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

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

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.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

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.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

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.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

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.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

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.

[moiread]

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.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

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.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That may be a better description of the thing I model in my head as "thinking stupidly".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think mostly the other side is the one debating stereotypes here, and our side is sort of snickering and shaking our heads. But yes, anyone who tried to coopt you as "middle-aged straight white male reader of Heinlein and Doc Smith, must be on our side against girl cooties" would have a pretty nasty shock.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is a thing that breaks down for me quite often--though not universally, as I hope is obvious--when people try to take a literary approach to SF and fantasy genres: too often, the author is too busy dealing with the speculative conceit as a metaphor to have the characters deal with it as a problem. This puts me out of sympathy with the characters, and with the author too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Combination of violence and stupid things reminded me: Criminal Minds has, over the course of four seasons, substantially rewritten my reactions. I used to see an agent pursuing a suspect and think, "Shoot him, shoot him, why don't you just shoot him!" and then pause and think, "Oh, right, civil rights, trial by jury, proportionate use of force, innocent until proven guilty, all that good stuff." Now I don't have that gap between my reactions and my beliefs. I'm glad it's gone.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, some of my favorite plot is about people wanting contradictory things. Neither of them has to be stupid or even make mistakes, although of course people do make mistakes and probably should in fiction as well. But if you want X for sensible reasons of your own, and someone else wants not-X for sensible reasons of their own, voila, plot.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, it's definitely their concept, not ours. Sorry I didn't make that clear enough.

[guppiecat]

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.

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

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)

[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.

[moiread]

#3: Oh, gosh yes.

[moiread]

...Actually, I can think of some fun and awesome scenarios for "exploring a deserted castle in your nightgown", but they probably don't fit the angle you're referring to.

[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.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

And frequently an excellent plot, too!

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

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).

[aliseadae]

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.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

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.