mrissa | Question of the day, #1

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Question of the day, #1

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?

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I agree with you. Loyalty. It doesn't have to be a woman just because I am a woman, or white because I am white. But loyalty, indeed.

This whole 'girl cooties' thing sets my teeth on edge. Honestly.

A sense of humor. It doesn't have to be my sense of humor precisely, but a character needs one and it needs to at least overlap with mine. I dislike practical jokes and fart jokes, for example, so I would be annoyed if those were a character's primary form of humor.

A modicum of self-awareness helps too. When I can spot a character's big emotional revelation (She fights with him because she loves him! These wacky misfits are her family!) in the first chapter and she doesn't get there till the end, I will be very annoyed at all the chapters in between.

I want to say I can't stand stupid characters; but that's not right exactly. I can certainly deal with ignorant characters. I can deal with characters not super-bright, or even fairly stupid. What I can't deal with is characters being stupid about being not too smart, if you see what I mean. They have to use what they've got in that area reasonably sanely.

I can't deal with characters with insane views of themselves.

And they all seem to be negative things -- flaws I can't stand, rather than characteristics I require.

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

Exactly. I remember reading Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David, and at the end wondering why I had bothered. It was borrowed from a friend, so no loss that way, but the author went on my do-not-read list.

I also don't like really stupid characters. I don't mind characters making mistakes -- how can you have a plot otherwise? -- but they have to be the kind of mistakes a reasonable person would make. Not "exploring a deserted castle in your nightgown" mistakes.

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Honor. Not necessarily in a Lawful Good or in an always-perfect kind of way--I'd have a hard time, I think, describing exactly what I mean by it--but yeah, I think that's the biggie for me.

The willingness to look at a problem and genuinely try to figure it out, whether that problem is personal or interpersonal or environmental or whatever else. The most frustrating thing for me, in a character, is when they keep running head-first into the same wall and refuse to even look at why. It's very true to life, I must admit, but I struggle enough to find patience for it in real people who actually deserve it. I don't really want to wrestle with it for fictional people in addition to that.

The "girl cooties" thing goes back to a sort of gender essentialism, right? Certain kinds of SF are inherently male, and others aren't? I think that's mostly rubbish, and what's left is mostly cultural, but mostly *I DON'T CARE*. I don't care what the socially perceived gender of the person who wrote the book is; I care what the book is like. I certainly haven't perceived a reliable enough correlation to make me want to filter that way.

Of course, I don't fit many of the stereotypes being debated all that well. I like David Weber AND Marion Zimmer Bradley AND Ursula LeGuin AND Samuel Delany (older short fiction, anyway) AND Lois McMaster Bujold AND John Ringo AND Ken MacLeod AND Niven & Pournelle AND Emma Bull AND John M. Ford AND Joel Rosenberg.

They have to not be dumb (which cuts most tie-ins), not be an ass (which cuts out most Donaldsons) and not be a dumbass (which cuts out the rest of what I don't like).

Oh, they also have to not be in Children of the New Disorder.

I tend to walk away from characters
1)who radically break with the "person we were getting to know" (unless Hyde/Jekyll scenerio has been made clear as part of the plot)
- or -
2)who I wind up asking "why did you do that" to the character one too many times.
- or -
3)who clearly do not have a clue about the area in which they are supposed to be an expert (unless here it is some "wolf in lamb's clothing" scenerio)

I think I've missed the most recent round of "girl cooties" rants, but since I can probably reconstruct them accurately from past rants, I suppose I'm not missing much.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a quality that I think is both necessary and sufficient. I think the biggest thing for me is that the character has to care deeply about something. I can cope with pretty nasty characters if their nastiness is driven by a purpose (and not presented by the author as unmitigated virtue), but characters who don't really seem to give a darn don't work for me.

The only example I can think of that is definable is when all characters have a complete lack of empathy (prime example of this was Bonfire of the Vanities which I only got halfway through before uttering the fatal words).

Curiousity and empathy but there may be more that I am not thinking of. They have to be curious about something and they have to show empathy towards some people.

I can't think of any particular trait I have to see (or at least not have disconfirmed--is that a word, anyway?) in a character. I do, however, need to see some glimmer of redeemability in them or the situation, if they are disagreeable.

I don't want to write from the viewpoint of a character who Knows the Truth About Everything.

I would find it very difficult to write from the viewpoint of a righthanded character.

The one thing that is liable to make a character least sympathetic to me is out-of-scale pettiness and anthropocentrism. If you're supposed to be an eons-old cosmic force of vastly superhuman capacities, you'd better have a reason for wasting time mucking about with the talking monkeys and the talking monkeys being the Most Important Things In The Universe Really doesn't cut it. If you're supposedly deeply in love with someone, don't go off in a fit and threaten to break it all off because you saw them hugging someone you don't know. Und so weit.

I want some smidgen of logic to exist in the actions of the antagonist.

So if, for example, the protagonist is an employee and the antatonist is their mean-boss-who-hates-them. The boss should be looking for a way to fire them, not murder them.

I'm willing to read an entire book to find out if said movitation exists, but I'm not willing to read a sequel.

I also have little patience for antagonists who won't accept overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. I'm aware that this is probably the author saying 'look how unreasonable this person is', but I read it as authorial carelessness.

Independence. I want the lead character to be able to stand on their own two feet, or find the help and support needed for them to do that, and also own up to mistakes. Other folk have said honor, and that works for me too. Integrity, and a sense of personal responsibility. Which doesn't mean they can't swear or be violent or kill, but there has to be a reason and a sense they know why they are doing it, even if its something really sucky. I also like loyalty, intelligence and a ready wit.

Most of those have always been easy to find in male protagonists, its been great for the past 10 years or so finding them riding high as traits in female protagonists without having to really hunt the books down, though if its well written with a good story I'll read most things.

I really care when I'm reading about characters who are crusading for justice, but superheroes aren't the thing I want. I want ordinary people who are trying to make their normal human-being lives more noble and who are trying to improve the lot of others in the face of systems and institutions and cultural norms that are destructive and unjust. I want to be like that type of person myself.

They pretty much have to have empathy. They don't necessarily have to do nice things with it, but I've met narcissism and it was quite dull.

Apart from that... I have Issues with characters who believe in some variation of the "because I said so" answer, team leaders who expect obedience in the absence of reasons, but that won't stop me from reading/watching if the other characters are interesting enough.

I have stopped reading books when I realized I just didn't care what happened to the characters. But that's neither necessary nor sufficient; if the story is well-written (defined subjectively, irrationally, and differently over time by me) then I'll read it for that. A lot of stuff I read for humor value is like that.

The only trait I can think of that would make me not care about a character is being boring. Others can make me like or dislike a character, but wanting to see someone get hurt is a form of interest.

There is no trait that will automagically make me care about a character, if the author does a bad job (e.g. makes it more effort than it's worth to figure out what's going on).

For me, it's quite simple: if a character has no care about the consequences of his/her actions, I have no care for his/her fate and may just forgo the story if it stays that way. Now, if the character starts out that way but goes through a growth/transformation, I find that engaging.

The loyalty thing is iffy in my opinion. I think some truly interesting character traits can come out of someone who is disloyal. I believe you find betrayal in some of civilization's greatest literature. In fact, a disloyal character makes a great antagonist to a hero.

Not that I want to give the movies any legitimacy, but the /story/ of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars universe is a compelling one - he's disloyal to his Order and his Teacher yet the plot is built on that disloyalty and eventually finds redemption through his own son.

Girl cooties? For really real?

I can't stand it when a character starts falling in love with someone who's a total jerk to them.

(And also, now you know how far behind I frequently get on my friends page!)

=v= Girl cooties? To paraphrase a recent U.S. President, "Bring 'em on!"

Aside from the little matter of women being, you know, more than half the human population and all, I welcome the idea of more female characters being written by women. I'm not a gender essentialist or anything like that, but in practice I can't help but notice that a lot of male writers, especially in SF, tend to script a dull gamut ranging from fantasy cuties to fantasy gun-toting babes. I prefer cuties (and even not-so-cuties) to be more realistic, even in speculative fiction.

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