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

[sethb.livejournal.com]

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).