(Un)likeability in characters. · 2:15pm Jan 25th, 2020
I noticed that Jamie Foxx's character in Baby Driver is a pretty similar archetype to Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs. They're the psychopath. And among a group of thieves, the others dislike them for being trigger happy and putting everyone at greater risk. Bats and Blonde see it the other way, that they're the only ones being serious and protecting the team. It's everyone else being a poseur.
Bats: You rob to support a drug habit. I do drugs to support a robbery habit.
Buddy: That's clever.
But I think there's some difference in how these characters are used. Bats gets scenes like this one, which solidify him as a foil to the protagonist. Baby is coerced into crime while Bats revels in it, but the entire hook of the movie is that action synchronized to music is cool, while Bats thinks it's stupid. This alone distances him from the audience. And it's all setting up an interesting payoff later in the plot, where Bats isn't even the antagonist, he's a red herring. Buddy is the real danger.
By contrast, you never actually see the things Mr Blonde does that make the other characters dislike him so. From his first appearance in the warehouse he just comes across as cool, even when he's torturing the prisoner, because he knows what he's doing while everyone else is lost. I've noticed he's almost always people's favorite character. Even in the many conversation scenes, there's nothing that sets him apart from the other robbers.
Whether this is morally irresponsible or whatever is a whole other topic I won't get into, I'm just limiting this to the scope that there's no reason for the audience to dislike him. Evil and sadistic, sure, everyone's logically thinking he's a bad person. But emotionally, he's just one of many robbers. The audience is just as in the dark about who can be trusted, and doesn't have a protagonist to root for (?) until 2/3 through the movie. I recently rewatched it just for writing this, and honestly I find Reservoir Dogs to be thematically confusing, and an overrated weak film.
I started watching Little Witch Academia again (I thought it was mediocre the first time, but this time I'm actually really enjoying it). One thing I noticed is just how often Akko is beginning or ending an episode doing punishment for breaking school rules. She does poorly in classes, and none of the other students respect her. She's starting from nothing, but not giving up.
It's so obvious to compare the show's premise to Harry Potter, magical schools and all, but the above makes me relate to Akko much more than I ever did with Harry. I mean it's a common observation that Harry constantly breaks rules and gets into mischief, and never faces punishment. That didn't bother me nearly so much as how the only people who don't worship him are the Slytherin characters. They alone are the bullies, the mean teachers, and of course every single one of them turn out to be working for Evil Wizard-Supremecists (I know Snape is more complex than that, but he is still technically working for Voldemort). When the big war happens and they turn into nazis, you're justified in hating them!
And I find that such a dangerous view of the world. Akko sometimes gets bullied, or at least looked down upon, but not because anyone is literally evil (ironically the one true villain gets along nicely with her). M.A. Larson said in a con panel that he found it much harder to write "good vs evil" stories, because by assigning someone as evil you're automatically implying the protagonists are pure good, and it changes how you're allowed to write those characters. Much like how in Harry Potter books, the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs are mostly brushed aside because they don't nicely fit within the good vs evil dichotomy.
I think I'm a sucker for the trope of characters who appear unlikeable at first, rough around the edges, but turn out to be the most trustworthy of all. Leorio from Hunter X Hunter is a good example.
Fukumoto does this a lot in his manga, showing the gambling world full of cheaters and con artists. It's not enough to trust someone just because they appear heroic and charismatic, because that's the easiest way to get burned. Or even better, just because someone is obviously a corrupt liar, therefore I'll trust everyone who's against him becomes a painful fallacy.
Finally, on this topic there's one very weird example I wanted to bring up. A 90s cooking manga named Iron Wok Jan!, where the main character is probably a psychopath. He's not quite an anti-hero, or rough guy with heart of gold. He's simply unlikeable because of how arrogant and abrasive he is. And yet that's why I couldn't stop reading him.
Jan's stated philosophy is "cooking is about competition", and that's what he does, he turns everything into a contest so he can prove he's the best. This sounds pretty common to a lot of manga, taking some field of interest and pumping it up with drama by turning it into a typical Sports Story (with a passionate underdog who has to suffer to become #1, etc.) and this is even common in the west (see the discussion on how the movie Whiplash is basically a Sports Story, and oddly a lot of viewers condone the abusive teacher because it fits within the familiar Sports Story arc, while actual music/art students found the movie uncomfortable and unrelatable.) This has become a writing technique I despise for how manipulative it is, and I could go on about how much I hate Bakuman but that's another post entirely..... SORRY LET ME START OVER.
Jan is competitive, and much of the plots are about these contests, but the manga never quite portrays this as a good thing. If you knew nothing about the title, you'd probably assume Kiriko is the protagonist, because of her empathetic approach and likeable personality. But instead it's about the jerk. Why?
Medium spoilers: in the first cooking tournament arc, Jan gets to the finals by doing whatever it takes to win, no matter how unethical. He has antagonized his fellow competitors, the judges, and even the audience itself. And then in the first round of the finals, he overlooks something important and messes up big time. He's 90 points behind, it's nearly impossible to make a comeback, and everyone hates him.
This is the point where every other story would insert character development. Oh, he finally realizes how toxic his philosophy is, and if he ever loses once then his own outlook has no room for forgiving himself. Surely he will learn that he must change into a better person, because he can't win by being disliked. Right?
Nope.
He comes back on stage and announces he's going to win anyway. He's decided that human beings are hungry gluttons, they'll overlook anything as long as you feed them something delicious. This is how he works his magic, by cooking something so bizarre nobody can understand what he's doing.... but they can't take their eyes off him.
In a meta way, I think that's exactly what it was doing to me. I wanted to see Jan lose and be forced to swallow his pride. But if he actually pulls off a miracle and wins, I wanted to see how he creates that miracle. No matter which happens, I just had to keep reading.
There is no character development in the entire story (which isn't required in stories, as I've discovered). I read the whole series to make sure, though you don't have to. I recommend just the first 5 volumes to see that tournament arc I talked about (I'm probably not allowed to say where you can find it?). Reading more than that is just for those people who are actually interested in the medicinal basis of chinese cooking and the science that explains it. It never tries to justify Jan, but it doesn't condemn him either. There are worse psychopaths in the world, and there's something fascinating about the lengths he'll go to for creating delicious food. Even if you hate him as a person, in a roundabout way he's just trying to give you exactly what you want, even if he's not motivated by empathy like Kiriko. It's a silly dramatic manga about cooking, and yet I still feel like it's criticizing human nature in a subtle way.
I don't really have a cohesive point here, but I wanted to get back in the practice of writing out thoughts. I had a few ideas planned that do have a stronger point, I'll get to those later. This is just the casual leftovers that I didn't want to throw away. Sorry.
I can’t speak for psychopaths (and the term isn’t even a medically accepted one.), but I have at least one good friend and one acquaintance who are self-admitted sociopaths but still good people. Both take the view of “Well, I recognize I can easily be a manipulative asshole, but I know that’s not good so I’m going to try not to be.”. I’m curious, does the manga ever go into why Jan is the way he is? Unfortunately, most people who have personality disorders (antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc.) do so because because of childhood trauma and/or abuse.
5191840 Hey!
I never admitted to being a sociopath.
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Are you a sociopath?
5192186 Of course I--
... ooh. You're a sneaky one.
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oh sure, that's true. I'm sorta using "psychopath" as a lazy shorthand since these are exaggerated fictional characters. Moreso for the killer bank robbers. I'm not sure what Jan would fall under, since he doesn't even seem motivated by selfishness.
Jan's whole backstory is being raised and trained by his perfectionist abusive grandfather, so I guess that fits. It's not deep or anything though, just used for drama....
Yes! I read an old book years ago called The Technique of the Novel, and in it the author makes this exact point, and it's stuck with me because it's true. He said stories can be about character growth, but they can also be about character revelation--about revealing who a character is at rock bottom. And he argues this is just as satisfying to readers.
A character growth story might take a liar and turn him into someone who learns to tell the truth, because bad things happen otherwise. A character revelation story might take a liar and, after lots of bad things happen because of their lies, at the end they still choose to lie. Because there's something they want more than the good afforded by telling the truth.
It's really the same thing we do with positive attributes of characters. We understand a good person isn't really good if they're such only when it's easy. If they're good when it gets tough to be good, then we know they're truly a good person. The attribute has not been shed under pressure. It's a part of them.
The same applies to negative attributes. If a person does not shed their vanity even under great pressure, we know it's a true part of them. We've learned something deeper about them, and therefore I think have learned something about ourselves. Which is where the story becomes meaningful and satisfying. 'Rarity is still vain, because vanity is part of the human condition, inside you and inside me.'
After all, we know in life sometimes people never change, no matter what. So it's justifiable for stories to reflect this. Therefore, instead of always having to write a character who changes in some attribute, you can instead write a story that asks, how far down does this attribute reach into that character? Or a story that simply asks, who are they really?
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Those types of stories usually get called "character studies", which I feel sounds a little condescending, as if they're not "real" stories. I'm not sure why.
I do agree that it's the revelation that's compelling about them. As an inverse example, I remember some mlp episodes that didn't have much of a plot, and only "revealed" things everyone already knew about the character. They were pretty darn boring.
And maybe this goes into more philosophical territory but I think it's valid that people can act differently depending on context, so no one's 100% "selfish" or "good" or anything like that. We're only trained to think that way, so it's easy to surprise us that a character might be more complex than that.
But character studies aside, I think it's useful in entertainment such as action or drama. The one dumb example that comes to mind is the movie Speed Racer. Speed doesn't develop at all as a character, and actually the plot makes it look like he's about to dramatically change -- but then he stops. He realizes he's strong because of what he already had all along. Sounds cliche.... but it's the anti-cliche, because writers think you're never supposed to do that.
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Exactly, any story "type" can be done poorly. I mean it can't really be a revelation if you already know it after all.
Honestly I think if most viewers/readers would just absorb stories with their eyes more open, they'd notice countless examples of narratives doing things they thought wrong, and doing them quite successfully. I for instance began doubting the universalism of "show don't tell" when I noticed lots of talented writers, especially outside of fanfiction, not following that rule.
The same goes for always having a "character arc"--which, in itself, isn't very well defined anyway. After all one of the key attributes we admire in both people and characters is their unwillingness to bend or change under pressure. We admire that Luke didn't give in to the temptation of the dark side, or that Batman refuses to kill even when clearly justified. So clearly there can be features of characters we don't want to change.
And if we, say, show Batman learn some patience and call that a character arc, is that change nearly as meaningful or important as the thing which doesn't change about him (his refusal to kill, let's say)? So does the term "character arc" have any real weight in that context? I don't really think so.
The first time I read this, I must admit I bristled a bit. Especially whilst reading about Iron Wok Jan!, I interpreted you as saying that likeable characters would have been boring and predictable, and that by extension an unlikeable one would have been the superior way to write that particular story element.
To a person who generally prefers to have relatable and likeable protagonists to get invested in, I can't say I was wholly sympathetic to that message. It definitely didn't help I wasn't - at the time - in the best of moods when it came to producing stories either; hearing common advice (that I struggle with already) get a 180 from someone else tends to be confusing and frustrating. It's a hard enough balancing act following the common advice.
On reflection, though, I think I get your point, and if anything it fits a principle I endorse whole-heartedly, and which I think is often overlooked:
The key part of a character arc - characters in general too - is psychological interest, not moral conformity.
In a conversation I had with someone else, I made a similar point, but especially when it comes to "character development" and "character arc". There's this simplified idea that those mean "the character conforms more to a bland kind of goodness as the story progresses". That to me is a questionable ideal, because:
A) Turning a diverse cast or an idiosyncratic character into a cookie cutter good person or cast of people usually means sanding off whatever made them interesting in the first place, or making it less relevant to the dynamics of the overall plot. I think that's bad psychology and bad morality.
To pick an example: people will disagree with me, but I think that's what happened to Twilight over the course of the show, that her more personal or idiosyncratic qualities - which could have made her a more interesting type of leader - instead became less and less relevant to her acquired and reinforced princess role, which largely amounted to being Celestia 2.0. The more she was pushed into the role of a Great Destined Leader with few or no real flaws, and the less her studious, rational, introvert, achievement-oriented tendencies informed her character beyond occasional gags, the less appealing she became to me.
It's not wrong in itself for a story to make its characters wiser and kinder, but then stories can be just as interesting - and more diverse - if characters have various kinds of lapses, falls, and corruptions. So long as we're allowed to see a compelling psychological drama or at least find something understandable about the change, I think it could be a good thing to show more often, especially if, instead of rigidly sticking to a black-and-white view, we concede that different behaviours have strengths and weaknesses in different contexts, rather than naively assuming, say, that confidence is "good" and lack of confidence is "bad", and then proceeding from those dubious assumptions. Which brings me to my next point:
B) It assumes as we discussed that ethical conformity is the ideal, not psychological insight. It presumes that there is only one direction to take, and that a character "arc" has "developed" or made "progress" if it moves the right way along this one-dimensional line. To me, that kind of lack of imagination is on par with the idea that biological evolution is a ladder leading to humanity. Apart from aggrandizing one specific type at the expense of several others, it's guilty of the charge of failing to respect the power of diversity, adaptability, and creativity born from a unique history of circumstances.
Exactly the same principle applies to human psychology, especially in fiction where we're most likely to see these attributes tested. What can it mean if the dominant idea is that there is only a small handful of "right" ways to develop or to be, and everything else must conform to it? Besides, speaking metaphorically, if your main contribution to a discussion on earthworms, eagles, and elephants is that "they're a lower form of life than humans", you're not exactly bringing much valuable knowledge or understanding to the table, are you?
If anything, I prefer the idea that fiction would be better to incorporate a more nuanced view of conflict.
I think I share with you a worry over people's incredibly simplified and naive ideas of morality and how to use it in fiction. It's easy to see why: in fiction, there's usually a clear good side (or a "home team" to root for) and a clear bad side (the "away team" to beat), and the goal of a story is to have your home team beat the away team, preferably while putting on a good show with memorable moments. Sometimes this backfires (because the writer made the home team boring and the away team more entertaining, for example), but by and large that's a consistent model that applies to a lot of stories.
The trouble is, I don't think it maps very well to real life, and the sheer ubiquity of it in fiction is more a problem than its appearance in any one story, per se. There's a psychological phenomenon called the "just world hypothesis": people have a tendency to assume that good people largely get rewarded and bad people largely get punished, to greater or lesser degrees. And I think the obvious problem is that this hypothesis doesn't match the real world, very well or (in extreme cases) at all.
Now, it might be that the prevalent belief in the "just world hypothesis" causes us to demand a bias in fiction, or it might be that our wish-fulfilment stories bleed back into our worldview until wish-fulfilment becomes wishful thinking. I'm more convinced the two factors feed each other.
Regardless, I think it's a flawed and outdated way to organize stories, because it encourages a view and expectations that aren't intelligent. The fact that it's an old tradition in storytelling doesn't, in my mind, make it a good one.
More fruitful for me is to pit two or more positions - two people, say, or two groups, or two societies, or even two ideologies in the mind of a single conflicted person - and try to give each side a mixture of attributes that are admirable, morally-neutral-but-interesting, and deplorable. It's not that there's no place for pure good or pure evil, but they're less psychologically astute than a complex mix.
For example, one of the reasons I quite like Avatar: The Legend of Korra is that the villains (usually) seek to do good in the world, but in their determination to see justice done, they become dangerous fanatics. This is an explicitly discussed theme in the last season of the series, wherein it's actually part of the main character's arc to gain insight into other people's viewpoints and so explain to the villain that they know why they are going so far. It's not a perfect exemplar - by and large, the villains are villains, and most of the seasons' stories are spent more on tactics and strategies to stop them than on showing where those viewpoints came from - but there's a clear effort to show moral complexity.
A better example for me was my experience of the first season of Mobile Suit Gundam 00. It still has a clearly defined "home team" to root for - Celestial Being, the anti-war activist/terrorist group - but it takes the fascinating step of fleshing out their enemies - the three superpowers that dominate the future Earth - and showing internal factions of people who are just, well, people, not obvious bad guys. Every side has a mixture of people of different alignments, like unrepentant war criminals, ordinary kids caught up in the world news, nervous fighters with darker, crueller sides, mysterious allies, cocky but noble pilots, loyal officers interested in their soldiers' welfare, and politicians reacting to a challenge to their authority. It was one of those rare times for me when it felt like the show could've leaned ever so slightly towards any of the sides in the conflict, and I still would have had no problem rooting for the new "home team".
On TVTropes, the closest there is to that idea is the idea of the "Morality Kitchen Sink": that while there are different, defined sides to a conflict, each side has its own white, grey, and black, and most of the distinction will be on their approach to each other, rather than on which side is "good" or "mostly good" and which side is "bad" or "mostly bad".
So when you discuss how the main character in Iron Wok Jan! is given an interesting "hook" to grab the reader with, and one that has nothing to do with an obvious moralistic character arc, I think I see the point you're making. There are still important principles when writing a character, as you state in the comments about "revelation", but they're principles of psychological insight, not moral correction. The point isn't to turn Jan into a cookie cutter redeemed good guy; it's to show why he's like this and why that's interesting.
If so, then that's a sentiment I can more readily get behind.
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Sorry I can't respond to everything in your comment, but I did appreciate the points made. That's a better way of putting it than I could put into words: getting away from the fixation with morality. Without getting too much into philosophy or politics, it feels like weird cultural propaganda at times, needing to justifying conflict with morality. Even with how American culture seems to be obsessed with anti-heroes for decades, there's always this need to show that the villains are even worse.
Iron Wok Jan isn't a deep character study or anything like that, it's shallow and proud of it. But I do think it's saying that you shouldn't hate this character for his flaws; neither should you admire him. He just is, and there's room in the world for people like him.
And I guess it's telling that there's so much various anime (or anime-inspired) stories that aren't trying to rationalize themselves on morality. Basically, there can be reasons for fighting besides good vs evil! Sometimes this can lead to exploring philosophical truths, but sometimes it can work just fine as children's entertainment about superheroes or whatever. MLP used that to great effect, in season 1's pilot at least.
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Heheh, don't blame you in the slightest. Sorry if it was a bit overwhelming. To be honest, I was just as much trying to thrash out the concepts for myself as trying to figure out what (I thought) you were saying. I can be too indulgent at times.
Yes! That's it. And now I think about it, maybe that's why I tend to like a lot of the slice of life episodes more: both sides (usually) tend to be fascinatingly sympathetic, just different in how they approach the same issues.
Hm... not sure what you mean, there. The main conflict in Season One's pilot was Nightmare Moon, and while she does have a great design motif and backstory, I don't think she actually exemplifies the point about conflict-without-morality all that well. Take out the backstory and the bit after Nightmare Moon's defeat, and she's essentially a one-dimensional moustache-twirler who needs to be beaten by the McGuffin. Princess Luna might as well be a different character altogether, though admittedly I can sort of see the "embrace diversity" angle there (Luna's main grievance was that no one respected what she brought to Equestria).
Unless you're referring more to Twilight's attitude change towards the other five, perhaps?
It's actually kind of fascinating to bring up the two-parters here, because my favourite ones usually tend to have that focus on non-black-and-white moral conflict. Discord's the bad guy, but he's mostly a means to test Twilight's commitment to ponies who have (magically) become antagonists to her (fair's fair, it's not perfect, but it's the more compelling side of the conflict than "There's Discord, we must stop him!").
Starlight and especially her villagers were (mostly) well-intentioned souls who'd exaggerated a legitimate point about friends (especially ironic, as their fear was for the risks of conflicting with each other). And Stygian's arc, though being a rehash of Princess Luna's, still emphasizes the point that he was trying to fulfil both an altruistic and a selfish ideal. He just got compromised by bad communication.
Compare that with Sombra, Chrysalis, the Plunderseeds, Tirek, and Cozy Glow, who are bad guys doing bad guy things. Although this works both ways too: I will acknowledge there are other reasons to like/dislike any particular episode or villain. For me, Chrysalis and her changelings were at least supremely entertaining to watch being so diabolical, whereas most of the show's efforts to redeem a bad guy (and so imply some greyness) strike me as inept at best.
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Huh. I didn't notice such a difference, but then I'm a bit eclectic in my media consumption and so not great at spotting larger trends like that. That's likely just me. Did you come up with that from your viewing experience?
Sorry, one more:
Considering this is about "(Un)likeability in characters", do you think there's a necessity to making a character likeable? Since "likeable" doesn't mean "moral" (hence you can have entertaining villains as protagonists), could it be the case that a character has to at least have some kind of entertaining charisma? Even if it's via audacity, there has to be something an audience latches onto. I mean, that's why villains so often grab the audience's attention in the first place: they have a kind of freedom that lets them be entertaining in ways that would restrict a more morally bound hero.
The Joker might be a good example: out of all the Batman villains, he rarely gets much of a sympathetic turn, and no one (sane) is going to pretend he's a moral exemplar. Yet his massive appeal seems to be based on the fact that he's always outrageously fun to watch when he's being gleefully evil. In a sense, because he's the most "likeable", for a given definition of likeable.
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I think she's villainous, but not particularly evil or mean. The worst she does is scare the protagonists and drop them off a cliff, but I'm comparing that to Discord breaking up friendships or Chrysalis kidnapping and brainwashing ponies. The story doesn't really assign blame to Luna, since much of it is Celestia's responsibility (or as parodied in Scootertrix: "Celestia seals you in the moon for 1000 years, and she makes you apologize?"). At the end it's more a celebration of peace instead of victory.
Even throughout that episode, the monsters like the manticore and sea serpent are hardly evil, they're lashing out because they're upset. So before even reaching NMM, it builds up the theme of not automatically hating your enemies just because they're fighting against you. I think this silently affects the audience much more than all the preaching and reforming applied to later villains.
It's kind of a common trope, the villain who ends up becoming an ally. But beyond that it feels like a broader theme that one's enemies might have common ground, and maybe you'll have to work with them instead of killing them. I think it goes back to the early anime like Astro Boy, who was written to fight for peace rather than to punish evil. Maybe further back than that, but I wouldn't know for sure. Samurai switched loyalties all the time, it wasn't so black-and-white for them.
Well I think the number one rule is that a character shouldn't be boring. If someone's boring, it's just because you don't know enough about them (so the writer did a bad job). I think I would clarify likability as being able to relate to a character, and that of course isn't always needed, or else we'd never want to read about people different from ourselves.
Since this all started with the character of Jan, he definitely has terrible social skills and antagonizes everyone around him. Yet he also has a strange charisma when he does his work, people can't take their eyes off him.
I'm not sure if I'm just biased on this, but I think the strength of a likable character is that the audience will care about their growth or arc. But a character that is hard to relate to, giving them an arc somehow feels wrong and forced. Like the Joker is fine as a cackling villain, but I don't want to see him grow and mature! I think this can explain some of the villain arcs in MLP, like with Discord or Starlight, where some (many) people enjoy them as villains but found their actions too creepy to be able to relate to them as part of the good guys. To such people, saying "but look, she has a character arc where she's learning to become good" feels completely hollow and unconvincing. Having an arc doesn't make a character automatically likable, they have to earn that trust with the audience first! But I think it's viable for such a evil-turned-good character to be at a distance from the audience, where the story doesn't assume we relate to them, and those can work just fine. (Maybe Vegeta from Dragon Ball is an example of this, you don't really get into his head, so he can still be an arrogant jerk even when he's one of the heroes)