I was recently watching some commentary on movies in which someone trotted out the complaint that none of the main characters in poorly written movies are flawed, and therefore they are boring. If I recall correctly, Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy was an example. I know I’ve heard this complaint many times about the main characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation, too. I’ve heard it about many boring movies and TV shows, and it’s wrong.
The first and most illustrative problem with this critique, though not the greatest problem, is that all of the characters invoked are flawed. On first meeting Finn, Rey chases him rather than trying to talk to him, hits him with a staff rather than using the minimal amount of force necessary to get him to stop fleeing, and consents to BB-8 electrically torturing Finn in order to get him to talk when he hadn’t even refused to talk. The TNG cast would be too detailed to go into, so just to use Picard as an example, the man was extraordinarily arrogant, treating a vastly superior being (Q) as a mere annoyance and trying to bully him into doing what Picard wanted. (This directly led to Q introducing Star Fleet to the Borg, and in consequence getting an extraordinary number of people killed when the Borg came to invade.)
These are not flawless characters. They’re deeply flawed characters.
What they are is uninvolved characters.
They don’t care about anything, they just do whatever is necessary in order to move the plot forward. This is to say, they are not vulnerable. Rey is a boring character because nothing is at stake for her. She will do whatever the plot requires because she’s just a puppet dancing on the writer’s strings. Picard and crew were, likewise, uninvolved, acting only for the sake of moving the plot along.
Oddly, but very interestingly, the one exception to that in TNG which I can think of is Lt. Commander Data. He did, occasionally, want things. The two examples which come to mind are The Ensigns of Command in which Data struggled to figure out how to convince primitive settlers to abandon an outpost before it was wiped out by advanced aliens in a few days, and Deja Q, where Q becomes human and Data tries to teach him how to exist as a human based on what Data has learned so far. These examples are important precisely because they are not vulnerabilities within Data, but in his love for others. (I use love, here, in the sense of the Greek ἀγάπη (agape)—willing the good of the other for his sake.) Data is not vulnerable because he will, personally, be diminished if he does not achieve his goals. He is vulnerable because the object of his love may be diminished if he does not succeed. This is also why Data is far and away the most interesting character on all of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
What was true in TNG is true elsewhere. Where you find boring characters, you don’t find flawless characters. If nothing else, writers who can’t write interesting characters sure as hell can’t write perfect ones. No, where you find boring characters, you find invulnerable characters. They are invulnerable because there is nothing that they want which they are not sure of getting. Mostly, all they want is to do whatever it is the writer needs them to do in order to move the plot forward, though there are some variants. For example, some characters only want whatever is necessary in order to set up the current joke.
In short, boring characters are boring because they are not, properly speaking, characters. They are lifeless puppets, a mere locus of dialog with a convenient label. They are boring because they have no will of their own. There is no breath of life in them. But it is important not to mistake this; having a will of one’s own does not mean being selfish. Indeed, the most interesting characters are those who love—who will the good of those who can receive good from them. They are the most interesting because they have the most at stake. Fools who are being selfish are not nearly so interesting because—painting with a broad brush—they would usually be better off if they don’t get what they want.
So can we please stop with this nonsense about flawed characters? We don’t want flawed characters. We want vulnerable characters.
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Chris Lansdown 
It happens more often in written stories, but all too often “flawed characters” are heroes who are almost as nasty as the villains.
In really bad stories, you could imagine the heroes doing the same garbage as the villains.
But yes, your thought about “vulnerable characters” makes good sense.
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I know what you mean. In a lot of modern stories the big question for the protagonist is whether he’s going to be completely worthless or take the higher path and be only mostly worthless.
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As Aristotle observed, we like characters who are like us or a little better. So, yes, some people really like flawed character. Perhaps very flawed.
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I have opinions on this point, expressed in the links below:
THANK YOU very much for posting this. I am SO fed up with the “make your characters flawed!” screaming. Flaws are natural – you don’t *make* them, they’re just *there*. And people too often think one thing is a flaw when it isn’t (such as angst). Thank you for this post. It is high time this trend got turned around.
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In my opinion the most interesting characters are those who have a signature quality that serves as both a virtue and a flaw, depending on the circumstances.
An example is Tony DiNozzo from the TV show NCIS. He was insatiably nosy for the personal details of other people’s lives and utterly shameless about indulging it, which made him amusingly flawed as a person, but also made him an extraordinary investigator. His personality defects allowed him to pursue lines of questioning that a more respectful and dignified person would have avoided and his habit of poking his nose into things not obviously connected to the case at hand frequently turned up clues that might otherwise have been overlooked.
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I agree with the “uninvolved” / “vulnerable” distinction, but I don’t parse things that way — that’s just bad writing. Anything that moves a character around for external reasons of plot vs internally motivated reasons is bad fiction.
Writing that moves unchanging archetypes around for the plot has its purposes ( religious fables ) but the writing that we (mostly) are aiming at in fiction is about characters, conflict, and growth (or consequences).
The fundamental distinction I think of is characters who are trying to do “the right thing” as a basic trait vs characters who automatically do the most “expedient” thing. The accompanying flaws are specific: “good guys” have a tendency to think their version of “the right” is the only relevant one, and can try and force their version unacceptably. They need to rise above that naive flaw to a wider perspective. They also have to survive (or protect) and that can force expedient behavior on them, contrary to their inclination, which presents an interesting problem of personal cost (or sin, if you think in those terms).
Characters who are “out for themselves” primarily may, of course, be successful “villains”, people of whom we disapprove who seem to thrive. What makes them interesting is conflicts in their reasoning (doing the expedient thing leads to personal dissatisfaction or disaster), and the “human” moments where they do the right thing without thinking about it (“don’t run over those kittens!”) and any cognitive dissonance that might result.
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