u/upsetusder2

Characters like

Hal wyler

Lester freamon

Lalo salamanca

Highly intelligent characters that feel Highly intelligent. Not just ohh he has a iq of 180 and at the age of 4 memorized the entire dictionary

I realised i do better when the iq test has a time limit of 30 mins.

Not because I need the 30 mins but because my brain doesent panic if the time limit is just 2 minutes per item I panick over analyze etc.

Is this a known phenomenon

This whole sub has become an echo chamber and people are just scaling characters they like more higher sorry but placing dr house higher than hannibal in fsiq or saying yumeko beats him is crazy

What is your favourite tv show mine has to either be hannibal or community.

It's a joke in bojack horseman about the fact that everyone is either a zoe or a zelda

Zelda is the happy, optimistic, fun-loving extrovert. Zoë is the moody, smart, pessimistic,introvert

Like on what side of the spectrum do you fall

Or to just speak what he thinks is true.

Because alicia western is interesting in my eyes she is one of the smartest characters ever put on a page.

She seems and feels genuinely smart my question is was this a way for cormac to come to terms with his own demise or did he want to explore fundamental truths of the universe and how a mind like alicia breaks the mold?

Or did he want to analyze the correlation between exceptional mental faculties and mental illness what do you think?

So I watched a video of a youtuber called limus and she said that if you think you need to get diagnosen you are either ableist or queerphobic which I didnt completely get where this sentiment was coming from

How does your thought process work

Does anyone else here feel the same way that they are not that commanding etc

Doesent matter in what genre I just want very very smart characters that feel realistic or atleast logically consistent.

In my eyes the biggest problem with writing genius level characters is two fold.

Firstly we do not know what intelligence really is we have an approximation but we do not know what true intelligence is we think it has something to do with problem solving but we do not conclusively know.

Like for example is creative aptitude a part of intellect who knows?

Secondly and more importantly we do not know how these genius level characters think or experience the world.

We might try to emulate genius level deduction with thinking long and hard about a particular problem and then let our character solve it in mere seconds but that not how that would work.

Real philosophical geniuses for example pondered questions for multiple months or years.

They made leaps they couldn't explain etc.

So making a genius just know the answer or figure out something super quickly just isn't really the beat way to do it.

The way in which genius is characterized which I hate the most is fast mental calculations like for example oh she is such a gemius she can do complex calculations in her head faster than a calculator.

Why why do people think that this is how intelligent people operate?

One way I have seen that I liked is making the genius character cunning or updating their hypothesis.

Or to give them creative plans or to make them think outside of the box

Or you could just do the cormac mccarthy thing and make your genius a culmination of other geniuses.

So what do you think how should gemius character's be written?

Do you agree with this take?

Looking for fantasy books with characters that are geniuses like tehol or vetinari

Books with characters like the mc in ted chiangs understand.

Jean le flambeur and miles vorkosigan

Heyy iam looking for scifi and fantasy books with characters that can be described as being geniuses.

Characters like the main character in understand by ted chiang

Like miles vorkosigan

Like lisbeth salander

Like jean le flambeur