You know you're not being employed because you're appealing to people; you're being employed because you're odd, or because you just represent certain human beings who aren't the wish-fulfillment characters.
The term is far older than Internet discussions: it originally referred to characters created in fan fiction who proceeded to outshine and/or romance the actual television characters: a Mary Sue is the author's own wish-fulfillment character.
"I later produced a TV series called '24,' and that's about a wish-fulfillment character that kind of breaks through red tape," Grazer says.
A protective layer of fairy-tale wish fulfillment keeps its characters, adapted from Ann Brashares's novels, at a studious distance from brute reality.
Viewers do watch Tony Soprano or Don Draper as wish-fulfillment, because these characters break rules that ordinary men can't, but that truth can obscure the deeper ways both shows are about rules, and how we as a society make them, and what they mean.
Although it contains up-to-the-minute references to Justin Bieber and social media, "The Discreet Hero" feels retrospective in a personal and perhaps valedictory way, a fulfillment of themes and characters that have populated his work for decades.
Its resolution involves love, which, in Apatow's view, is no renunciation or simplification, but just another mode of difficulty, a kind of fulfillment that emerges from characters who are already formed and who merely put themselves and each other to new tests.
Walker, who has been an editor at ElleGirl and Seventeen magazines, has previously written Y.A. romance-centric novels, but Ty feels more like an import from the Department of Wish Fulfillment than a real character in the scope of this story.
According to Pahls, "To a great extent, Fritz was his wish-fulfillment... [the character allowed Robert to] do great deeds, have wild adventures, and undergo a variety of sex experiences, which he himself felt he couldn't.
Behind the characters' confused attempts at fulfillment is Uncle Eric, to whom they go seeking solace, not realizing that his brooding wisdom is driving them apart.
Disabled people should not be convenient mechanisms through which other characters find motivation and fulfillment, a trope seen not only in Me Before You (which the Guardian's review called "a deathly dull euthanasia romcom") but other films.
