Investing in the 'wrong' character, is it a problem with the story?
Since starting to learn a little about writing I've noticed that I'm more critical when I read things. This has led to a conundrum I've had recently and I'm not sure if it's inevitable or the result of 'bad' story telling.
The problem is that when reading a novel I often times identify and invest in the 'wrong' character. By that I mean I'm more interested in one of the side characters than the protagonist and this leads me to not really enjoying the story. Not because the story is necessarily bad but it's become not the story I wanted to unfold.
I'm not sure if this is because I'm now reading things in a different way and asking myself questions about character motivation and development during reading. I'm not sure if this is because my imagination is starting to work on developing a story other than the one the author intended. I'm not sure if this is happening because the author is failing to tell an engaging enough story in the first place.
The best example I can quote is from a fantasy novel in which the young hero is being mentored in his early years by a veteran mercenary and a scholar. The idea is that the hero's formative years are full of lessons in both warfare and politics. My problem is that both of these characters seem to have more depth to them than the hero. I care more about them than the hero. I'm interested more in their story than the one that is being told in the book about the hero.
I've not finished the book yet. I am at the part where for, reasons, both of these mentor characters are no longer in it. I suspect that the hero will now be placed in a position to make decisions and face choices based on their teachings but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out. I don't really care that much what happens to the hero now those interesting characters are gone.
To turn this into a question. Is this a fault of some sort in the story or the writing of the author? Is it usual that some of a books audience will become more invested in a side character than the main one simply because of personal bias?
EDIT: I wanted to add something after selecting my answer. That is because the one I selected most directly applies to me however I would urge anyone reading this now to look at all the answers as they do contain interesting information. I don't really feel like selecting just one does the others justice. I'm now of the opinion that there will always be a few people that identify with the 'wrong' character from the point of view of the author. It's only a real problem if most people do that. Even then the author may be more interested in telling the story they want to tell rather than making the work more popular. That decision is theirs alone to make.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/25048. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
Sci Fi and Fantasy are perhaps the genres least concerned with character. Worldbuilding (so called) is often the central obsession of authors in those genres. (Historical can just the same sometimes, with many authors, and readers, obsessed about getting the buttons right.)
Characters in these genres often exist merely to animate the world that has been built. It is little to be wondered that they sometimes fall flat and loose interest. That incidental characters will sometimes turn out to be more interesting is hardly surprising.
And if a story is not driven by a compelling character arc, but by the desire to explore all the features of the world that has been built (to have the character spring all the traps the author has planted or use all the gadgets they have dreamed up), then, again, interest is likely to flag.
One of the curiosities of human beings is that real story never grows stale no matter how often we hear it. But all the gee gaws of world building will grow stale, and even the most original and inventive world building will cease to move us after a while. The human moral arc, as familiar as it might be, is the one thing that holds our attention indefinitely, presumably because we are inexorably caught up in it in or real lives.
This is not to say that you can't have character-driven sci-fi or fantasy with a strong moral arc. You certainly can. But these genres are often dominated by other concerns. It may be that you have simply sucked all the juice out of the speculative part of speculative fiction. It certainly happened to me over time. It may be time to try more story-focused/character-focused genres.
It is worth noting that readers often grow out of sci fi and fantasy as they age, whereas devoted readers of romance or mystery seem to keep reading them for life. This is not to say that that there is anything wrong with the pleasures the sci fi and fantasy give, simply that they seem to be exhaustible pleasures for many readers, whereas more character-driven genres seem to give less exhaustible pleasure. This mirrors our experience with food, where, in most people, certain tastes are diminished over time, while others persist for life.
0 comment threads
It sounds like you're seeing this problem in Hero's Journey stories, which have a pretty standard arc (Hero leaves Home, gains Mentors and Helpers, faces Challenge at Threshold, returns Home with Knowledge) and you aren't as interested in the Hero as you are in the Mentor characters.
- If you find this is happening in every Hero's Journey you read, from the Belgariad to Star Wars, then it just means that you don't enjoy that kind of story. Nothing wrong with knowing your tastes. I don't care for romantic comedies and "overgrown adolescent/poorly launched twenty-something acts stupidly" stories. That doesn't mean they're bad, just that they are for others to enjoy.
- If you find this in every book you read no matter what the structure — you prefer Lestrade to Holmes and Watson, the comic-relief sidekick to the romantic heroine, Cindy Lou Who over the Grinch — then it sounds like you're thinking too hard about the creation of the story and not allowing yourself to suspend your disbelief enough to enjoy the tale.
- If you find this in, how shall I say this, books geared to the Twilight audience, then you're just reading a lot of lousy books. ;)
For most books and most readers, the protagonist is the person in whom they are most interested. It's not typical for book readers to say "I wish these books were about Sirius and Remus rather than Harry." (the typical response to that is "hie thee to AO3 and start reading/writing fanfic.")
(I would say this is not necessarily the case with most movies, by the way; I often read in movie reviews — particularly of romcoms, particularly of female sidekick characters in any genre — that the side characters and the people who play them are more interesting/better actors than the lead characters.)
0 comment threads
0 comment threads