Is it good to hate a character?

It depends a lot on the plot, the "genre" (I don't like this word too much, but there is a difference between pulpy science fiction and literary fiction), and other dynamics.

For genre fiction (=science fiction, horror, fantasy, detective, etc.) stereotypes are generally expected. This means, characters should be rather clearly offered as good/evil, smart/dumb, etc. Check about character theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_theory_%28media%29

For Literary Fiction (or if you want your genre story to be more complex - "high-brow"; at your own risk!) the exact opposite should happen:

• A character cannot be evil; s/he can be misguided
• A character cannot be omniscient; s/he must have doubts
• A character cannot be omnibelevolent; s/he must have some dark side (or, at the very least, some fundamental character quirk that assigns a flawed quality to his/her ethics

And so on

posted over 8 years ago

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System‭

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Well, "good" is subjective. You can have a loathsome, hissable, completely irredeemable villain who roasts puppies, shoots women with crossbows, and writes comics where Captain America is revealed to be a lifelong HYDRA agent at the end, and your reader will likely despise that character.

However, even your wretched villain should be three-dimensional. Just because there's nothing good about this person doesn't mean the character doesn't have motivation, personality, or a backstory. The motivations can be horrible (he likes kicking sand in the faces of 90-pound weaklings and hates that one was turned into a supersoldier), the personality can be insane (she blows up hospitals just to watch first responders scurry around), and the backstory can be horrendous (he's a thoroughly spoiled and coddled royal brat who's the product of brother-sister incest and inherited the throne at age 13, with no one who can stop him or even discipline him), but do come up with something. Flat villains aren't interesting. We just want them to go away and stop being obstacles.

There's a place for a character we love to hate. Think of Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones and Red Skull from Captain America. They are horrific and we generally want them to die, but they aren't cardboard cutouts.

Compare with GOT's Ramsay Snow/Bolton and The Waif, or Jafar from Aladdin. They are villains, but beyond varying levels of anger, sadism, and hunger for power, we don't have backstory or motivation for them. They aren't as interesting or rounded.

posted over 8 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Lauren Ipsum‭

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