: Is it good to hate a character? I have a character that I want to give a huge slap across the face to. If I absolutely hate this character, does that mean my reader will hate him too?

Vote Up Vote Down

I think if you try hard to make a character hateable, most readers will hate him. And yes, it's good to have such characters in stories. If all your characters are nice and kind, the story might get a little boring. Those hated people are something different for your story. If you really want your readers to hate him, make him bully the protagonist or something. Readers will boil out of anger every time he shows up. Of course, this also opens possibilitys for the outcome. Will you kill him off in a very sattisfying way, finally rewarding your readers for everything they've been through because of that guy, or will you have them change their personality and become good? The latter one also uses to be a good idea, but you have to do it in a convincing way.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

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.

(0)