Welcome to Recurring Character
Why I'm creating a field guide to characters – in stories and in life.
What is Recurring Character?
It’s a newsletter about the roles we never stop playing.
Who’s behind it?
Me, Holly Friend, a writer and researcher who makes sense of the world by identifying trends and narratives. I do this for brands and media companies – you can find more about this here – but mostly, I do it for fun. I also write fiction.
Why am I writing about this?
I’ve always been interested in characters – how they annoy us and obsess us. How they’re not only in TV shows and books, but in our gossip, personal histories, the way we describe someone we just met. We can’t help but fill our lives with characters. In a world that’s so confusing and disordered, giving people a defined role is one way to create order. It’s normal. It’s healthy.
Which characters, exactly?
There are countless character types that resurface again and again in storytelling – not specific people necessarily, but roles, patterns, and behaviours we can’t seem to shake. I’ll be writing about the ones that are on my mind.
Some of these characters you can already find on TV Tropes. It’s a website I loved as a teen, and I would spend hours going from link to link like some sort of video game, usually starting with our favourite Millennial nemesis, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and ending in agreement that the Villain Has A Point. You might think this early exposure to our apparent unoriginality of thought might stop me from enjoying stories – or wanting to write them. But instead I found it comforting. Finally, there was a formula, a shared language, a set of rules we could admit to following.
I still go on TV Tropes. It reminds me of a quieter internet that, rather than being crowded with voices, has just one omnipresent narrator. That said, I always felt like there was something missing. Where TV Tropes was focused on the characters and tropes in fictional media, I’ve always wondered what happens when these tropes spill out into real life. Where do they go? And who is documenting them?
‘Saying don’t use tropes in a story is like saying don’t use flour in a cake’ – Reddit
But aren’t tropes bad?
We like to think we’re above tropes, but I’m not sure there’s a way to live without them. I recently went looking for evidence of this, that tropes are ready to be ‘de-villainised’ or at least talked about, but all I found were articles warning us away.
Everyone on the internet seemed to agree that this, the avoiding of tropes, was not only the secret to being a good writer, but something that was actually possible.
To help us avoid using tropes, people like to tell us to look around – at our cousins, co-workers, the man at the bus stop, to remind us, as if we have somehow forgotten, that they too are people; that they have annoying habits and strange fears and contradictory value systems. I don’t disagree with this. People are weird! But they’re also weird in very similar ways. Most of us live in a culture where we aren’t that different from one another. And I’m not sure we really even… want to be?
Is it related to trends?
Sort of. I work in trend forecasting, which is, in simple terms, an exercise in pattern-spotting and contemplating, a bit like this meme. After nearly a decade in the industry, I notice that the same things keep going away and coming back. It is people, not brands, who are responsible for creating and following trends. Even in all our mirroring, gathering, absorbing, we remain certain that we are individuals. We forget that we are surrounded and shaped by context and codes and styles and memes. We forget that we are characters, many of which, ultimately, aren’t even that ‘new’.
What will this be?
A cultural field guide to these characters. A place for reflection, analysis, and prediction, drawn from pop culture, literature, media, and social observation (Instagram Stories, personal experiences, the pub).
What won’t this be?
An objective study. Some characters will make me roll my eyes, others I’ll feel weirdly protective over, but I’m not going to be complaining about the Cool Girl or waging war on the Softboi. Asking whether a character is good or bad doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is they came from, why we feel things about them, and why they never seem to go away.
I’m also not a media historian. I have plenty of biases, cultural gaps, and references I’ll return to more than once. Think of this as a small, personal world. When I fixate on something, I get critical, carried away, and more than a bit annoying. The same thing will happen on this Substack.
Who is it for?
Anyone who sees patterns in people and stories.
How often will I post?
I’ll be publishing free Character Reports whenever I can. Over time, expect new formats like emerging tropes, recommended reading, and field notes.
Subscribe below to get Character #1 in your inbox soon. Until then, you can listen to me fixating on Ottessa Moshfegh and Margaret Qualley on the STARGIRL podcast.
this is soooooo exciting!!!
Simply cannot wait - congrats Holly!