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

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, sufficient, no. It's easy to imagine a loyal character I wouldn't give a rip about.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

What I think I really should have said is that I'm not sure if I have any qualities that are necessary, but not sufficient, whereas I can think of a number of qualities that are very nearly sufficient, but not necessary. For example, I'll cut a lot of slack to a character who has great wit and a sense of humor, but if the character isn't gifted in that department, that can be fine, as long as they have other qualities.

[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.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

How would you count the Hitchcock-type plot where you have normal person going about normal life to whom Something Happens and who is then running around trying to stay ahead of plot developments for long enough to figure out what the heck is going on, but who really would like nothing more than for the competent authorities to take care of everything and sort it out so they can go back to their normal life ?

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Good question. It's a type of story that sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn't. In general, it works for me to the extent that the protagonist copes with the demands of the plot, however unwillingly, and fails to work for me to the extent that the protagonist tries to pretend that the plot isn't happening or spends lots of time complaining that it's unfair that this is happening to them.