Characters to Care About

Last week, I came across an excellent example of poor character creation, and its impact.

By the nature of our lifestyles, my wife and I DVR a lot and then get caught up later, so forgive me for being behind the curve on this. We were just getting caught up on Grimm, a show about a cop with unique talents who hunts criminal human/animal hybrids. In this episode, a new character was introduced, a young woman who also had his special ability.

Half an hour in, the character had demonstrated that she was rude, unappreciative, combative and self-centered. I said to my wife, “I already hate this new character.” To my surprise, she answered, “I agree. We can stop watching this anytime you want.” She hated her enough to switch the program off.

We’re big Grimm fans, but both of us were ready to bail on the show because of this new addition to the cast. That’s exactly the opposite of the response a writer shoots for. Obviously, this character was being set up for some change arc across episodes, but I didn’t care to see it. The cops filled me in on her foster care childhood and I’d seen her attacked by the bad guys, yet I had no compassion for her. Why? Because while she’d been in sympathetic circumstances, she’d displayed no sympathetic qualities. A character has to do at least one small thing like wash the dishes or rescue a cat from a tree so viewers can see there’s a real human being inside her that deserves their emotional energy.

I think her impact on the other characters in the show made it even worse. Nick, our hero cop, and his girlfriend take her in, then Nick takes her to a crime scene (credibility stretched past breaking) where she nearly reveals his secret gift. In a lame bit of dialogue, Nick addresses her by her given name and she responds that most people call her Trouble. So Nick calls her that from then on. It sounds stupid every time he says it, and no caring person would reinforce another’s low self-esteem with such a nickname. So not only was the character unlikable, she had a negative impact on how we saw the characters we do like, onscreen friends we are emotionally invested in.

We skipped the rest of that episode, and the next one, praying that either Trouble would die or hurry-the-hell-up and finish her transformation, an event we couldn’t care less about witnessing. Her part in the season finale looked like she’d made it.

The TV series didn’t lose us for good, mostly because my wife is a Monroe/Rosalie devotee. But in a book, this kind of mistake would be fatal. The cover would close, never be reopened, and the reader would send out warning flares for the rest of the world to stay far away. So keep in mind that that character who goes from flawed to fabulous, or that villain who goes from evil to excellent, needs a little something for us to hook onto early, something to foreshadow their potential, to make us root for the underdog part of their personality to win out.