Unlikable Protagonists I Love

I know, I know, this is a very
common topic for a post. I have probably done posts on this topic
myself, but it was probably a long time ago and now I have a new
candidate for “unlikable protagonists I really love,” so
time for another post.

Obviously by “unlikable” I don’t actually mean unlikable. If the protagonist is evil, excessively stupid, or suffering from various other problems, then I won’t like them one bit, far less love them, and I’m not interested in reading about them. In fact, I’m repulsed by the whole idea of reading about them. That is a different meaning of the word than I have in mind. In fact, let me sort out a few of the various types of actually, truly unlikable protagonists before I get into the category of “unlikable but I love them,” which is entirely different.

a) Characters who are
unlikable because they are completely annoying twits, such as Emma in
Jane Austen’s novel by that name. I’ve only ever read that novel once
and doubt I will ever read it again.

b) Characters who are
unlikable because they are worse than twits: they are gripped by
ennui, drift through life with a sort of depressed contempt for
everyone who isn’t gripped by ennui, and just make me want to slap
them. This kind of protagonist is exemplified by the lead in
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. You know, Madame Bovary, in the
novel of that name, may be another character who fits what I have in
mind here. Let’s say this is the kind of protagonist who is used by
the author to glorify depression, as though depression were something
edifying rather than a terrible pathology. I can’t bear
protagonists of this kind, which is why Madame Bovary is the
single novel I most hated ever ever ever. Unfortunately it was
assigned twice, and even worse than that, I was such a dutiful
student I actually read it both times. These days I can’t
imagine why I didn’t just pick up the cliff notes the second time.

c) Characters who are
unlikable because they are evil. I couldn’t stand Jaime Lannister
because he threw that kid off the tower and killed his own twin
sister and who knows what else. Nope nope nope. This is the same
problem I had with Glokta in The Blade Itself. Yes, I know, he
had glimmering of non-evil, but he was also perfectly happy to cut
the fingers off men he knew were innocent in order to make them
implicate other innocent people in nonexistent crimes, so you know
what, I don’t care that from time to time he might have patted a
puppy.

I’m sure there are other
types of protagonists that I truly dislike – selfish, narcissistic
protagonists; or petty, stupid protagonists; or whatever. But let’s
move on to characters who are called unlikable, but they are
actually highly likable, or at least I really love them. This is a
really big category and this is the category I want to expand here. I
can think of three categories of unlikable-but-I-love-them
protagonists:

1. Protagonists who are
ruthless.

I love Tremaine
Valiarde in The Fall of Ile-Rien – and Nicholas Valiarde as well.
Remember when Tremaine nearly shot those prisoners? I totally
sympathized! Remember when someone (Florian?) said to Nicholas, “But
if we do [whatever], we’d be no better than him!” and Nicholas
was completely baffled by this common statement?

It’s true that ruthlessness
could in theory grade over into inappropriate indifference to things
or people the protagonist ought to care about. That would be
different. But basically I love a ruthless protagonist who takes
effective action, but is essentially a good guy. You know how
Nicholas sort of reluctantly went to enormous trouble to save
Inspector Ronsarde, and then everyone was worried he might kill
Ronsarde because the inspector was in his way, but that was never
going to happen? That’s what I mean by “essentially a good guy.”

2. Damaged, bitter
protagonists.

Briony in Chime by
Billingsley is this kind of protagonist. This is a fairy tale, more
an original than a retelling. Briony believes she is guilty of
terrible crimes, hates herself, and is a completely untrustworthy
narrator. Did I like her? No. Did I love the writing? Yes. The story
is one I liked almost despite itself, until close to the end, when
Briony finally starts to believe she hasn’t actually done anything
terrible after all.

I’m sure there are many
other protagonists who fall into this category, but moving on –

3. Protagonists who care
about people important to themselves a LOT but about other people
perhaps very little.

Aud Torvingen, from The
Blue Place series by Nicola Griffith, is the protagonist who made
me think about writing about “unlikable” protagonists, because I
can see perfectly well that she is not, possibly, a completely
sympathetic character. This series is as much a character study as it
is anything else, and Aud is certainly the sort of character who
merits study. She is absolutely unique, as far as I know, among genre
protagonists. She is a sensualist, a voluptuary, a hedonist, whatever
the term you want to use, she is an extremely physical sort of
person. She’s oriented toward the sensual world, not the world of
the mind – as unlike Nicholas Valiarde, say, as you can imagine.
She’s also on the edge of violence basically all the time, because
to her violence is a sensual pleasure, the way dancing might be for a
dancer. She does have this aspect of herself under control … most
of the time … but it’s a crucial part of who she is.

Is she likable? I don’t
know. Maybe. Or maybe not exactly. She isn’t nice, or actually she
can be, but not in a conventional way. It’s more that she responds
to vulnerability first impatiently, with a sort of “Well, someone
has to take care of this,” attitude, but this often – not always
– grades into, let’s say, a species of tolerance that is not that
far removed from actually liking someone. And when she actually falls
for someone, hoo boy, she falls hard.

I think she is wonderful, and
if I were being attacked by someone I would want her to happen past
at that moment, and I would like to take a women’s self defense
course from her. As a protagonist, she is unlikable – in a good
way.

Both Keziah and Carissa in the Black Dog series probably fall into the damaged, bitter category. The Wolf Duke in Winter is certainly ruthless – and so is Kaithairin, the griffin mage, though he’s a griffin, so maybe he doesn’t count. But I have never written a character remotely as physical as Aud Torvingen. I think that kind of character has to be written in first person, and I think it would be quite a challenge even then.

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