502 – What Makes Characters Unlikable?

The Mythcreant Podcast

Sometimes you immediately fall in love with a character and want them to succeed. Other times, you want nothing more than to fire that character into a passing sun. It’s the second category we’re talking about today. What is it that makes characters unlikable, and how do you fix it? Assuming you want to fix it, of course. If not, then just do the opposite of everything we talk about in today’s episode.

Show Notes

• Save That Cat
• Do Characters Need to Be Likable?
• Eleanor Shellstrop
• Quentin Coldwater
• Wednesday
• Lisa Frankenstein Outfits
• Candy and Spinach
• Understanding Character Karma
• Kvothe
• The Sleepless
• The Bone Shard Daughter
• House on the Cerulean Sea
• Leap Year
• Neelix
• The Last Halloween
• Skin of the Sea
• John Wick
• The Ghoul/Cooper

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song] This is a Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:

Bunny: Bunny!

Chris: and…

Oren: Oren!

Chris: You know, you two are both such pathetic losers who are so uncool. I’m so much better than you. But hey look, I just saved a cat, so you have to love me now. Even though I said that to you.

Oren: Chris, you didn’t have to save that cat. You were already a cool, truth-talking rebel [laughter from Chris], who doesn’t let society censor what you have to say.

Bunny: Now that I see you holding that cat, I realize I disliked you and whined over here in the corner. It’s just because you’re just so cool and nice.

Chris: Obviously, you were jealous of me.

Bunny: I was jealous. It’s true.

Chris: Yeah. Everybody who hates me is really jealous. That’s how this works.

Oren: Yeah, that’s just how it works.

Bunny: I’m jealous and therefore weak, and everything you said was correct. Now, can I please touch the cat?

Chris: Okay, but only because I’m very gracious.

Bunny: Oh!

Chris: But also this cat likes me better ’cause I’m the coolest.

Bunny: [laughter] That’s only fair.

Oren: Wow. We just love this character.

Bunny: It has great taste, that cat.

Oren: This character is just so great.

Chris: Uh huh, am I not the most likable character?

Bunny: We all bow down to your supreme likability in the face of our whining, quivering inferiority. We’ve both got, like, unflattering haircuts, and we’re constantly kind of sweaty in a really sullen way.

Oren: Yeah, there’s a lot of descriptions of “moist” when people talk about us…?

Bunny: Yeah, we’re like, mopping our forehead. Got damp handkerchiefs. Everyone’s like, oh, Chris is the only normal one in this podcast.

Chris: Yeah. So yeah, this time we’re talking about what makes protagonists unlikable, ’cause there are a lot of things that can get in the way and make people hate a character that generally the storyteller does not intend. Just to clarify, I do think, again, defining what we mean when we say “likable” can be important. This is a pretty contentious topic−

Oren: Little bit.

Chris: And to be clear, we are not talking about whether or not you would like somebody if you met them in real life. We are not talking about whether somebody is moral or immoral, although that does factor in. We’re specifically talking about whether this is a character that readers enjoy reading about. That’s it. That’s pretty self-evident, ’cause that kind of aligns with the storyteller’s goals, right? You have an immoral character where readers enjoy reading about them, enjoy having that person as a protagonist, then you don’t have a likability problem.

Oren: And it’s one of those things where it’s true that it isn’t a question of would you like them if you met them on the street? But there is more… overlap to that then is sometimes convenient for the way people want to talk about this question. Things that you can do that would make a character likable that wouldn’t work on a real person, but at the same time, a lot of the things that would make you dislike a person in real life will also apply to characters.

Bunny: It is just technically true that you will be spending a lot of time with this character. You’re not going to be hanging out with them at a coffee shop per se, but you are gonna be with them a lot. So, I think it’s true that at some level you want to be… not actively turned off by them.

Chris: I think the biggest difference is that us storytellers, we have our tricks because whether something has emotional impact really matters. So, if you meet somebody and you find out they’re scamming seniors on the side, you might be like, “Ugh, I don’t think I should be this person’s friend.” But if you watch a show about The Good Place and you have a character, Eleanor Shellstrop, and you find out that she’s doing that, but the show is funny and the storyteller does their tricks to make sure that you never feel bad, you never meet any of those seniors, you never see them get scammed, you never have that emotional impact of the bad things that she’s done, they can get away with a lot more.

So, I think that’s the biggest difference, especially when it comes to people judging immoral actions. Part of that judgment is always the harm, and that is always judged at an emotional level. So, if you can keep people from feeling something emotionally, you can get away with a character that does more.

Oren: There’s a certain taste question to it. I have a specific pet peeve that makes me instantly dislike a character, which is when they are “fake” outcasts. They act like outcasts, and the story treats them as one, but they have all the traits of a popular person. Or, at least, the thing that they are supposedly outcast for isn’t a thing that would actually happen with−

Chris: −like, every magical high schooler is like, “Freak!” Looks like a really normal, cool high schooler. There’s nothing here.

Oren: Or Quentin in The Magicians, the TV show version. He’s supposed to be a nerd, ’cause he likes the Lord of the Rings, and people don’t like him for that. And, I don’t know, maybe in the 80s that was true. It’s definitely not true now. Or when the show came out, which was in the late aughts, early tens? Being a nerd was very cool by then.

So, the idea that he was outcast ’cause he liked Narnia and Lord of the Rings is like, nah, no thank you.

Chris: I mean, it wasn’t cool when I went to high school, but I don’t think it counted against me either.

Bunny: Definitely nothing out of the ordinary now. Everyone likes Lord of the Rings.

Oren: Yeah, a more extreme version is Wednesday from the Netflix show where she’s like a social outcast who hates all of the things that it is socially acceptable to hate, like social media. Oh wow. What a trailblazer there. Hating social media. That’s certainly not a thing anyone does, but not everyone seems to care about that, so that might not be a broad spectrum thing.

Chris: There are a lot of big budget or popular bestselling stories that meet storytelling requirements or requirements for likability through some very serious contrivances, and it has definitely divided people on whether or not you buy it. Are you gonna buy that this super attractive, cool-looking teen is gonna be bullied because they have magic? I wouldn’t buy it. But obviously some people might want to buy that. So, that definitely gets divisive, I think.

Bunny: I will say, one thing that’s not necessarily in the writing of a character’s likability, but in the presentation in visual media−talking about the fake outcasts thing−when you have a very attractive actor and you dress them in baggy, unflattering clothes and then have everyone tease them about being ugly. That’s really obnoxious.

Oren: Yeah. I’m not a fan.

Chris: I do understand the appeal of the transformation movies. We just wanna see a character go from unstylish to stylish so that we can have that sequence where she’s gotten her hair straightened or something and she walks out in her new dress and people are like, [gasp] understand the appeal.

Bunny: Wow, you are hot all along! Holy crap, you’re played by Halle Berry!

Chris: Makeovers can be fun. It reminds me of this trope that has now found new life−the 80s trope where we watch a character go try on a bunch of different clothes, and we have a montage of them just wearing different clothes.

Bunny: I think the Wonder Woman movie had that, of all things.

Chris: Yeah, and I watched Lisa Frankenstein recently, another movie that had a sequence like that. It is very cheesy, but I can see that it’s in service to a specific trope that people enjoy seeing.

Oren: Yeah, okay, so moving away from that specific trope. Probably the most reliable thing that will make a character unlikeable is if you give them too much candy. Just tell everyone how cool they are, and they’re super cool, and they’ve never failed at anything, and they’re perfect and beautiful.

Bunny: Yep.

Chris: Candy characters have the opposite of sympathy. Because usually a lot of candied traits are very inherent traits to them, not things that they’ve earned. So, they just… are automatically good at everything. They’re just a genius who takes to every skill immediately. That’s not really something that they had to struggle for. So that puts them in karmic debt where we feel like they have more than they actually deserve.

Now, some audiences are just sweet tooths. They just do like these characters. I think kids are more likely to like candied characters. So, it’s not like nobody grabs onto them, but if you don’t immediately like them, then you start to resent them instead of the character winning the audience over, which is ideal.

Oren: And a lot of it has to do with, do you identify with the character or not? This is why Kvothe is able to be popular despite the fact that he’s the best at everything. He does all of the things that even basic writing advice says not to do, but he manages to be popular okay, because a significant number of the readership were like, “Oh man, what if I was Kvothe?” It’s also turning off everyone who didn’t think that. So, it’s a really major division of your audience.

Chris: And this is the kind of ironic and unfair thing. We call it “candy”, but outside of us, what most people would recognize is the term Mary Sue.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Which blames this on women, but actually, if you look at popular stories, these are usually men because female characters are much less likely to be given that kind of budget if they have lots of candy.

Bunny: Yay.

Chris: There’s a double standard where if it’s popular and has a budget, it’s probably a male character. Not that there are no popular stories with female candied characters, but they’re less likely because everything is still male-centric.

Oren: Yeah. On the bright side, I haven’t seen this that much in novels in the last five or six years.

Bunny: I unfortunately just read a novel that had an over-candied main character.

Oren: Oh, really?

Bunny: The Sleepless.

Oren: Oh.

Bunny: The story begins with several pages of him describing how many cool skills he has because he now has all this time to learn cool skills, which is everything from kung fu to cooking really good steaks, but then those never come up, really.

He gets in a really brief fight at one point, and then immediately gets his ass beat. I was like, where’s your kung fu? So it’s got the kind of weird situation where he’s got all this awesome, cool knowledge, and he tells you about it. He’s so empty inside, but he’s still got all this cool stuff, don’t worry. But then it’s just… it’s window dressing. So he is both candied and not, it was very weird, but I did dislike him at the beginning because I was like, stop bragging.

Chris: Yeah. Characters also have a tendency to be hard on other characters. They tend to steal the spotlight from other characters and render those characters helpless so that the candied character can just get all the glory and save the day every time.

They often are smug. A lot of times, the author gets joy of having them get one over on other characters and show other characters up. So these are all things that tend to make candied characters a lot less likable.

Oren: I’ve actually recently been running into the opposite problem more often than I would’ve expected, which is when they have too much spinach because then they’re just unpleasant and downtrodden and dejected.

Mm-Hmm.

Oren: Like in the book that I had to stop, The Bone Shard series. Spoilers for the first second book. I really like Lin, the empress character, but in the second book, it’s just a series of her being told she’s wrong over and over and over again. And it didn’t help that me and the author were clearly not jiving on what the correct solution to these problems were because every time Lin would suggest a solution, I’m like, yeah, that’s probably the best solution in this circumstance. Then she would be told, “No, that’s the wrong solution. You have to do this other thing.” And I’d be sitting here being like, no. And then that other thing would work, and I would get so upset.

Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating.

Chris: I recently read The House of the Cerulean Sea, and this one is a funny one because it’s clear that the author just loves all of the side characters, and so the main character just gets all the spinach and all of the other characters, they’re candied, and they’re constantly telling him that he’s wrong about things or being condescending to him or forcing him to do things.

It’s like a character arc by telling, not showing, but like every other character other than the main character is the author’s mouthpiece. And so again, a lot of this comes with a difference between the storyteller and the audience, or a difference between different audience members, on which character is the character that you are emotionally attached to.

So in this case, it felt like this author created a main character to just be the person who’s downtrodden and wrong about things, who then has to learn better because the author liked these other characters. And probably some audience members did too, because they’re the ones that are given cool stuff.

The main character doesn’t get any cool stuff. Doesn’t get any magic powers, for instance. But I really liked the main character. And that’s always going to happen when you make somebody your main character, because if you open several chapters with this person and they have to like the main character to continue the book on some level. Which again, is just why if you have a candied character or favorite character, I always recommend making it your main character because that is the person you are basically telling your audience to like, and that’s the character you need them to like in order to want to continue the book. So, falling in love with a side character and giving that character all the candy, going to be a bad time for some of your readers.

Oren: I had that problem with my villain in The Abbess Rebellion. One of the things that I did several times when I was editing the book was adjust scenes so that the villain didn’t seem more right than I wanted him to be. I wanted him to not be cackle-y and mustache-twirly. I wanted him to seem like he believed he was doing the right thing, and I think I mostly succeeded by the end. But in the beginning I definitely gave some signals that some readers were picking up on that actually, he’s right the whole time, which is not what I wanted. So I had to balance that and I think I did okay. Buy my book! It’s okay!

Bunny: What an endorsement. I do wonder if comedies sometimes have more of that spinach problem. On St. Patrick’s Day, I watched Leap Year, which is a romcom set in Ireland, and the female lead in that, it goes out of its way to humiliate her. At one point, she’s driving with a love interest, who at this point is like really prickly and doesn’t like her, and they get stopped by a herd of cows, and she gets outta the car to move the cows out of the way, and then she steps in cow poop, and then the car rolls backwards into a ditch. They have to walk because the car is now busted.

And then she thinks she’s about to get a ride from some guys who then steal their stuff, and the love interest this entire time is just making a smug “I told you so” face. The poor female character−the lead−doesn’t ever really get to use her actual skills in this. It’s just the cool one is the love interest, and he gets to be sad and somewhat snarky, and she’s always on the back foot. I just found it really frustrating.

Oren: Characters failing things is great comedy gold. That can be very funny. I have seen comedies that, at least for me, take it too far and make the character just unpleasant to watch, and it’s hard for me to say where that line is with comedies, especially filmed comedies, right? That’s two degrees of separation outside of what I normally work on.

Chris: I think there’s a couple things that happen. One, a joke can just become too repetitive if you overuse it. And also, this is what I would talk about with the spinach-candy balance. Its spinach becomes a lot more tolerable if they also have time to shine.

If they also have some cool skills, if they also get to solve problems and make a difference−and those things should just balance each other out a little bit−you can have a character that tends to have more candy, but still has a little bit of spinach, or a character that tends to have more spinach but still has some candy, but gotta have both, or it’s just not gonna land well with a lot of people.

Bunny: And I think it was also that this wasn’t just a straight comedy either, like it’s a romcom. We’ve also got the romance element and some more, like, serious tender moments in there because romance, right? The main female character supposedly does have skills. Her skills are, she’s an interior decorator, and I expected that to come up at some point because the love interest is kind of a rough man of the earth, I guess. He doesn’t have a lot of soft skills. So, I expected that she would have more of that or that her interior decorating skills would come in handy. At one point, they’re staying with an older couple, and they’re starting to connect, and they’ll make dinner, and that’s the only time that her skill comes up is she arranges some flowers on a table. I just wanted to see her doing things well.

Chris: Another thing that I think is really important in the context of characters being unlikable is character flaws. There’s so many other writing outlets out there that just emphasize flaws a lot. Literary genre types especially like to emphasize character flaws, I think, in rebellion to characters that they see are not flawed enough probably. And also, if we’re doing character arcs−and a lot of people put a lot of focus on character arcs−they don’t have to start with a flaw. A character who’s grieving doesn’t have a flaw.

Chris: For instance, they often do start with a flaw, and writers tend to get very focused on flaws, but flaws−especially if they take over a character−really can push audiences away. So thinking about having a flaw there in a balanced way, because I’ve seen a lot of stories where it basically entirely defines the character, the writer’s hitting that flaw button so hard.

Yeah, I get it. There’s gonna be a character arc, but we don’t need it to be their main feature of their personality. That’s just unpleasant.

And it does vary depending on what flaws they have. Some flaws are much more unlikable than others. Arrogance and selfishness are the two biggest ones. But for instance, when I did my retelling of Snow Queen, my character is meek to start out with, and some readers were just fine with it. There were a few readers who… they didn’t like how meek she was at the beginning. They wanted a character that was more empowered. And so, not sure that there’s any flaw that if you have it there strongly is entirely safe when it comes to likability. And maybe that’s okay. Sometimes we’re okay losing a couple people, but I do think it’s worth just thinking about that balance of having it present but not having it take over too much. And especially readers get really frustrated when they watch a character make a decision that they know is the wrong decision and watch that blow up in the character’s face.

Oren: Yeah, they’re not fans. Something that is very common, not quite in either the candy or spinach area, is a character who hinders the other characters in moving the plot forward. That kind of character is especially annoying. Probably the archetypal character for this on TV is Neelix ’cause Neelix is constantly messing things up and making it harder for the other characters to do their jobs.

And so you’re just sitting there wondering, “Why is Neelix even here?” But you can have subtler versions of it. The superhero stories. The superhero’s love interest is often pushed into this role of the, “No, superhero, don’t go out and save the world!” Well, he’s obviously gonna. He has to do that for the plot to work. This doesn’t feel like anything other than delaying the story.

Chris: Or the wife that’s like, “How dare you go save the world. You need to spend more time with your family!”

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Oh, why did we create this scenario? We really created a scenario where people are gonna die. Now, we’re putting them in a position where him taking care of his family is being made into a bad thing, and then his wife is being made into the bad guy for wanting him to spend time with the family. I don’t like it.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I don’t like it at all.

Oren: It’s not great. I wish writers would stop doing that.

Bunny: There’s also−maybe this is just because of film media−I feel like child characters have a higher probability of being annoying or unlikable when they display these traits. The character I’m thinking of−this was from the webcomic The Last Halloween−is an obnoxious child, and the cast are children, but the author clearly loves this awful vampire kid who’s constantly being the worst.

Chris: That sounds like a candied character. Anytime you’re like, oh, I know the author loves this character, that’s a huge sign of candy. And it can be hard to recognize because it’s not just that a character is objectively super cool. When you see a character is just getting a lot more energy from the author, the author makes them quirky and elaborates on the backstory and describes what they look like, seems to make the story revolve around them a little bit more, even though they’re not supposed to be the main character.

Bunny: I think the author just found this guy fun, and I found him awful. It was clearly, “Oh, what a little rascal, ha ha!” But his being a rascal involved actually killing people or leaving them to burn alive while also being all of the worst things that a little boy can be. When he disappeared, everyone was sad about it, and I was like, thank God.

Chris: Yeah, no, that’s so much candy.

Bunny: And then he reappeared!

Chris: Yeah, no, that’s another common candied character thing is a character’ll even die sometimes or whatever, just so everybody else can be like, “Oh no, I should have done what that character wanted. And I never appreciated how cool the character was. Oh, aren’t we all so sad? This character was the best.”

Oren: When a character fake dies so that there is a funeral for the other characters to gush about them over, that’s too much candy. That’s too much.

Bunny: It’s pretty telling that that sort of thing would happen to my terrible self inserts when I was learning how to write and just sticking myself into every hero. They would always have a fake death, and then everyone would be like [crying noises].

Chris: But hilariously, I’ve also encountered a couple of annoying child characters that it wasn’t actually that the author wanted to give them candy. It was that the author didn’t know how to make them likable, and the child was just supposed to die.

Not what I expected! So, Skin of the Sea, a book that has a lot of good traits, I have used it for word craft examples ’cause I do love the prose in that book, but it has this precocious child character that I’m just like, why are they bringing this character? He is obnoxious and he really shouldn’t be going on this dangerous mission, and it’s frustrating that they’re bringing a child along. Sometimes having undue emphasis on a character by the storyteller really does doom that character.

And maybe they’re doing it ’cause they want the audience to like that character. Maybe they’re trying to make you care about the child just to kill the child off, which is a bad idea. Don’t do that. Um, if you succeeded, you would make your readers real upset.

Oren: It feels like I’m being bludgeoned or almost like emotional blackmail.

Chris: It feels manipulative. I didn’t feel natural.

Bunny: I think the only story I’ve seen do that sort of thing decently is also pretty brutal, which is John Wick. Where he’s just lost his wife. He’s having a really hard time. The wife as a parting gift gave him a dog, and then the villains come in and wreck his house and kill his dog. And that’s the impetus for sending him down a murder destruction pathway. And John Wick is an extremely violent movie, but I was listening to an interview with the directors and they were like, yeah, you only ever kill one dog in your career. We’re not doing that again.

Oren: John Wick does a lot to make it seem this character is doing his best with his dog. It’s not like he brings his dog with him into the den of the evil mafia, and then the dog gets killed. Yeah, which is what was happening in Skin to the Sea, which is one of the reasons that character was so obnoxious. It’s like, why are they still with this child? Why have they not returned this child to his house? They know where his house is.

Chris: Yeah. In fact, I feel like there was even an elder that was like, “Hey, after you show them to this village, come right back.” And then he just doesn’t, and it’s like, I don’t think you have permission from his elders to bring him with.

Oren: Yeah. He stowed away on their boat, and they basically decided, “I guess we don’t have time to take him back.” And I was honestly thinking, I think you have time.

Bunny: Probably have time.

Oren: He is going to make your mission worse if you bring him. So, that was weird. A thing that is a little more subtle that I think might be worth mentioning before we end the episode is when your character has an unpaid karmic debt. This is a thing that authors struggle with a lot because sometimes they’ll have the character do something that to them just seems like either a fluff moment or establishing who the character is.

But to the reader, it’s like, well, that was a bad thing he just did. He should pay for that. You have your character who is mean to a barista. In the first scene to establish that he’s gruff and having a bad day, but he was mean to a barista. Rude. He should pay for that! I don’t like him.

Bunny: He’s a meanie.

Chris: The character in Fallout−Cooper−he has a fair amount of candy, and he mostly gets away with it because he has a charismatic actor who is also a white guy. But even though he’s kind of immoral, I tolerated him for quite a while. Until he shot that young man. And it was the kind of thing where like, yeah, maybe the young man was gonna shoot him, but Cooper deliberately provoked him. Right? That was a situation−

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: −that Cooper could have easily just not told the kid that he just killed his brother−And avoided any violence.−and the fact that he just does that and walks away and doesn’t have to pay for it at all. That was it for me. Now, I don’t like this character anymore. Sometimes it’s just one thing that they do that’s bad.

Oren: For a villain, okay, sure, ’cause we’re hoping to see him get his comeuppance, but he’s clearly not a villain. He was clearly an anti-hero who was moving closer and closer to just being a protagonist by the end, but he still killed that kid for no reason. So, yeah, it’s obnoxious.

Chris: So if you do wanna have a character that’s a sympathetic villain that you want to be likable or who is selfish or does bad things, you really do have to carefully manage, okay, what are we gonna actually show them doing and make it so that they only kill people who the audience already hates?

For instance, or we assume they’re supposed to be killing people, but we only ever see them knock somebody out or kidnap them.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That careful management of emotions so it’s not too far. And Oren has a post on redemption arcs where you use the concept of, okay, but it’s about how far they go and having to be redeemed and the amount of time you have for the story to redeem them. If you’re not willing to spend tons of time making them grovel in order to stop the audience from feeling resentful about the bad things they did, then you really shouldn’t make them do things that are very bad.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: Okay. Well, on that note, I think we will call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you found us likable, please consider contributing on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And if you didn’t find us likable, contribute anyway so we can buy likability lessons.

Bunny: Yeah, maybe they’ll teach us how to clean off our foreheads. Stop being so moist.

Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

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