Terrible people can make interesting characters. But there’s a catch: getting readers to care about protagonists who are deeply, unpleasantly flawed can be a challenge. Reveal their egregious defaults in the wrong way and readers will nope out.
My go-to example is Thomas Covenant, whose adventures I stopped following the moment I got to that scene. You know the one I mean. I don’t remember how far into the first volume that scene is1. I hope it was early enough to save me reading time better invested elsewhere.
How, then, to keep the reader engaged? These are the coping mechanisms I most often encounter, in reverse order of preference.
License
The novel offers readers hope that in just the right circumstances, they too would be able to indulge their worst impulses. The enabling mechanism is often a calamity of one sort of another. It does not really matter if the problem is that commies nuked LA, the dead walk, almost everyone has gone blind, or just that young people are rude and everyone is writing a book. The important thing is, a bad thing happened, the old rules no longer apply, and it’s every person for themselves.
I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but the 1962 film Panic in the Year Zero! is such a perfect example I cannot resist mentioning it again. For Ray Milland’s Harry Baldwin, atomic war means launching a relentless crime spree, robbing people and sabotaging infrastructure in the name of protecting his family from exactly the sort of chaos he himself is causing2.
This is not my favourite solution, to put it mildly. Still, I don’t hate Panic in the Year Zero!, although I am not sure the movie I enjoy is the movie Milland thought he made.
Obliviousness
The protagonist (and sometimes the author) is so completely blind to their own flaws that they manage to create a sort of narrative momentum where the fact that they are terrible, terrible people doesn’t carry the weight it should.
Case in point, Robert A. Heinlein’s 1941 novella By His Bootstraps. Bob Wilson is a feckless, unintrospective nincompoop3 who, when offered the chance to set himself up as a global dictator, is far more interested in the harem potential of the position than the inherent moral issues. A guy like Bob, one of whose go-to political texts is Mein Kampf, does not seem like ideal leader material, but watching Bob deal with causal loops is sufficiently entertaining to distract from that glaring fact.
How favourably I react to this ploy is entirely dependent on whether it’s the protagonist who is completely oblivious or the author. I couldn’t shake the sense that the late Leo Frankowski was entirely on board with his protagonist’s reprehensible behavior, which is why I stopped reading his series at that scene. You know the one I mean—and if you don’t, lucky you.
Contrast
If an author wants their character to look good or at least not as bad as they could be, confront them with antagonists who are even worse. Yes, saintly is better than morally compromised, but morally compromised can look pretty darn good next to complete fucking evil.
Walter Jon Williams’ 1991 Days of Atonement centres on Atocha Chief of Police Loren Hawn, who believes himself to be a paragon of virtue but who is in fact a violent, close-minded, xenophobic bully. Even his wife treads carefully around him. Luckily for Hawn, William Patience is a monster. Hawn brutalizes suspects. Patience murders people for what amounts to professional convenience4.
The above isn’t all that’s going on with Hawn. The skill with which Williams makes the fate of this legitimately awful guy tragic is astonishing. In fact, Days is the book that made me think about this subject in the first place, inspiring this article.
Consequences
This comes in a few flavours. Either the protagonist belatedly realizes the error of their ways (the classic concept of “The Man Who Learned Better”) or the reader gets the satisfaction of watching a hateful character receive their just deserts.
An example of the first strategy (recently encountered) would be Lester del Rey’s 1961 Moon of Mutiny. Moon’s protagonist is young Fred Halpern, whose exuberant faith in himself has already caused an avoidable death by the time he is kicked out of the Academy. A good chunk of the book recounts Fred’s dawning realization that he is often incredibly arrogant and irresponsible and that these character traits are bad5.
John Brunner’s 1974 Web of Everywhere exemplifies the second. Hans Dykstra is sufficiently unpleasant that Mustapha Sharif, who exploits his wealth and status to acquire underage bed partners, is somehow only the second worst person in the book. Watching Hans’ plans go horribly awry is quite enjoyable.
Charm
Sufficient charm and personal magnetism can compensate for many personal flaws. Make your protagonist witty, pleasant, entertaining, and (particularly if it’s a visual medium) good-looking, and the audience may well overlook minor quirks like dishonesty, predatory inclinations, and the odd spot of homicidal mania.
The title character from Angélica Gorodischer’s 1979 Trafalgar is at best a flawed man, a man who should not be left unsupervised near an untended wallet or a pretty lady (or entire planets of women). Furthermore, his tales of interstellar trading strain credibility, living as he does in 1970s Argentina, a nation notoriously short on working starships. Trafalgar’s accounts of his adventures are too amusing to end his storytelling by dispatching him to the prison time he likely deserves.
In practice, of course, authors don’t focus on just one technique for any potentially unlikable character. They mix and match: the protagonist is a charming cad and their antagonist gleefully eats live babies, or the cad learns better but circumstances force them to revert in the next installment, and so on and so forth.
Furthermore, I’ve probably overlooked some obvious methods, which will no doubt come to me at 3 A.M. Feel free to point them out in comments.
- And I didn’t keep my copy. Used bookstores mean… actually, you know what? This thought deserves more than a footnote. ↩︎
- Panic in the Zero! would benefit from an Airplane!-style parody. ↩︎
- A number of Heinlein protagonists are not as smart as they think they are. Now, some compensate for that with extraordinary qualities such as a sterling character, being a lightning calculator, or being both willing to ask for advice and then heed it… but is it possible that Heinlein was drawing readers in with characters who were just a smidge dimmer than the reader, so the reader could have the pleasure of outthinking the lead? It’s probably tricky to hit “just thick enough” without wandering into “irritatingly dense.” ↩︎
- Days does not, happily, try to make the case that bad men like Hawn are necessary to stop worse men like Patience. A better cop would have worked out what was going on faster than Hawn did, if only because they would not have been distracted by impending police brutality charges. ↩︎
- Which is somewhat undermined by the fact that Fred saves the day by doing the one thing that consistently annoyed adults, violating orders because he was sure he knew better. Fred has a talent that compensates in part for his flaws, which is being lucky. Luck is invaluable. Luck is the difference between Fred (who survives) and Blish’s boy protagonist Chris deFord, who gets executed between A Life for the Stars and Earthman, Come Home for doing the sort of thing that made Chris the protagonist of A Life For the Stars. Earthman was written before Life, which means Blish wrote Life knowing Chris would get it in the neck. ↩︎
As someone who finally slogged through to the very end of the Thomas Covenant books, the fact that he spends a LOT of time in the rest of that book and the remaining ten angsting over how horrible he was in That Scene does not really help. Sometimes consequences and atonement ain’t enough.
Rei Taylor in I’m In Love With The Villainess manages to hit all but Obliviousness. I think the creator realized some time in the first few volumes that Rei’s behavior was the sort of thing that in a male protagonist wouldn’t be tolerated these days. Between meeting Someone Worse and having some personal epiphanies. Rei has come a long way. I mean, she’s still a thirty-something woman in a teenager’s body taking advantage of her otherworldly knowledge to woo an actual teenager, so the creep factor hasn’t gone away, but it has been greatly mitigated.
After firing this off, I reread Jane Gaskell’s A Sweet Sweet Summer. I am sorry I didn’t read before this essay because Summer’s protagonist is astonishingly bereft of any positive qualities.
I’m surprised you didn’t include Tragic Origin — making the character sympathetic by showing they have a reason for becoming so unpleasant, because of their abusive upbringing or whatever. Or maybe that goes under Contrast, by showing that they were once the victim of someone or something worse than themselves.
This may go under Charm, but one option is to make the character more intriguingly complex than they seem at first — that what seems initially to be just being a jerk represents some nuanced and unusual value system. For instance, someone who’s always incredibly rude and blunt to others, but it’s because they despise dishonesty and believe everyone deserves to know exactly what others really think.
The problem with what I will call the “Alternative Value System” method and possibly the idea of “unlikeable protagonists” is the changing nature in time and between people in what is “unlikeable” not familiar with “by his bootstraps” but Lazurus Long is another good example from Heinlein except that if you find him “unlikeable” or not has a lot to do with your own personal morality. When the book was written a certain section of the population certainly found him objectionable and many people still do today (though often for very different reasons) others do not.
An “Alternative Value System” can become the value system of some – or even many given enough time. To paraphrase one of my favorite B5 characters – death is what gives us the illusion that anything is permanent.
Try reading some 1950s DC comics — the ways the heroes treat women were portrayed as healthy and admirable at the time, but to modern eyes would constitute psychological abuse and gaslighting.
Yes – exactly. Right and wrong is historically a moving target. I mean watching some of the sitcoms from the 50s now … (I mean watch some of SOAP – a hilarious show but incredibly cringy in many many ways)
I’ve been rewatching Barney Miller for the first time in decades, and though it had a remarkably diverse cast for its day (even having a recurring gay pickpocket who was portrayed openly and sympathetically), there’s a lot of ethnic humor that would never fly today, even though the writers and characters are mostly mocking the people who’d have prejudiced attitudes.
To be honest, I completely forgot about that option.
Haunted Hotel had an amusing take on that, in an episode where Katherine (who operates the hotel) insistently tolerates her Aunt Rose’s horrible behavior because Aunt Rose had a terrible childhood.
This sounds a bit like Aunt Ada Doom (in Cold Comfort Farm) who has spent many years being a recluse and getting away with being a domineering and not very nice old biddy because she once saw “something nasty in the woodshed”.
One of these years I really must write Cold Comfort Avengers, in which she is aunt Ada Von Doom who saw something nasty in Latveria and took over the country…
Is having a tragic backstory and/or a couple of people who they do care about part of charm? A horrible character can be sympathetic if their horrible behavior can be explained by their suffering. Gollum, for example. I don’t like him, but I can empathize with him.
Ah, Leo Frankowski. I once commented “I’m a fan of stories where a modern-day person is thrust into the past and must figure out how to stave off disaster using only what they remember. Stories like L. Sprague deCamp’s Lest Darkness Fall, or S.M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time, or Leo Frankowski’s Actually, It’s Ephebophilia.”
The hero of Space Merchants is not a nice guy – but the book makes him learn better (with a delightful suggestion at the end that he’s got plenty more learning to do).
Gerrold’s Jim McCarthy apologizes so very well -because he’s gotten plenty of practice, because he keeps doing things that require apology
Speaking of Donaldson, The Gap Cycle’s Angus Thermopyle comes to mind…
True dat, though I would not call him a protagonist.
Well, he sort of becomes one, eventually, experiencing both of the flavors of “consequences” described by our peerless OP?
An excellent combination of charm and obliviousness, to the point where it almost becomes a new method on its own, is exemplified, I think, by George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman. Flashman is, by any realistic measure, a pretty horrible human being, but because he seems to genuinely believe himself a charming rogue, manages to pass himself off as one, most of the time, to the reader. See also Slippery Jim di Griz.
As an autistic-spectrum teenager – I suppose – I didn’t notice what I did rereading later, that Jim “Stainless Steel Rat” DiGriz really was quite an awful person, at least in the first book and less-than-half – I’ll include the episode of his wedding and honeymoon, though I also recognise that that part is written as comedy, his desperate attempts to escape from the ceremony, his extremely pregnant fiancee’s ruthless methods of forcing him to go through it. Mostly not addressing the question of whether loving her means that he deserves her. But in his first-written book where he drugs himself into carefully designed insanity to understand the genuinely insane antagonist, in the last read I perceived his insane self as hardly any more abusive and unreasonable than he was in the rest of the book.
“Hateful character meets just deserts” occurs in a lot of short stories where a sensitive reader might not enjoy a sympathetic character meeting an awful science fiction fate, which also happens. Harry Harrison and Larry Niven also wrote many stories where people only slightly-awful, or reckless in space, fare much worse than a merciful author would find necessary. “Heh”, I imagine the cruel author saying.
Flashman has very few illusions about himself – except possibly believing that he is a coward, when in fact he repeatedly gets into great danger to avoid revealing that he is a coward.
Flashman exposes himself to appalling risks under duress – above all else (perhaps even above his regard for his own skin) he fears losing his standing as a great military hero. His status in Victorian British society means everything to him.
However, when he can slough the risk onto someone else without being caught, he doesn’t hesitate.
I agree that he is quite clear-eyed about his own lack of ethics and scruples.
I would say that a major category is the thief.
Often they have a non apocalyptic license – e.g. to provide food for their friends or family.
They also often have charm.
But they really deserve their own category.
This often falls under the contrast category. A lot of heist stories and movies such as Ocean’s Eleven spend time showing how horrible the person that they’re about to scam/rob is.
Pretty much the whole premise of the series Hustle and Leverage.
Oh, I love a good gentleman/lady thief story. Their stories are about creative problem-solving, they generally don’t kill people (with some exceptions, like Lupin the Third in some versions but not others), and they often target rich and powerful people who can stand the loss and frankly deserve to be stolen from (or stolen back from, really, since you can’t be super-rich without depriving lots of other people of their fair share). Which tends to fall into the “Contrast” category, the targets of the phantom thief or con artist being worse than they are.
Of course, the gentleman thief genre is the opposite of “unlikeable protagonist,” since being likeable and charming is their whole deal.
As characters observed in Avatar: The Last Airbender:
Toph: Rich people should get robbed at least once a week
Aang: Why?
Toph: Builds character.
The Bernie Rhodenbarr books side-steps the whole “he steals other people’s stuff” issue by having Bernie regularly stumble over murders that he is forced to solve to clear his name. Solving murders is generally felt to be good.
Plus, he runs a used bookshop, tying him in to the other post this week!
That sort of goes into the Contrast category, the unlikeable detective or doctor solving crimes or saving lives. That’s been a recurring TV series format in recent decades, building a crime or medical procedural around an unlikeable or deeply screwed-up protagonist.
Oh, one more thought about Donaldson, and the character of Thomas Covenant. Despite the title, Covenant is not really the protagonist of the first trilogy: that would be Mhoram…
A lot of these sound like disadvantages in an RPG – Get five points for being a psychopath, nobody will like you but you can spend the points on a deadly superpower or a nice big gun, then use it to retaliate when people are mean.
Which brings to mind Dr Impossible from Soon I Will Be Invincible, who admittedly has imperiled the world while trying to conquer it but he has a medical condition compelling him, one that doesn’t seem to get treated when he is in prison.
I have to say that I think you are being way too hard on Trafalgar. He was a roguish sort, but I don’t think that he was really a thief or a bad guy.
I read the book in short bits, so i didn’t get to annoyed with him.
Another category I would suggest is Competence Porn. Westlake’s Parker character is a horrible, horrible person — but he is so good at what he does that it is endlessly fascinating.
This makes me think of Jack Carter from Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home (and its excellent film adaptation Get Carter with Michael Caine). Likewise the extremely rough around the edges Rooster Cogburn in Portis’s True Grit. While not exactly horrible, Cogburn is certainly morally suspect, violent, and hauling some seriously dark and weighty baggage from his past, none of which matters to the supremely self righteous Mattie Ross, thanks to his expertise at manhunting.
That relates to the genre of obnoxious or screwed-up TV-procedural detectives or doctors — people who are horrible to everyone around them but get away with it because they do brilliant and necessary work.
The Good Place did very well establishing that Elenor Shellstrop had been a horrible person before she arrived. Occasionally afterward too, but she got better.
Jason was not so much horrible as he was Florida Man, but he was very Florida Man. Even Jason got better once he was no longer around other moronic Florida Men.
Jason was pretty bad, what with things like framing someone for a crime to keep them from poaching a dance crew member, robbery, and of course throwing Molotov cocktails being a routine thing for him.
Granted, it’s unclear that he’s mentally competent to distinguish right and wrong.
Covenant’s story is supposed to be one of atonement. He’s selfish and cowardly through the first two books before starting to change direction in book 3 and making the ultimate sacrifice in book 6. Understandable if you don’t want to follow a story like that, but it was an unusual choice for when the series first came out. Since then we’ve gotten more used to despicable characters as protagonists and that includes ones who never redeem themselves in any way.
Gully Foyle, the hero of The Stars My Destination, like his literary model, is pretty unlikeable. In fact I’m hard-pressed to think of any Alfred Bester story where the protagonist was likeable. Then there’s the psychopathic title character in Roger Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows, unusual for that author. And Monza Murcatto in Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold may not be totally unlikeable, but she’s pretty far over on the unlikeable side of the balance.
You can always have your protagonist save a cat (in the Blake Snyder tradition), that often grants some buy-in from the audience until the full hook is set!
I finished the first Thomas Covenant trilogy (and don’t have any idea what ‘that scene’ is because it was 40-odd years ago and I don’t remember the details). As I remember it, in those 3 books he apparently experienced some degree of growth and improvement. But when I started reading the 2nd trilogy I discovered that he had somehow gone right back to where he was at the beginning of _Lord Foul’s Bane_. At that point I was done with Thomas Covenant.
In Consider Phebas, Horza is clearly a Noir Protagonist from the beginning … doomed to suffer both kinds of Consequences. Part of what’s engaging there is the desire to see exactly how that plays out.