Two weeks without a post? Good googly moogly. When I goes off the wagon I goes hard.
I’d like to talk about writing likable characters. I was inspired by a description of a sleazy movie directed by a cool auteur in his younger days, how it got unusually good reviews for soft porn, that specifically mentioned likable characters. That’s something his later works had as well. He’s got an advantage over a novelist because he’s equipped with actors – or as i call them, professional charisma-havers – but his writing and directing do count for something there.
There’s this bullshit kiddies are into these days which is characters lacking in all redeeming qualities. Amateur writers sayin “Look at my guy, he’s such a piece of shit asshole motherfucker, i love him.” Cool, but will anybody else?
I even think there’s a place for that and it’s probably fine. I just think that the ability to write likable characters is much more impressive. Writing a jerk is easy. Successfully threading the needle of charisma, that’s somethin’ else.
That said, the most likable character in my recent work Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice was probably the mute homunculus.
I just don’t have the time to do this properly, to make the thesis strong, and I know you’re gonna shit all over me in the comments, oh, my favorite fictional guy is an asshole, how dare you say i’m not allowed to like assholes, rabble rabble. Whatever, im right and ur wrong.
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Not long ago, I read about the rise and fall of the antihero. A few years back, every main character was an anti-hero; unlikable and an all-around jerk. Audiences got tired of the all-jerk-all-the-time trope.
I’m going to gas on for a bit, so feel free to ignore these speculations.
There are antiheros and there are jerks. Both have been around a long time. Melmoth and Manfred are antiheros, Maldoror is a jerk. It can be hard sometimes to tell them apart, but while an antihero ends up doing good acts (even if he isn’t trying to), a jerk just disrupts things.
I really haven’t noted that there has been a lot of jerks in recent fiction, but that may be because I haven’t been reading much recent fiction recently. I have seen a lot of antiheros, they appear to dominate fiction. That may be because, almost by definition, they are more interesting. Who is more interesting? Superman or Batman? Technically, Batman is an antihero. He operates outside of the law, using morally questionable tactics, and his motivation could be seen as being caused by the guilt of the death of his parents. Superman on the other hand, is a hero. Superman has a strong moral sense, uses his powers without thought of personal gain, helps people solely because they need help. Batman can have interesting stories even if he is simply rounding up baddies who are much less powerful than he is. Superman needs a foe of roughly the same power in order to create narrative tension. This doesn’t mean that all of Batman’s nemesis’s are weak, but that a compelling narrative can be written without needing a antagonist of equal power. Some of Batman’s drama comes simply because of his character, not his enemies. Of course, relying on this too much will come across as moody, teenage, angst (“I AM BATMAN!”). Dude, we know you feel conflicted, just get on with it already.
Jerks are different though. The only satisfying thing which can happen narratively to a jerk is redemption or comeuppance. Works where this doesn’t happen tend to not be all that satisfying. Jerks have been around a long time too. Scrooge was such a jerk that even though he achieved redemption his name lives on as one of the archetypal jerks in literature. On the other hand, Fitzwilliam Darcy starts out as a jerk in Pride and Prejudice but his redemption allows him to be seen as a hero by the end of the novel. There are narrative reasons why Mr. Darcy is seen as a hero, mainly through his transformation being off-screen (as it were) and his selflessness is discovered in the past tense after his good work was accomplished. Unlike Scrooge, whose final transformation appears to be linked to the threat of his own mortality (and the reader is bludgeoned about the head with this fact), Mr. Darcy appears to be helping out the Bennet family as an apology for his boorish behavior. It couldn’t really be that Mr. Darcy is stalking Elizabeth Bennet.
The more human the hero, the more like the antagonist is a jerk rather than a villain. That is, the antagonist isn’t evil, putting out kittens eyes for the fun of it, but just a bully to the hero. Marty McFly in Back to the Future has a jerk antagonist. While a lot of the movie didn’t really need Biff, the redemption of Marty’s father did need Biff. We don’t really see enough of Marty’s father to know if he was a jerk before the altered timeline, but we do see that he lacked confidence. (Why was the McFly family in the same house between the two timelines, that never made sense to me. And why, if his older brother worked in an office, was he still living with he parents?)
Jerks as protagonists could be interesting to the author. Figuring out the reason why the person gains pleasure by disrupting the lives of others can provide the insight into their character which helps write the stories of redemption or comeuppance. However, I’m not certain I’d enjoy reading the narrative of a character who is a jerk but never reflects on it.
I recently saw the move, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The character who was the focus was Miles Bron, who is a jerk. A selfish, narcissistic, tech billionaire, who believes wealth is equivalent to intelligence. He gets his comeuppance; hard.
I suppose at the end of the day, the antihero definition is too broad. If a hero is someone who always follows a strong moral standard, and acts selflessly to the best of their power, there are few examples of heroes. At best the hero is an isolated action, like saving a cat from a house fire or jumping on a grenade to save the rest of your squad. This behavior does happen, but no one is a hero all the time. At best we are all antiheros, we may not be jerks. We have conflicting desires. Some of the good actions we take may be from pure motives, we want to help with no thought of ourselves. Some of the good actions we take also are to our benefit, or assuage some inner motivation, and are not selfless. But we also take actions which we think are good and which turn out badly. There are no full-time heroes, but there are plenty of one-time heroes.
Antiheros seem more realistic and more authentically real than heroes.
Jerks are just jerks.
Now it’s about time for our all-hands meeting to start, so I’m going to stop gassing away. If any of the above doesn’t meet your definition of antihero, hero, or jerk, I apologize. I’m not trying to start any arguments, and any lack of clarity in my writing is my own, not the readers, responsibility. Au revoir.
gas is the name of the blog, lol
i didn’t have the time to compose a quality post and likewise quality interaction with the commentariat. thx for the content tho, comrades.
I think it’s not all or nothing. Interestingly a likeable character can still do awful things within a narrative. Tony Soprano is likeable or the show would not have lasted or had an impact like it did. I think it’s connected with empathy, an empathetic character is easier to forgive even if they’re a jerk or have jerk qualities. A character can have all the likeable characteristics but if there’s nothing to empathize with then we don’t really care what happens to them. Can a person who lacks empathy write an empathic character? Perhaps but it would lack depth. People are shades of many colors so black/white thinking creates shallow ideas and characters.