“It’s what _I_ want to do!”
How dare they not buy my book.
Had a poster pop up on my X feed, saying that some research or other showed that people did not like the main character to be unlikeable. This struck me as research into if water is wet. But our writer-poster continued: what if that was the author’s intention? What if they MEANT to write an unlikable main character? And they had done that really well!
I’m guessing here that she (pronouns in bio) had done this, and now wanted to be told how desirable succeeding at doing this so well that no-one liked the character was. Maybe I’m maligning her, but it’s not the first time, or, I’ll bet, the last time I will come up against an author who has written something in what their English Lit Prof would have told them was utterly technically brilliant — and are offended because I didn’t enjoy it.
“But it is BRILLIANT.”
“I got bored, didn’t really care about the characters.”
“But it is BRILLIANT! You’re an idiot and WRONG!”
Maybe I am. I don’t really care. You write exactly what you want to. Hell, these days I do. But I am not paying money for something I don’t want to read. No matter how brilliant you or anyone else thinks it. I am sure that an audience of people who want to read something where the author pleases themselves by writing something most people don’t want to read… must exist. I have a feeling it might be pretty small.
If pleasing yourself and writing what you want is primal, fine. You can. You are free to. But I too am free not to buy it. (“Bigot!” she screamed. “This is why we need state support for authors. The right authors. Not ones who are vile literally prostitutes, serving the coarse taste of the hoi-polloi instead of Art.”)
Seriously, even the most unlikable main character has to offer the promise of some redeeming feature to get my money. Unless it is an author I know and trust to deliver, I prefer to like them a little from the outset.
Mad Genius Club 
67 responses to “It’s not what the readers want”
I have seen so many people advance the theory that a main character has to be unlikable at the beginning of the story so that the character can grow and change over the course of the story. It’s presented as an axiom, that of course all good stories follow that principle.
Honestly, I can’t think of a single example of a character changing from unlikable to likeable over the course of a story. In Coming Of Age stories characters do grow and change as part of the plot, but they change from a likable child into a likable adult.
Often characters do learn about the world as part of an unfolding narrative, going from naitivity to experience, but that’s not a change in who they are, but what they know.
Emma Woodhouse from the Jane Austen novel is one of the few examples I can think of off-hand, and while I will watch period Emma adaptations (Clueless can go to blazes) all day long, I find the book character, unmediated by an actress, kind of difficult to take.
Heck, my wife sat me down to watch one of the movies (I’ve never read the book), and after 20 minutes I said, “Honey, I love you very much, but do I HAVE to watch this? There is literally no one to like.”
Ouch, you poor man!
I actually like Emma, it’s one of my favorite Austen novels.
Possible candidates:
The Beast in Beauty and the Beast
Ebenezer Scrooge
Martin Chuzzlewit (the younger)
Sam Adams in Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels
Scrooge has humor and a certain amount of pluck; there’s also some indications that, although by no means a kind or sympathetic person, his bark is worse than his bite – in spite of much grumbling he lets Cratchit take Christmas Day off (possibly as paid leave depending on how you interpret the “picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December” line). A real, dyed in the wool, Evil Rich Guy in your standard Dickens novel probably wouldn’t even do that.
The Beast is not usually a POV character; the other ones I’ve not encountered.
It’s a balancing act to depict a flawed character likeable enough to make people care whether they overcome their flaw. I have seen memes where people complained about T’Challa in Civil War — why did he assume Bucky was guilty? — and others responding that was his character arc. (And that’s not getting into how the same character will annoy some readers as too good to be true and others as too flawed.)
OTOH, I have seen a supporting character start to arc. The webcomic The Specialists has Jack-Be-Nimble who was at first just an obstacle to our hero, but we find out more about him and the commentariat was musing that he really needed to be broken very, very carefully and then put back together very, very carefully. He shows some promising signs. (Though it is perhaps unsurprising that the first unmistakably good thing he does is lie.)
I have confessed to loving Space Station Noir, where the main characters are criminals. But they are loveable criminals.
Here’s the thing, though, people who say you “should” like it if it’s well done, are confusing writing for other people’s pleasure with passing a test in school. No matter how well you do it, if it’s unpleasant, you’re not getting my chocolate money. (I rarely drink beer.)
But as a supporting character, I’ve seen it done beautiful.
I once said, online, that I didn’t like a book because of X. Someone said it was supposed to be that. I asked him what, if anything, he meant by that, and didn’t get a very coherent answer.
They think it’s a test and if you pass it, people HAVE to like it. It doesn’t work that way.
I don’t read books to take tests anymore, so they can take that book and shove it. I read for entertainment or to advance my knowledge of a subject area.
Precisely. And we have SO MUCH CHOICE. If I don’t like it, I ditch.
OTOH, I have run across readers who seem to think that anything they don’t like is an error on the writer’s part.
I once got a critique of a story, where in one scene, one character calls another a prig. The critique included the disapproving statement that he also thought her a prig. What can one say? Thank you for telling me I succeeded?
oh, there is that. Sometimes
First time I saw it done was Silverlock way back in the 60s. I didn’t like it then, and do not like it now.
Not only was he unlikeable to start, he didn’t arc convincingly, and he was a very poor choice of point of view character.
But I don’t want to make chocolate pudding OR butterscotch! I make the best Brussel Sprout pudding in the world, and people would buy it if it weren’t for their ignorant prejudice!
I’ll raise my hand and suggest Dexter (Jeff Lindsay) as an edge case.
For those who don’t know him, this is a Florida psychopath, orphaned and damaged young, who is raised by a cop and channeled into directing his impulses to violence/murder only toward criminal villains, and then taught how to hide his actions. His career is in forensics for a police department, and thus he often finds himself investigating his own crimes and trying to bury any self-incriminating evidence.
He is presented as crippled by his inability to read most emotions or recognize them (though he is sometimes surprised by his own), while retaining some pseudo-familial ties (the man who raised him and that man’s daughter as his “sister”). We understand much more of what he interacts with socially than he does. The only things that inhibit him are “the code” his adoptive father trains him into, and survival (which often means the murder of bad guys to stay hidden). When he does a nice thing (from our perspective), it’s almost always instrumental (to stop questions being asked), rather than out of a benevolent impulse (he doesn’t really have those).
I’m not sure this is plausibly consistent with any real psychopath, but in the context of the books, the audience would surely divide between those who are amused by the black humor and clever webs of potential discovery, and those who are repelled by the whole premise, since he is wholly without remorse or compunction about killing (within his “code”). My personal take of the character (as if he were real) is “limited, understandable, repellent, damaged, fascinating, — how will he survive? — will he damage anyone he “shouldn’t”?” I don’t think that quite translates as “likable”.
The Man With No Name movies and some of the other spaghetti westerns in the same era are interesting precisely because of the “does good-ish things for self-interested reasons…or does he?” Stronger element in Fistful of Dollars and Few Dollars More than in GBU, in my opinion – the grand anti-war gesture of destroying the bridge both sides are fighting for feels more like Leone preaching than Blondie acting within his normal parameters.
Curiously enough, you get it also in Jane Austen, of all people. Mansfield Park, with its messy, uniformly unheroic characters, anticlimactic final chapter, and the timid heroine modern readers so often accuse of being judgmental, when the far more popular Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot are actually much b****ier in their private opinions of people they don’t approve.
@MishaBurnett (For whatever reason my phone browser can’t reply directly on word press anymore)
I’ve seen it pulled off exactly once. Prince Rodger from Weber and Ringo’s ‘March Upcountry’ books does transform from an immensely annoying brat into a sympathetic, respect worthy character.
I am not John Ringo. Nor am I David Weber.
That said, I think why it worked is the Bronze Bastards were the initial hooks, rather than the annoying immature princling they were guarding. I distinctly remember the good Captain’s sinal salute as he decides the only way any of them are going to avoid throttling their charge is to treat him as an especially green 2nd lieutenant in dire need of training. Wall to wall training, if necessary…
You beat me to it. I was going to suggest Prince Rodger, too.
Eric Flint had a way of taking the villains from a previous book and turning them into the hero in a second book. (John Chandler Simpson of 1632 and 1633 is an example.) However there is a sympathetic main character in the first book and Simpson does not start as the main character of 1633.
It might be instrumental to note that 1633 was cowritten with David Weber, who figures pretty prominently in other examples.
He also changes the Peoples Republic of Haven as the “bad guys” to the “Republic of Haven” good guys against the bad guys of the new Manticoran government.
And one of his tricks is that the “bad guys” aren’t irredeemable arseholes and the changeover is shown on the page. We really understand Roger’s frustration when he learns why his mother has never trusted him. Weber tends to write multi-pov stories a lot, so it’s easier to see the changes in main characters, too.
Weber is a master at character growth.
Another example would be Sir Vaijon from Weber’s Bahzell series.
Agree. And I think that one thing that “helps” him as a character is that he wonders “what am I missing”. IE He knows that his teacher (forget the teacher’s name) wants more from him but isn’t sure what it is. Of course, he’s a member of the Order because he wants to service his god not because of “status”.
Still, a couple of broke arms and Bahzell’s mercy wakes up up to “what he is missing”.
I would note that in all of these examples, there was at least some indication that the character was capable of growth.
For a main character that was unlikable all through a novel – Ender. (Pitiable, maybe, but not likeable. Opinions vary on him in the sequels – but I still didn’t like him, and he was not even nearly as interesting to me as in “Ender’s Game.”)
For that matter, going back to the classics – was D. D. Harriman ever “likeable”? Obsessed, driven, interesting. But willing to do anything, including outright fraud, to achieve his goal.
“Sympathetic” might be a better term than likable. Understandable motivations, ones that a reader might agree with even if they disagreed with some of the choices the character makes in pursuit of their goal. Someone we at least care about what happens to them and whether their goals turn out.
Peter in Ender’s Game is the character that I hated. It wasn’t until the Bean companion series came out that I started enjoying the character as we see his motivations. Ender’s Game is a great story, but it’s a very dark story as well. It’s basically just showing you all the child abuse. Speaker For the Dead made Ender seem much more human and empathetic. They are very, very different books.
Different, IMHO. In the mind of the reader, of course.
For examples, the central characters in the “Nikki and Bob,” the “Union Station” (and offshoots), and the “Wine of the Gods” (and offshoots) series are all very likeable to me. I would be thrilled to meet them in real life and “hang” with them for a spell.
I’m reminded of a subtype of music that’s really only enjoyed by musicians. Sometimes (often) professional musicians get bored of the popular classics they’ve performaned so much they can do it in their sleep. What they get into on their own time start to be fantasticly technically demanding pieces. Odd tempos. Patterns that are exactly the opposite of what their instrument does well. Really experimental stuff.
The thing is, it usually ends up being pretty unlistenable stuff behind the appreciation for the technique.
One of the milder examples is the bass trombone version of the beach cello suites: https://youtu.be/BVxAehgZtCY?si=axsYzmWikTanbRpg
It’s not bad, but certainly not something you can expect the average music listener to flock to.
Now, it has a place. Doing the cello suites on bass trombone is something of a rite of passage for a bass trombonist, because it *really does* push you to your limits and stresses every pain point of the instrument. But it’s never going to Flight of the Valkyries. But the skills that make the cello suites sound passable on bass trombone will make your Flight of the Valkyries the stuff of legends too.
I feel like a lot of the literary weirdness came out of that, and forgetting what it was really for.
This is similar to some abstract painters, especially Pollock. Pollock did not splatter paint, but controlled every drip and drab. He is what painters call “painterliness”, the attention to brush strokes, paint build up, layer, and so on, without any subject.
Once it was explained intellectually I got it, but I don’t understand it like the artist who explained it to me did. Although she was primarily a sculptor and hated most abstract art she had a soft spot for Pollock because the attention to detail and craft divorced from everything else spoke to her stone carving heart.
Learn something new every day. This explains why some people seem to study Pollocks in such detail, when to an ordinary person, who judges paintings as a combination of subject and execution of same, there’s nothing much to see. Thank you!
I hate abstract art. And having never had Pollock explained to me thus, I’ve always thought he was overrated. Next time I’ll have to look at the fine details. Thanks
Maaayyyyybe Eustace Scrubb in the Chronicles of Narnia? Although that might just be me, because the character pushed some of my personal buttons from dealing with his ilk in school at the same time as I was reading the books for the first time.
I always thought of him as the annoying comic relief, at least until his redemption arc. As if Tucho Ramirez was a weaselly British schoolboy whose greed got him turned into a dragon partway through, and made him rethink his life.
He wouldn’t have worked, though without Edmund and Lucy there. Just like Edmund wouldn’t have worked as the main character in the first book, but the other 3 kids (Especially Peter for me) kept me in the story. This and his actions in Prince Caspian let him and Lucy carry us through Eustace’s redemption arc in Dawn Treader and into the Silver Chair. Unlikeable can work for A main character but probably not THE main character. Even anti-heroes on a redemption arc, if they’re primary, need to be likeable enough you want them redeemed.
Although Edward from book 1 is closer to “main character”, Eustace works too.
Edmund….
I dealt with kids like him too in school when I read ‘Voyage’. I wasn’t a fan of him either. I was even more boggled to see that Eustace was unhappy about becoming a dragon. When I was in 4th grade at my school I would have loved to become one and buzz the neighborhood, but I’ve always been strange.
Thomas Covenant in Donaldson’s isekai trilogy. Whiny, unsocial author transported to another world and expected to be a hero. Does not do well at the job.
As for state-supported authors, how about that British wanker they gave a literary grant…I think it’s been about 15 years now, and still hasn’t published a word. I suspect we’re all better off for him being paid not to write.
It’s like when I first heard about the John Player Lectures that went on in Britain in the early 1970s (basically, cigarette company using gov’t grants to have sportsmen, celebrities and politicians talk about their lives in front of audiences). My reaction was something along the lines of “That’s an amazingly stupid use of taxpayer money, but still probably less dangerous than most of the other things the government could be doing with taxpayer money.”
There’s an entire subgenre of movie westerns (the two most familiar to me are Ride a Crooked Trail and Beyond the Law; you could maybe put Posse from Hell and Duel at Silver Creek in here as well) about the town that recruits someone from the wrong side of the law to be a lawman. There’s certain baseline requirements for them to be protagonists though: they have to be at least killers with a code of honor; and in Crooked Trail and Beyond the Law the anti-hero is a thief who doesn’t kill unless he has to and has a certain degree of kindness to those weaker than him (the obligatory cute kid and dog in Crooked Trail; the seemingly naive mining engineer in Beyond the Law.) This is of course a part of a larger subset of westerns about morally ambiguous but competent people acting to protect the weak or support their friends. (“Shane! Shane! Come back Shane!”)
That’s where the Thomas Covenant series goes wrong (from an audience appeal point of view). Covenant is not a competent but morally challenged man who just needs more responsibilities or the right situation to challenge him; or an incompetent but decent man (who also probably just needs more responsibilities and challenges). Covenant has no redeeming traits except the ability to deal somewhat competently with his leprosy in the real world, and since that goes out the window when he gets isekai’d, followed shortly by him raping a woman because he believes this strange new world is all in his head, well, you can see why many readers want to take off and nuke him from orbit.
I detested Thomas Covenant. I slogged through the first two books in the series and that was it. I haven’t read anything by him since and am unlikely to change my mind. Nasty, whiny, self absorbed man child. I wouldn’t put up with him in real life, why read a book about him? I actually knew some folks who beta read for him and they expressed similar opinions. Still, someone must like him, because the book sold well and he was able to publish others.
I do enjoy a book where the main character is troubled or flawed and redeems themselves through personal growth and change. I think it’s one of the significant story arcs. Because we are all flawed and it is hoped that we can, to some extent at least, overcome those flaws and become better people by doing so.
I hated that series. 😡 Read some of it, hated it. Cheering for Thomas Covenant to get crispy fried by a dragon. Like a bacon rind. Kept hoping for it to get better, never did.
I read it when I was reading any old high fantasy thing off the library shelves, including Games of Thrones and the proto-romantasy Rhapsody series, and I had been warned about which parts to skip. Certainly we see a lot of Covenants out on the streets today, arguing that the sick fantasies inside their head aren’t hurting anyone and meanwhile said sick fantasies are leaking into everything they do, so perhaps those books ought to be filed under Disturbing Satire And Social Commentary, next to Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal. Meanwhile, I am one of those who holds that if you must read Stephen Donaldson you are better off with the Mordaunt duology or that hardboiled PI series he did about a martial artist (initially published under the pen name Reed Stephens) than with the Covenant Chronicles or his scifi novels.
If it had come with something in the blurb, like “Superbly hateable main character, contains gratuitous rape and other disgraceful things” then I’d have known to give it a hard pass. But no, marketed as high fantasy, they got my money and I didn’t have anything else to read (because they got my damn money) so I slogged through.
They didn’t get my money for #2 and #3 though. I read the ending of #3 standing in the store. The ending was very literary, I must say.
I’ve seen lots of people defend that series, and say it isn’t as bad as I think, and I should give it a chance blah blah blah. But I notice nobody has to come around and defend Poul Anderson, know what I mean?
Yes, I do know what you mean. I couldn’t stand that book. Shudders…
I threw it out of the train window between France and Germany, and bought some magazines at the next stop. Totally worth it. I apologize to the German Farmer whose field I littered.
Sarah
Don’t worry, I’m sure his goats ate it with much relish 🙂
<boggles. They give relish to goats?
<Runs.
Okay, since it was Germany, his goats probably ate it with much mustard… 😉
LOL. “Where a goat had it for tea” — Mr. Tuppam’s (sp?) hat in Thomas Tank Engine. When it blows off.
I’ve seen people attacking Anderson for ‘lecturing’ about his politics. Though the real problem seems to be that he wasn’t lecturing about their politics.
In general, Anderson escapes their ire by having been successfully memory-holed. I was well into my twenties before I encountered, even in print, anyone outside my immediate family who a). had read Poul Anderson, and b). was not writing an introduction to one of his works.
I was thinking High Plains Drifter, where he confirms he’s a murderer and rapist in the first couple of minutes. He doesn’t really have any redeeming qualities.
He’s not sent to help or rescue; he’s sent to punish.
Yeah, it’s a horror movie, and the director and top-billed actor is playing the arguably supernatural “monster” sent among the humans for their sins. Mordecai (the dwarf) serves the function of the good-ish human character who survives the monster show; I would go so far as to argue he is the actual POV character and protagonist.
Saying “well, High Plains Drifter gets away with being about a rapist” is like saying 1931 Dracula “gets away with being about a vampire” or 1932 Mummy “gets away with being about an undead necromancer.” In all three cases, the plot consists of something not entirely human wreaking havoc on humans, and although the humans overall aren’t very sympathetic in any of those cases (intentionally in Drifter, less so in the other cases), there are specific individuals you’d rather see survive than not.
Ashok Vadal. Larry Correia’s rehabilitating hm gradually. But he’s still a long way from cuddly!
The only way I can enjoy an “unlikable” main character is if there’s some hint that there’s something there that can make them better.
Prince Rodger, for example, kept coming off early-on as a whiny brat…but you kept getting the feeling that there was something there worth knowing and finding out about.
And part of the journey of a good story is finding that something.
If I wanted to see assholes get nothing but the best, because of increasing depths of being an asshole, I just have to watch the US Congress. Or Star Trek:Discovery. Or any number of “realistic” crime dramas out there.
“But it is BRILLIANT! You’re an idiot and WRONG!”
Maybe so, mighty author, maybe so. But it’s -my- money, dewd.
Also, and this is something I’m seeing a lot more of the last couple of weeks, all the “writers” and “creatives” responsible for the downfall of Western art that’s been so blisteringly obvious to us all since at least 2010 are suddenly not getting any jobs anymore.
Books are dead. No one is reading. How you tell is by the number of dead-tree bookstores still in business. One (1) in Canada, maybe three (3) in the USA, but probably two. On life support. Bookstores selling what? The backlist! Not the new stuff, the old stuff.
Record stores! Vinyl making a huge comeback! What are they selling? BACKLIST. Old stuff.
Comic book stores are selling manga and anime figurines now. Nobody is moving comics, all you have to do is look at the big distributors copies-per-issue to see it.
All the biggest shows on streaming, with a few exceptions, are re-runs of pre-2010 television shows. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Disney+, whatever, all the same.
Mighty Disney has been running a bombing campaign since 2019, with Star Wars and Marvel. One would think their CEO was Curtis LeMay. But lest we be laying this at the feet of the House of Mouse, none of the other big producers have any hits either. Except Barbie and Oppenheimer (neither of which I’m going to go see, frankly), the cupboard since 2019 is bare.
So fine, we the audience are a bunch of idiots. We’re WRONG! A basket of deplorables, clinging to our guns and religion. Granted, for the sake of the argument, all granted.
It’s still our money.
I think part of the problem is that “like” is ambiguous.
Is this someone who I would appreciate as a good person, a chum?
Does this have to be someone I’d like in real life?
Is it someone who would actually annoy the crap out of me, but who I would nevertheless like to be (Robert B. Parker’s “Spenser” novels are like this for me)?
Is it someone whose corner I’m in because of other circumstances (like many people who are saying, “I don’t like Trump, but sheesh, I’m voting for him because seriously”)?
Is it someone who’s interesting, and I like reading about him without liking him per se? (The examples above of Scrooge and The Man With No Name might qualify here.)
Of course, once you get further from “a good person,” YMMV. I grew up loving Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and I get a kick out of any production of The Music Man. My daughters hate them both; in their eyes, neither of them is a “lovable rogue,” they’re just jerks.
I adored Robert Preston’s Music Man as a small girl and again in my mid-thirties or thereabouts. From a female POV, it sometimes helps to interpret Harold Hill’s success as a ladykiller as being only slightly more real than his abilities as a musician.
One of the problems with a likeable or unlikable character is that you can’t control what people will read the work. Or just how badly askew (or not) their opinions on what you consider to be good or bad can be. I’ve seen people who honestly support Palpatine’s Empire from Star Wars as ‘the real good guys’ — not just sorta-decent Imperials like Thrawn and Pellaeon, but the out and out monsters like Tarkin and pre-reform Vader.
I’ve also seen people sincerely defend the main villain of that one comic series I’ve mentioned here before, despite his being a treacherous sexist racist literal backstabbing murderer who uses the woman he says he loves and makes it quite obvious that he intends to throw her away once he gets bored with her. Why? Because the hero and his boss the Empress were mean to him, as in, the former seduced the woman he was getting tired of and the latter thought he was getting power-hungry and decided to test his loyalty!
I just don’t get some people.
A lot of the “rooting for the Empire” stuff is done for the shock value or due to people playing devil’s advocate (if the Empire sees Alderaan as a sort of Space Qatar – underpopulated place with a very rich overclass and an underclass consisting of droids instead of Indian immigrants – which funds terrorism without getting its hands dirty…is the Death Star still overkill?) and taking it way too seriously. At one time, there was an element of political incorrectness as well, given the alignment of the Rebels with the hippy-dippy stuff that the Jedi and the Ewoks (whom I personally much prefer to the Jedi) are meant to represent. In those days, it was a kind of rebellion against the smug platitudes coming from Lucas and his surrogates in the media; somewhat similar to the fandom for Quaritch, the baddie from James Cameron’s Avatar. Increasingly, and unfortunately, rooting for the Empire seems to be an unironic pro-big-government thing, like the ones who watch Person of Interest and root for Samaritan.
Mostly though, it comes down to a lack of foundational values. People used to be able to find fictional villains or flawed historical figures intriguing, and then go away and write more redeemable versions of them; now people just make up excuses for them. Unless the historical figures belong to an undesirable class of course.
Darth Vader is probably pop-culture’s greatest love-to-hate villain. And, perhaps because I don’t hang out in Star Wars fandom, the first time I ever encountered the idea that the empire was a possibly sympathetic entity was the movie Clerks (1994). I’ve still not seen anything that actually makes it sympathetic.
I find it hard to read or watch characters with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Stephen R. Donaldson had his Gap series. The first book had the main characters doing some disturbing things, but it was well written, fast paced, and kept me interested. I didn’t care for the second one, and after that I didn’t bother as I had other things I’d rather read. Moorcock’s Elric character is another one that is very hard to like, but he had little sparks of redemption and he grew on me as the series progressed.
Most of the main characters that were a-holes I’m aware of are actually from movies/TV. The Parker movies (Donald Westlake wrote the books) are one of the first that come to mind. I’ve not read the books, but the movie characters don’t really have any redeeming qualities.
From TV it would be Breaking Bad. I watched most of the seasons, but it just didn’t sit well with me. There was not a single character in that show that was likeable. I couldn’t finish the series. But quite a lot of people think it’s one of greatest shows to ever be. Not for me.