Guest post written by author Cassandra Hartt
Cassandra Hartt grew up in upstate New York and Maine, where she spent most of her childhood among the seaside suburbs and rocky beaches that inspired the fictional town of West Finch. She went on to earn an English degree from Dartmouth College and currently works as a program manager for Google. She lives in the Bay Area and wishes she had a dog. The Sea Is Salt and So Am I is her debut novel, which releases on June 8th 2021.
I’m obsessed with unlikeable characters.
I’m not talking antiheroes—your Batmans, your Walter Whites—or villains, though I have a lot of love for those horrible jerks too. I’m talking about the flat-out hard-to-root-for. The characters with pasts so dark, they haven’t yet found their ways out of them.
I can’t stop writing them into my fiction, from the short stories I penned in college to my forthcoming debut novel. The characters I dream up are the types of people who consider all their options and then choose the worst every single time. The only exceptions? My characters’ dogs (because all dogs are good dogs).
When I’m not writing, I gravitate toward the books and movies and TV shows that feature these prickly, challenging protagonists, and the more morally gray, the better. Think everyone in HBO’s Succession. Courtney Summers protagonists, all of them.
Maybe it’s because I wore a lot of shirts from Hot Topic in middle school. Maybe it’s because I don’t fully trust people, fictional or otherwise, who seem happy all the time and always, without fail, try to do the right thing.
I’m not alone in feeling this way, but I’m also not in the majority. Case in point: if a book has one of these off-putting characters, you’ll know it. The countless ways in which they’re a trash person, be that because they show too much emotion, refuse to justify their choices, or exist as a headstrong non cis-male will be mentioned in every discussion of the book. Even readers who profess to like the book give in, making sure to mention that, yep, they know the characters are Very Bad! You can almost see the invisible disclaimer at the ends of these reviews, promising that these readers’ enjoyment of this book in no way condones the behavior of its trash cast.
But calling characters unlikeable does not make those characters any less complexly human, nor does it make us better, wiser, or more likeable ourselves.
This feels especially relevant for Young Adult books, the genre I write. I wouldn’t have passed any type of nebulous likeability threshold when I was a teenager. I was a young woman with a clear sense of my own boundaries, an independent streak, and a bone-deep conviction that I knew more than anyone else around me. Still, I don’t think anyone would’ve called me unlikeable. And I feel the same when people apply that label to fictional characters, taking their own reading experience—I did not like this character—and letting that snowball into This character is so bad that no one will like them. They are impossible to like.
I’m not here to tell you unlikeable characters are actually squishy and huggable under all those cactus spines because maybe they’re not. Maybe the point is for them to be difficult. And if that’s the case, then yeah, it’s easier to say “unlikeable” than to let ourselves grow to love a character who wasn’t created with our comfort in mind. Easier to consider that character impossible to root for and undeserving of empathy than to let ourselves get emotionally invested in someone who’s so messy. So lifelike. And listen, no judgement. I myself prune toxic people out of my life before they can take root. I get why, at the first sign of a character who’s ready to send their life through a paper shredder and not even bother to clean up the pieces, we collectively high-tail it out of there.
But I think we could leave more room for “This wasn’t for me.” Or “I think this wasn’t the right book for this season of my life.” Or even “I didn’t understand this.”
Because sometimes we do need to escape into a world that’s kinder and better than our own, where every character feels like a best friend we haven’t met yet. And sometimes we want to be kept company by characters who feel just as broken, hopeful, lost, selfish, needy, and full of yearning as we are.
So bring on the misbehaving, pushy firecrackers who know what they want and do anything to get it. Bring on the wounded kids who find ways to survive, even when those ways aren’t palatable or easily understood.
And please, keep calling them unlikeable. It’ll be that much more fun when I obstinately love these insufferable, made-up humans anyway.
