I’ve lost track of the number of times the characters I write have been called unsympathetic. They have an apparently-unpalatable tendency to be emotional, selfish, illogical. They make choices that are motivated by fear and greed and pure unfettered impulse. They make bad choices and treat each other poorly and try to get away with things when it would probably be simpler to just fess up, or better yet, to make smarter choices.
When people describe these characters as unsympathetic, I start to wonder if maybe I don’t know what the word ‘sympathetic’ means. I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way—the functional meaning of a word is influenced heavily by popular usage. Pedantry can be a useful tool for self-soothing in an uncertain world, and I understand the urge to cling to it—but in practical terms, I don’t have much use for fussing over whether a word is being used incorrectly. I just want to understand what people are trying to communicate in a way that brings us as close as possible to mutual understanding.
So when someone says they can’t sympathize with a character who navigates the world in a fundamentally flawed way, I start to wonder if maybe there’s a comprehension gap on my part. I’d usually interpret a ‘sympathetic’ character to be a character people can identify with and understand—a character who is legible to readers, who comes across as realistic enough to elicit some degree of compassion, or at least recognition. Even when I’m wincing at a sympathetic character’s choices, some part of me is thinking: been there.
This is why I’m starting to wonder if I’m wrong about what a sympathetic character is. So the question that I get stuck on is, naturally: What do people mean when they talk about sympathetic characters?
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Just Like Home
My first impulse is to think that maybe people simply mean charming. I often write characters who have no interest in being charming, who are actively avoiding any semblance of charm, who aren’t looking to the reader for friendship. Vera Crowder, the protagonist of my newest book Just Like Home, is so afraid of what emotional intimacy might mean that she avoids forming meaningful friendships. I would think that this kind of trait would be resonant for many readers—but maybe resonant isn’t the same thing as sympathetic. Maybe there are parts of ourselves that we’d prefer not to see reflected and examined on the page, and so characters who act as mirrors at the wrong angles are unsympathetic.
But that answer seems too shallow. The specific ways in which people push back on my unsympathetic characters are not just about affection. I’ve been confronted several times by readers who are actively angry at my characters for making the wrong decisions, over and over again, and reaping consequences for those decisions. One person in a signing line confided in me that they enjoyed the book even though it was ‘riddled with plotholes’—the plotholes, they explained, being all the protagonists’ mistakes. They elaborated that she shouldn’t have done the things she did if she didn’t want to have so many problems.
That reader hung a lightbulb over my head and clicked it on. The question of sympathetic characters isn’t one of familiarity or relatability or affection—it’s a matter of instruction and admiration. A sympathetic character needs to be followable, emulatable, inspirational. Their choices need to offer some form of guidance to readers who want (as so many of us want) to know how to do the right thing in impossible circumstances. A sympathetic character needs to be a light in the darkness, showing the way to a more desirable destination than the one the reader is stuck in.
This, then, is the problem. My characters are almost never lights in the darkness. They’re just as stuck as the rest of us, groping frantically through the dark, hoping not to stumble into anything worse than what’s behind them, mistaking the occasional bioluminescent flicker of a cave worm’s glow for daylight. In Just Like Home, Vera Crowder is trying to decide if it’s best to simply embrace the darkness, because finding her way to the light has been so impossible for so long. If a character needs to be charming or instructive to be sympathetic, then Vera is the least sympathetic character I’ve ever written.
But if, in order to be sympathetic, she needs to be real—if she needs to be where so many of us have been in our lives, recognizably stuck, desperate to understand what it means to be a good person, battling the monsters in her head that tell her she’ll never find her way—then maybe I’ve finally done it.
Maybe in Vera, I’ve finally managed to write a sympathetic character after all.
Hugo Award-winning and bestselling author Sarah Gailey is the author of the novels The Echo Wife and Magic for Liars. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and The Boston Globe, and they won a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Their fiction credits also include Vice and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was a 2018 finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Well, this persuaded me not to pick up the book.
While I agree that a lot of readers are harsh towards complexly flawed characters, and that many terms of literary criticism have lost or reversed their meaning in popular discourse, this doesn’t read as a sincere attempt to engage with the new (mis)constructions around “sympathetic characters”, but more like a grudging defence of the author’s characters. I’m not saying that Vera Crowder isn’t an excellent character, just that this essay didn’t present a compelling exploration of what makes characters sympathetic.
This is a fascinating topic of conversation. I’m deliberately not looking up what anyone else says about sympathetic characters, but I will briefly give my thoughts on what I mean when I say a character is sympathetic (not necessarily dictionary definition!). For me, a sympathetic character is someone I both understand and also would enjoy spending time with. It’s a character that resonates as real (and yes flawed!) but someone who has good motivations and a simple integrity, a character with a strong vein of decency running throughout. So if I think of a few examples from literature, I think of Meg Murry as being sympathetic (despite – or maybe because of – her faults). I think of Kvothe (for all his arrogance and folly!) as sympathetic. Jay Gatsby is somehow sympathetic. Whereas (this may be my biases showing) Mark Ryland from Project Hail Mary is decidedly unsympathetic.
As I wrote the above, I think my definition of sympathetic is broader than I originally stated. A well rounded character, one written well, one living and breathing on the page…is generally sympathetic, as long as they maintain that basic striving for decency and love. If a character is poorly written – a cardboard cutout if you will – I’ll generally not find them sympathetic. So I’ve talked myself full circle. I agree with your thesis – if the character feels real and is one who grows throughout the course of the book and isn’t an entirely horrible person, I will likely (hopefully!) find them sympathetic. I’m now intrigued to read this book to find out if it proves true in your case!
A sympathetic character is a character we feel sympathy for. Someone we feel sorrow at, and someone who we can understand why they make the choices they make.
That doesn’t automatically equate to logical choices. It doesn’t equate to good choices, either. Namaari is the antagonist in “Raya and the Last Dragon” but remains a sympathetic character. She knows what the best choices are, but keeps making bad ones, either directly under her mother’s order, or because she’s doing what she knows her mother would want. She’s making those bad choices to win her mother’s approval. The audience understands that, understands her, so keep hoping she’ll start making better choices. She keeps our sympathy.
Character’s become unsympathetic when we, the readers, can’t understand why they make those decisions. I lose sympathy for a character when I don’t understand why they’d make a choice like that. Sometimes it just feels so forced, like this happens because the plot demands it. I’m not going to name names, because that’s disrespectful, but when you have a character that is literally the pope of this Aztec-inspired secondary world, who has people that just pay lip-service to her religion plotting a coup because she’s a true-believer (and we know she’s a true-believer because she’s a POV character) suddenly commit blasphemy because she’s found out about the plot against her. No crisis of faith, just a “those people seem scary, wanna do some blood magic?” Complete loss of sympathy.
Or another book where the protagonist is caught in a love triangle, but one of the corners of the triangle is nothing but a clichéd example of power and toxic privilege. No charm, no description of how they’re physically attractive, no redeeming characteristics at all, yet we’re supposed to believe the protagonist believes herself to be in love with them. That moment meant I lost all sympathy for the character.
I think the issue here is twofold:
1. Female and feminine characters are held to far, far higher standards by readers of all genders. If a male character does terrible things and feels bad about it, well, he’s just a very complex person. If a female character does those things she’s an irredeemable monster and only a sociopath could love her.
2. Everything is a frigging purity test on the internet. “I loved X character!” “X character is a THIEF and a JAYWALKER. You’re romanticizing REAL CRIMES!!!” Or, conversely: “Oh you don’t like Y character? That’s because you’re a RIGID MORALIST who thinks NO ONE is allowed to like DARK THINGS! FICTION ISN’T REALITY YOU KNOW!!!”
From your description I think I might find Vera unsympathetic, not because she’s flawed or makes bad decisions, but because they’re flaws and bad decisions that exasperate me in real people. Which has absolutely squat to do with whether she’s well-written or compelling or even a good person! But far too many people can’t or won’t make those distinctions.
A character being unsympathetic could either be that the writer has not made clear how their motivations work (they don’t feel real), or it could be the writer did an excellent job but there is a fundamental gap in how the character works and how the reader works.
For me, a character is unsympathetic if they just don’t care about other people. One of Gailey’s works has a character who is kind of a mess and has some behavioral patterns that aren’t great, but she does genuinely regret when she hurts someone, and wants to improve how she relates to others. Another novel has a main character who sees how she is harming others, sees how she is repeating patterns from her childhood and then…just continues to do them and doesn’t try to stop. This character and the story around her were amazingly written, but no, I can’t find that sympathetic. I sympathized with the character’s difficulties but not her reactions to them- but there is nothing wrong with that. I found the novel chilling just because the characters did feel real to me, and the protagonists narration was its own form of subtle horror. One of the reason I love reading is experiencing different viewpoints and character types. A sympathetic protagonist can be enjoyable but that isn’t the only kind of good protagonist.
I think you hit it on the head when you said “But that answer seems too shallow”. I have a feeling that too many people think a “pro”tagonist should be positive and right-minded and virtuous and all good things, including a light in the darkness — not a person like, well. Like people are. You write complex characters, and all the better for that, in my opinion. I think the sense over the last few years that too many people are lacking in compassion and sympathy — in “fellow feeling” and the ability to “suffer with” impacts their fictional views, as well. Maybe they don’t want complex people they can identify with, but simpler depictions they can feel good about, who are better than they are?
Please, don’t change how you write your characters! Whether they grow in any particular way, or not, during the narrativem, you give them the room to do so.
Ahahahahaaaa! I finished this book last night, and when I saw your headline, I laughed right out loud. Oh, how it put the finger right on how I felt about this story!
It was so complicated and uncomfortable, and there was so much layering about love and remorse and belonging, and how love can warp people just as cruelly as hate. I found it a very compelling novel, with, yeah, sympathies that are all over the place and often very uneasy. It was frightening in a lot of ways – the haunting scenes were taut and creeeeepy, the echoes of real-world horror & the voyeurism of the present were skin-crawling, and the loss of tangible reminders of lost loved ones added a visceral ache to the unfolding tragedy, past and present.
Are any of them sympathetic? Is it good or bad that we can continue to feel empathy for broken and dangerous people? It gave me so much to chew over today at work. I loved it – ordered it for my library, and can’t wait to talk about it with patrons.
This just persuaded me to pick up the book.
There are times when I can read about flawed people who make bad choices and who don’t care about others as much as they should. During a worldwide pandemic that was made MUCH worse than it had to be in my country by a political leader who tried to make it all about HIM and by millions of my fellow countrymen who politicized elementary precautions against the virus to the tune of more than a million deaths, most of which didn’t have to happen, I am not in the mood for flawed people who don’t care about others.
I want to read about people who CARE, who try to make a difference, who try to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. I want Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and Starfleet values of cooperation and belief in Science and working together to solve problems. I want unselfishness and even self-sacrifice for the greater good.
I’m sure the author’s books are very skillfully written. But when the world is in this bad of a shape — and I haven’t even mentioned climate change yet — I want to read about GOOD people.
The problem is people conflate ‘sympathetic’ ‘likeable’ and ‘morally correct’. They are not the same, nor should they be.
Hmmm. That’s not how I use the term. For me, a sympathetic character is one where I can believe in, and understand, their feelings. I consider almost all of the protagonists in American Hippo to be sympathetic.
So … I guess I’m saying, don’t let the complainers define something for you.
This does read a bit as “my characters REALLY ARE sympathetic” but it’s an interesting question.
I’d usually interpret a ‘sympathetic’ character to be a character people can identify with and understand—a character who is legible to readers, who comes across as realistic enough to elicit some degree of compassion, or at least recognition
I don’t think “recognition” and “compassion” go along with each other. I can recognize and understand the actions of a flawed character, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily sympathize with them. I mean, I read the description of the characters:
emotional, selfish, illogical. They make choices that are motivated by fear and greed and pure unfettered impulse. They make bad choices and treat each other poorly
And didn’t think any of those were particularly sympathetic characteristics, especially all together.
@@.-@ “Feminine characters are held to far, far higher standards by readers of all genders…”
Examples?
I agree it is an interesting question. There are characters for whom I feel protective in the sense that I want to shield them from the consequences of their bad decisions (and from other bad things that may happen to them for other reasons), and it makes me agitated that I cannot. The Umbrella Academy crew elicits this reaction in me, for example, as does Gideon (but less so Harrow) in the Locked Tomb series. I’m not sure whether sympathetic is the right term for this, but it is more apt than likeable. It is also definitely not about them being role models or people I would want to emulate. Nor is it about verisimilitude or resonance, or even legibility. It does, likely, relate in some way to their willingness to try to do the right thing (whether or not they succeed, and whether or not I agree with their assessment of what is right). But it also involves their vulnerability.
On the other hand, there are other characters who are interesting and engaging, whose stories I can get invested in, and whom I care about, but who do not elicit the same kind of response. Frodo Baggins is admirable, but Sam Gamgee is sympathetic (and also admirable).
I think there’s a difference between a character being “sympathetic” and a character being “relatable.”
I read a lot of crime fiction and noir fiction, where the protagonists are most often really flawed, damaged people. Frequently, they are in desperate situations, usually through their own mistakes, and are then driven to make even worse decisions that draws them even deeper into despicable situations. Yet I find myself compelled to care about these characters because they’re relatable.
That is, I can relate to them and what happens to them since a good author makes me understand how and why these characters end up as they do, and the best authors to put the reader in the characters’ place and challenge them to come up with better decisions. The real terror come from maybe realizing how easy it would be for us to end up the same way.
@15, I think I tend to use “sympathetic” and “relatable” as synonyms, but maybe it is useful to draw a distinction between these concepts.
For me, a “sympathetic” character is one in whom I can sympathize sufficiently to actually care what happens to them–and that’s a vital component of any book I actually finish. Russell H, #15 above, uses the term “relatable,” and I think this is a valid and important quality. The characters need not be good, moral, or admirable, but does need to be interesting and sufficiently motivated to allow the reader to understand their feelings or actions, or relate to those actions in some way. Scarlett O’Hara is often cited as a self centered and fairly despicable character, but she’s also determined and goal driven so the reader does want her to succeed–get better, get punished, but in the end succeed as a person. So a sympathetic character must have at least some balance in their traits, even if only a recognition of their own bad behavior.
I barely got through “Gone Girl,” because I simply didn’t care if both unlikable main characters dropped off the face of the earth. That related in part to their being “unreliable narrators,” but also because Flynn, previously one of my fave writers, didn’t open them up enough to encourage the reader to be sympathetic to their personalities. Both characters baffled me because they didn’t seem real–I’ve no doubt that there are real folks as disassociated with others as they, but I haven’t, to my knowledge, encountered any.
So maybe sympathetic characters, IMO, need to seem real, no matter how good or evil they are, and the writer needs to open up the emotional part of a character’s personality so the reader can recognize the character’s motives and filters. Sympathetic characters aren’t just wooden props moving across the pages to further some plot.
I think that in many cases, the most important factor in determining if a character is sympathetic is the disposition of the reader. As other comments have indicated, we live in an age of scrutiny and nitpicking, where mere disagreement is seen as an existential threat. If your readers aren’t willing to extend mercy to random strangers on the internet, why do you think that they’d sympathize with characters that baffle and frustrate them?
Sympathy, in that context, is overrated. If people want to read only about people who would do what they do and think what they think, maybe they need to put down books and go rethink their overall disposition towards differences in general. Then, when they’re emotionally mature enough to try to get into the mind of someone they totally disagree with, they can try reading again.
You, as a writer, probably shouldn’t be too concerned with where your readers are on their personal journey of emotional growth. Write the kinds of characters you want to write–warts and all–and let the readers figure themselves out.