If a character lacks realism, there is no way that the author's story can appeal to a reader. Even if it's a fantasy character (vampire, elf, centaur, whatever), all characters need to have a certain level of realism. If the reader can't imagine this world of yours because your character lacks dimension, your story is flat and boring. This is why I always stress the importance of your characters because the way they are portrayed can ultimately affect the way your readers view the story.

Even a boring plot with amazing characters will make the plot seem less boring, but a great plot cannot survive on plot alone.

By realism, I generally mean to make them believable and realistic. In some ways, it's best to put yourself in your character's shoes and wonder how someone with a working brain will react to a certain situation. Surprisingly, most authors on AFF fail to realize that their fictional characters are only human and exaggerate everything they do that it doesn't touch the reader.

Some of the most unrealistic and overused characters are the ones that fall too quickly in love and respond unrealistically in moments of distress. A character that wears his/her heart on their sleeve is a good, well thought-out character. It shows that you've given the character a flaw and made him/her emotionally unguarded, sensitive, and endearing in the sense that he/she has so much love to give. This is a realistic character. An unrealistic character is one who is introduced as a cold, heartless person in the beginning, but within a few days, he/she falls head over heels in love with someone else.

No sane person will ever react this way.

In the same manner, a person facing a murderer in the middle of an empty street will not act like a complete badass unless he/she is also mentally unstable and has a heart of steel. If you were to face a murderer in the middle of nowhere, what would you do? Piss your pants? Cry for mercy? Probably. These are realistic reactions to a certain situation.

If your crush talks to you, do you start blushing and saying ridiculous things like you're a character out of a shoujo manga? Realistically, this isn't possible.

Readers constantly ask me how I can portray a character so well as if they're comfortable in their own fictional skin, and I realize that a sense of realism helps tremendously since so many AFF authors forget that characters are not just toys in an alternate dimension but imitations of you and me. You can't hope for readers to understand your character without relating to them on a certain level, so always think about how any normal person would respond to a situation instead of making it so dramatic that it's unbelievable and fake.

Like I've addressed so many times in this chapter already, your characters are real people, don't forget that. Without realism, they're just flat, folded origami, and to be able to relate to a character, the emotions that a character feels also needs to be relatable and, most importantly, believable.

Let's learn about pathos next, yes?