Question of the day, #1

[mrissa]

So I was thinking about the recent rants from "oh noes, girl cooties in my SF" people. I was thinking about which traits of mine are most crucial to my reading experience when reflected in characters. I do not, for example, find it particularly difficult to care about male characters, or non-white characters, or homosexual characters. But I was pretty sure that if I thought about it, I would come up with some things where I really did want characters to be "like me."

What I came up with is loyalty.

I don't require a character with whom I can identify; caring is enough. But when a character is blithely disloyal to people who are showing them loyalty, I have a hard time not putting down the book and walking away.

How about you? What traits do you want to share--or at least not blatantly not share--with a character in order to care about their story?

Comments

[redbird]

Yes. I was about to say "plausible motivation" as necessary, and that's connected to what you have here.

It doesn't have to be a motivation I share (the world is full of motivations I don't share, but I have no trouble believing that people want to be professional ballplayers, or avenge their parents' murders), but it has to be one that I can believe in. If the character's motivation is supposed to be "avenge his father's death," and he instead goes off and spends four years doing nothing but studying accounting and playing tennis on weekends, without so much as thinking about his father, no. (Hamlet spends a lot of time dithering, but it's "was my father murdered?" and "what should I do," he doesn't spend most of the play trying to start a University of Wittenberg Alumni Club.) If he's supposed to have that motivation, and spends the entire book deliberately making life easier for the person he believes to have killed his father, really no.