This week: Writing Unlikeable Characters Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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You dislike them. You may even hate them. Aren't they a great character, though?
Who is your favourite unlikeable character? What do they add to the story?
This week's Action/Adventure Newsletter is all about creating the nuanced and the memorable.
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline |
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Before I begin this Newsletter, a quick note: I live in Great Britain, so I use British English. Hence the 'unlikeable' rather than 'unlikable'.
I don’t know about you, but I quite enjoy writing an unlikeable character. When I write a character like that, I get to play around in the darker corners of my mind and then take it a step further, trying to figure out what makes those people tick who simply do not care about the suffering of others.
Everyone is capable of causing pain. I know that I have hurt people. It wasn’t intentional. There were times when I said the wrong thing, or didn’t properly consider the consequences of my actions. Intentional or not, though, the impact was real – I was responsible for that pain and it made me feel like a horrible person. I don’t know how anyone cannot care when they do harm.
We tend to think that the majority of people are like us. That they share our beliefs, our motives, our morals. At least mostly. It’s a harsh lesson to learn when you discover that that’s not true. More people than you’d think are motivated by greed, and envy, and the pursuit of power, and they’ll use anyone and everyone to get their way. Then there are those who believe that they are doing the right thing even when their ideology does far more harm than good. Add people ‘just following orders’, and the way that the bureaucratic machine can crush the best of us, and we have a rather messy world with plenty of potential for villains to arise.
Take an Umbridge, for example. J. K. Rowling may be a controversial figure these days, but she sure knew how to write a character who it was easy to despise. Umbridge made good use of a ministerial environment of fear to get herself into a position of power. The reader knows that she is completely the wrong person to oversee Hogwarts. The students know it, the teachers know it, but there is nothing they can do about it and so we witness a person devoid of any empathy wreak havoc in what is supposed to be a safe space; a home away from home.
George R. R. Martin’s Joffrey Baratheon is another character who should never have been anywhere near a position of power, and this highlights well the flaws of a system of all-powerful rulers, and those who surround them. He was just a boy. In the books, at least, he is only 12 when we meet him; in the TV series the younger characters were aged up and he must have been around 15 or 16. That places a lot of responsibility for his cruel actions on his parents, his wider family and his advisors. But the king is the king, and not held to the same level of accountability as others would be. How do we hold to account those who seek power over us? That’s a question that remains relevant to this day.
It must be fun to write an Umbridge or a Joffrey. To properly explore what human beings are capable of when there is little that can stop their darkest urges. It can make us wonder who are you, when no one else is looking? Who are you, when you can get away with anything you want?
Yet, there’s more to unlikeable characters than the obvious villain. What about those who you used to root for until the story takes a turn?
Who truly thought Bran Stark was the best person to sit on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms? Who found joy in their heart at that outcome? Sure, it can be argued that Bran’s no longer Bran. That it wasn’t his fault. Yet, ‘who has a better story than Bran’? Pretty much everyone!
And on a lesser scale, there’s Molly Weasley. Such a kind, warm-hearted woman who becomes a motherly figure for Harry Potter and has Hermione Granger stay over each summer. Yet, when a notoriously unreliable reporter spreads rumours about Hermione, Molly believes those lies over the girl she’d known for years by then. When she stayed at Sirius’ home, she was hardly kind to her host. Her need to control the situation, and the people in it, may have been motivated by fear, but it sometimes bordered on the cruel.
That does make Molly quite a realistic character. I could relate to her better than to an Umbridge, a Joffrey, or even a Bran. Molly can be petty, judgemental, and overbearing. She can be frustrating and unlikeable. She isn’t without empathy, however. She is going through her second war against the same enemy. She has lost friends and family in these battles. She wants to do the right thing, but she’s scared, mostly about losing more loved ones. It's not difficult to relate to not being our best self when we’re scared.
I’m still learning how to create nuanced, unlikeable characters. It would be nice to create a character that inspires strong emotions; a character that’s truly memorable. In the meanwhile, it’s fun to practice.
What do you enjoy about writing characters of this kind?
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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Action/Adventure: December 04, 2024 Issue [#12868]
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