On Tobias Funke

I wonder if part of the reason Arrested Development was cancelled was because of characters like Tobias. He was pretty much asexual. People didn't know how to classify him. Or Buster for that matter. Or George Michael, maybe. Tobias' sexuality and Buster's intelligence were both made fun of but never made clear. Was Tobias gay? He certainly didn't seem sexually interested in his wife (Portia De Rossi for those not in the know). He did have a lot of man crushes. I think he had the possibility of being gay but he was too much like a child to know it yet. He was pre-sexual in a way. I wonder if audiences didn't like that. I wonder if audiences didn't like not knowing whether Buster was retarded or just extremely sheltered. Does the ability to classify a character increase a show's or a book's or a film's chances of success? Most definitely. That means more people can "connect" even if it is a more shallow connection than an extremely complex character that only the author truly understands. Does that necessarily mean that classless character results in an unsuccessful show, book, or film?


I guess I need to quantify "success". Let's say, for the sake of simplicity: 10 seasons for a show. 100,000 copies for a book. $200,000,000 for a movie's theatrical run. 


Thinking about characters that defy categorization: who are some other characters that fit this? Do they fit into the realm of "successful"? In the end, it doesn't really matter but I am interested in the possible conversations that could be had.


Judge Holden from Blood Meridian is pretty much pure violence. At first he is a little harder to put into a category. He is this smart, hairless member of a group of Apache hunters. Still he is intriguing. Though, by the end of the book, he pretty much fits snugly into a classification, so maybe he isn't a good example. I would say the book is successful, but maybe not at first. I read somewhere that it only sold about 2,500 copies in it's original run. This could be falsehood, though because I don't know where I read that. Since then the book has been listed as one of the best books in the American Language. The Judge has also been named the 43rd greatest character in fiction since 1900, so I think it is a success.  


I'm blanking on possible ambiguous characters other than Tobias Funke and Buster Bluth, so I will now pass the topic on to the next person.