>>43
I know you wrote this four years ago and you'll never read my response, but this comment was so stupid I can't help myself.

>For example, people have asserted that a work of fiction is bad because no one in their personal lives act like the novels' characters. Yet, they make no attempt to back why this makes it bad, just leaving it up in the air, a hanging non-sequitur.

If a work of fiction has characters who aren't realistic, it is probably a self-indulgent piece of shit. Lots of godawful writers love to write characters who epitomize what they consider to be the good and the evil, the strong and the weak, etc. Inevitably, the character that results will seem plastic and fake, because he has been written purely to represent an idea and not to be a believable human being. This fakeness will be evident in the character's actions, his inner monologues and his dialogue with other characters. If your characters act all weird and plastic and fake, they're not relatable to the reader as human beings, and they don't draw the reader in. A character should only seem unrealistic if that's the way he is meant to seem, and in that case other characters should recognize it (see Brave New World for a good example of this.)

So yes, characters who don't act like human beings are generally not effective characters. And it doesn't matter whether Ayn Rand was trying to prove a point about independence or reliance on others or any of that. The Fountainhead is a novel, so it should have characters who fucking act like people and not robots with pre-programmed responses. If Rand couldn't handle not writing a preachy political/philosophical text, she should have stuck with her essays.

By the way, it is possible to write a political or philosophical novel that also feels "real". 1984 and Brave New World are great examples. Rand just wasn't any good at it.