I’ve been trying really hard to articulate my thoughts in a way that really gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say. Simply put, the characters aren’t real, and treating them like they are prevents you from actually engaging with the themes of the story meaningfully. Ultimately it’s your life, everyone can do what they want, but people often just use this to dictate how lenient they are in understanding a character’s perspective, or the justifications or reasons for a character’s actions.

The best way I can explain this is anecdotally. Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket is a 1989 spinoff show, some five or six episodes, detailing a space colony during the events of the original mobile suit gundam. The main protagonist is a war obsessed 11 year old boy who views the one year war as spectacle, not as, y’know, war. He is whiny, selfish, and desperate for attention and approval to the point he begins to help a Zeon sting operation against his own home colony because the Zeon soldiers will sometimes indulge him. If you go to an anime viewing website with comments (certainly unmoderated comments), you will find people disparaging him with comments ranging from what I just said, to things I think it’s inappropriate to say and won’t repeat.

This is setup. You can find him annoying, but this is setup. That’s the point. His actions might be personally annoying, but they aren’t narratively annoying, because the story is about him growing up, about him being thrust into adulthood before his peers because his war-as-spectacle ideals blinded him to the politics dictating the one year war. When the story ends, someone has died, someone only he knows and cares about. He has experienced a loss that none of his friends can relate to, and none of them understand.

If you base your opinion of Alfred on how you’d feel about him IRL, you’ll lose the entire story. I’d be damned if you made it through the show at all. Media is art whether you want it to be or not, and it is asking you to engage with it in certain questions. If you aren’t willing to look past your real life feelings on a hypothetical real life person (who is not real and does not exist), you will never be able to get to the heart of those questions. You’ll lose out. I realize this will sound a little mean, but it’s shallow, basically.