NoiselessFan wrote:Yes, I agree her motivations are consistently good. She's just the closest thing to unpredictable in the show. Everyone else, while they may have a few blips of behavior here or there, are totally predictable to me, in all moral situations.Audrey Horne wrote:And in regards to Audrey -the character is absolutely wonderfully written and developed, sure.
But in terms of surprising us in which side of morality she will fall on -it becomes pretty clear after the crying at Leland and the madness of the town, that she is an innocent.
Her scheming is always against those that deserve it- always a cog to those attempting to do something illicit (Ben and the Norwegians raping the land; Battis and Blackie recruiting underage girls into prostitution; Bobby attmepting to blackmail Ben and leading to stealing evidence of Renault to exonnorate Cooper. Her tactics are always fun and surprising but the viewer begins to feel safe and secure that the end result is in the vein of acheiving good. It's just the surprise of how she'll do it.
With Audrey I was surprised when she cried seeing Leland. I figured she'd laugh, so she got me there. I was also wondering if her tactics to get Cooper would escalate later and entering more of a scheming mode. They never did but I thought they might, so I felt that made her future course a bit unpredictable. Other than that, yeah, she could be read fairly easily.
All humans have 2 things in common: 1) we all want something that makes us happy, whatever it is, and 2) we'll go to varying lengths to get it. So we all have motivations pushing us and moral boundaries holding us back, and the boundary can be the same or different for each motivation we have. This is what makes us all the same and unique at the same time. It's what makes us complex and unpredictable, because the combo of motivation to boundary is a tug of war that goes on forever.
The best characters mimic this - for characters to be great, they need lots of different motivations and lots of different moral boundaries matched to those motivations.
So for example, I may be motivated to get money or fame or a particular woman, 3 different motivations. I could go to school to get the money and while I'm there I may have to cheat on a test (moral boundary crossed); I could also try to marry someone who already has money (a different moral boundary crossed); I could also try to steal the money (the most severe moral boundary crossed). It all depends on how big the motivation pushing me versus the boundary in my way.
What's my point? Audrey seems predictable because she seems to have only one motivation: To get Cooper. Within that one motivation, however, she has a variety of different moral boundaries, some of which she will cross at times, some she will not. This is what makes her cool, because although we're sure what drives her, we're never quite sure where she'll stop to get it.
Some characters are unpredictable because we don't know what their motivations are, others because we don't know what their boundaries are, and some because we're unsure about both. Audrey is more the second type, so I guess I now disagree that she is predictable - she is only predictable in what she wants, not in what she will do to get it.