#never in a million years would I thought that i would love a Transformers ™ movie. life works in mysterious ways

[turnipoddity]

my friend practically DRAGGED me into watching transformers one and i was like FINE. you owe me one. I’ll give this a chance

my eyes are opened. I cant believe it. I guess i am transformed. It’s peak

[jeanjauthor]

...If you perceive openly kind and gentle characters as boring, maybe it’s because you haven’t actively thought about all the ways that kind and gentle characters can be awesome and fascinating.

Here’s a starting point, in case you’re having trouble thinking up some situations and ways they could be awesome:

Lil doggy falls off embankment into raging river, gets swept onto rock, cannot get free, barks frantically for help.  Openly kind and gentle character quickly grabs the pretty spool of ribbon they bought in the village from their shopping bag, ties one end to a tree upstream the other end to their wrist, uses it as a safety rope to wade into the river, grabs lil doggy under arm, hauls self and doggie to shore.

I dare you to tell me that isn’t awesome!  A kind and gentle person is fully capable of being heroic.

Here’s a starting point, in case you’re having trouble thinking up some ways they could be fascinating--a real life example:

Bob Ross, the gentle, kind, happy painting instructor with the curly hair, was a real life shout-at-you-and-order-you-around sergeant in the military.  He was paid to be mean to people, and chose to be gentle and kind when he got out of the military.  The effects of having to shout and yell at people all day long, day after day, year after year, transformed this man’s nature into never wanting to do that again.  Whatever revelation he had that made him not want to do this?  Good for him!

That is pretty damn fascinating, at least to me.  I wish more people would have that kind of a revelation and personal transformation.

Or how about a kind & gentle character who studies bugs for a living, an entomologist who discovers his mailcarrier’s little brother has a lizard who hasn’t eaten anything in days, so he gets her a box full of beetles he spent hours searching for among the grasses and weeds and bushes of his several-acre home, all so she can take it home to her brother to see if her lizard will eat it and not starve to death. (Spoiler, the lizard did love the beetles, snapped them right up, & survived, yay!) 

(That was the plot of an actual book, btw, Harlequin Temptation™ #437, Dr. Hunk, by Glenda Sanders.  Kind, gentle, sweet, geeky hero, mailcarrier heroine, & one of my favorites, on my to-be-kept shelves.)

Kind and gentle characters can be awesome, fascinating, heroic, protective, a million things, without sacrificing their kindness and their gentleness.

As a reader, you need to open up your mind--and your book choices--to more than just the brooding anti-hero type that’s become so popular these days.  Yes, they have their place; yes, they can be complex, fascinating characters.  But you need to read about all kinds of people.

Why? Because this world is filled with all different kinds of people, and yes, you have to interact with them and get along with them.  Learning about them as characters in books is one of the steps in that process.  It’ll benefit you in the long run.

As a writer, you doubly need to open up your mind to ways of creating gentle, kind characters that can become awesome protagonists.  What we write about, other people read, absorb, and incorporate into their own lives to some degree.  It could just be an appreciation on all the steps that goes into making cheese, or it could be an exposure to a new kind of hero who could wind up being one of your role models in some way.

We need more gentleness, more kindness, in this world.

If you need more inspiration in your life on why kindness and gentleness ae awesome and wonderful and emulation-worthy personality traits, humans rescuing animals is one of the strongest ways we showcase and applaud these aspects of our nature.  So here’s one such video, one among thousands out there, showing kindness and gentleness displayed by humans, indivually and in groups.

its true!!