While literary characters often adhere to consistent traits and behaviors, humans exhibit a complexity that defies strict characterization. Characters aren't supposed to be human like, they are not supposed to capture human complexity but the complexity of the work they build upon.
Characters can navigate intricate emotions, internal conflicts, and layers of psychological depth but only in a limited frame. It's why slice of life stories thrive on portraying the everyday experiences and emotions of people. Mundane acts are more predictable and too low stake to matter being out of character.
Unlike fictional figures designed with specific traits, humans do not serve a story, humans do not neatly tie up their arcs or have any meaning to their lives as stories do.
The unpredictability of real-life situations and external influences challenges the notion of consistent character.
Just a quick thought I wanted to type out. Will get back to think about this. Would love to hear what all yall think about it.
I disagree with the implicit assumption that humans and characters are mutually exclusive.
Consider biographies - are the subjects humans, characters, or both?
The thing for me is that characters exist in the vaccum of a story hemce why I call em mutually exclusive.
Now each biography tells a story and the person os turned into a character. I mean I have used real life people as inspiration for characters myself.
So in biographies, consider someone like Churchill, Gandhi etc. They've had many biographies written about em and each creates a different character.
Hell just look at the recent Musk biography which paints him in a much better light than most of us see. The writer is still creating a compelling character based story, as Walter Isaacson basically uses musks childhood to explain his actions for eg. He's just a writer creating a story.
Then what would you consider to be a human, given all we hear about others are stories, or snippets thereof?
The full essence of a person goes beyond the narratives constructed around them, like the richness of personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions that are beyond the scope of any story or snippet.
Having said that, I like your point and perhaps capturing a snipett of a person is all we can do anyways (Outside of ourselves). Which is exactly what stories do too