to see for yourself. I say yes. But I wouldn't wanna be him sucess-wise.
Or Terry Davis, a guy who wrote a new programming language and the Temple OS from scratch, got schizophrenia and died homeless. He certainly didn't act humble (claming to possess a divine intellect and be chosen by God) yet his ability is unquestionable. Despite not being successful by any means.
Laplace has called himself the greatest mathematician in France and he may have actually been right. He was by no means humble but he can't be denied the title of a genius else who can be called that? No one.