Sympathy for the devil

why do we like some characters when we shouldn't?

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Given that I just recently finished a book (yay!) I am in more of a consumption mode than a creative mode. When I’m in a “fallow” period, I spend a lot of that time binge watching things I need to catch up on, or consuming analysis of things I’ve already watched. In the past week, I watched a retrospective on Carrie and Big’s relationship in Sex and the City, a few reviews of Rings of Power, and listened to a podcast about the “Ozymandias” episode of Breaking Bad.

I watched Sex and the City in real time when it aired and the entire time, I could not tell if we were supposed to like any of these characters or root for Carrie and Big because they are both garbage people who do garbage things to each other. (However recently, upon consuming the first season of the SATC followup And Just Like That, which is literally microwaved diarrhea, I listened to a podcast with the writers and I think the answers to both those questions are that we are supposed to like them and are supposed to root for them, hence the travesty of the ending of the first SATC movie. SPOILER: Big leaves Carrie at the alter (on brand for him) and the movie ends with them getting back together and her apologizing for wanting a big wedding and to wear a free Vivienne Westwood gown.)

I’ve been in a serious mood for fantasy and finally got around to finishing Rings of Power, which if you know, has had a spotty reception. I’m in the “lukewarm like” category because I’m aware of the fact that while the show has some really good aspects (good casting, incredible production value) it’s really shaky on character, logistics, and logic which has led some to have pretty harsh opinions of it. Mainly, the show really really wants you to like its central character, Galadriel, and does a really bad job of actually accomplishing this. It’s almost as if their desire to have you like her backfires. A huge part of this problem is that her character is often sacrificed for plot (ie, people do things that don’t make sense or are inconsistent with their character because the plot needs to happen a certain way.)

Lastly, I was thinking of the end of Breaking Bad (one of my favorite TV shows of all time) and about the genuine distress I had at the time over whether or not Jesse Pinkman would survive. BB is one of the go-to examples of a recent fiction centering an antihero rather than a traditional hero—you see Walter White go from a seemingly decent guy to an awful one. But if you know anything about the show, you know how central the Jesse-Walt relationship is to it. The Jesse character was supposed to die in season one, but they realized they had something special in the dynamic between the two that they kept him on. Fundamentally, the show revolves around the relationship between these two men—it’s the backbone, IMHO.

I was thinking about how I find Jesse to be very likable, sympathetic, and memorable. But on the face of it, should he be? If you haven’t watched the show (or if you have) I can summarize the basic facts about his life here: Jessie is a 20 something kid who never really tried that hard into anything, fell into drugs, makes uses and sells meth, kills at least one person directly and several others indirectly, goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with the intent of finding people to sell meth to, and gets involved with a deadly cartel. And I could “Yeah, but..” all of this! But how exactly were the writers able to take someone who has done all these objectively bad things and make it so fans facing the end of the show say they will riot in the streets if Jesse dies? Here are my thoughts of a few key factors.

He’s impressionable.

You don’t need to have a young character to make them impressionable. But there is a clear dynamic in this story: Walt is old enough to be Jesse’s dad. He’s frequently lecturing Jesse and telling him he does things wrong. It’s not that Jesse isn’t smart, but it’s that Walt is very very smart and also manipulative. You see that Jesse doesn’t have the best dynamic with his parents: they know about his drug usage / selling and basically cast him out of the family, not wanting him to have a bad influence on the younger brother he clearly cares about. So obviously he wants Walt’s approval and it is really sad when you see someone wanting the approval of someone else who you know is bad for them. The show starts out with the relationship being about an odd business pairing, and increasingly turns into an abusive relationship with pretty extreme ups and downs. As demonstrated in this clip with Jessie at the hospital after one of the many times he gets the shit beat out of him, you get the sense that Jesse would have never gotten into this much trouble if he had never met Walt. Sure he might have ended up being picked up for being a small time dealer, but I think he would have spent a lot of his life hanging out with his stoner friends and playing video games, not getting mixed up with an international cartel. He does do bad things, but you often see him as being forced into circumstances— Jesse (SPOILER) is forced to kill someone at some point. He doesn’t want to, but if he doesn’t both Jesse and Walt will be killed. He is deeply emotionally distraught by this. It has a massive impact on his psyche after he does it. (something fiction often doesn’t deal with is the consequences of a major set piece of action.) You don’t see him as a cold blooded killer, but, more interestingly, as a warm blooded killer. An adult character who is TOO impressionable—who believes everything anyone tells him—would be annoying, but when an adult is somewhat impressionable, it plucks on the part of you that thinks of children or the deeply naive.

He’s downtrodden.

This guy gets put down and shit on so much in this show. Everyone thinks he is a loser who will never amount to anything. (Contrast this with Galadriel in Rings of Power where she’s supposed to be so awesome and badass and never seems to be held accountable for bad decisions she makes.) His parents are mean to him. Walt is mean to him. The police see him as a criminal and a waste of space. This makes him an underdog, so you want to see him succeed. At one point, his parents seize control of the house he lives in, which belonged to an aunt he took care of while she was dying of cancer that he believes was promised to him. Later, when he comes into drug money, he buys the house at a severe discount and deliberately shows up with the keys so his parents know for sure it was him. But this happens after you see what happens after he’s evicted: he tries to stay with a friend, but the friend’s wife doesn’t want this loser guy around, all his possessions get stolen, he tries to get into the impound lot where his RV is but instead falls through the roof of a portapotty and is covered with that ungodly blue goo. It’s satisfying when he takes the house back, even though parents being tired of a junkie son is probably reasonable. The writing on this show is so good that at one point, the cartel wants Walt to make meth for them—because he’s the best and gets a near perfect purity—but instead they get Jesse, and they are not happy about it. But he cooks a batch of meth for him, and at this point you’re so twisted that it’s really satisfying to see him get a way higher purity level than they expected him to be able to get. If no one in the world believes in a person, and you find them otherwise sympathetic, you end up believing in that person.

He’s not exceptional.

Yes, he does eventually get to the point of being able to cook meth at a very high purity level, but this is because he has cooked meth with Walt many many times and was paying attention and learning. Working, in other words, rather than cruising. I think an error a lot of writers make (particularly genre writers) is that they want to make their character likable, so they give them lots of admirable traits. They are exceptionally smart, strong, hot, whatever. This is particularly a problem for people who want to make badass female MCs. But when you encounter a character who is good at everything—they are hot, every guy wants them, every girl wants to be friends with them, they have magical powers OR they have MORE magical powers than everyone else, they went to Harvard AND they are a quadruple black belt. Why would I like someone who is utterly unrelatable? There are people who are mystified by the fact that so many readers loved Bella Swan from Twilight—but she’s just a dishrag of a person! Yeah and most people are dishrags who aren’t exceptional. The fact that he’s not exceptional means that he’s vulnerable to human failings. He can be naive. Sometimes childish. He falls into addiction a few times. Sometimes he makes bad decisions. The only thing more annoying that someone who is good at everything is someone who is always right. (Maybe an obscure reference, but I really liked a couple seasons of the show Poldark but one of its fatal flaws was that Poldark was always, always right. He’s a British soldier who ends up fighting on the British side of the American Revolution even though he agrees with the Americans, and of course he’s against slavery and displays no hint of racism when that comes up even though its the 1700s.)

He’s funny.

This is a really simple one. Or at least simple if you can write comedy. You need a foil for Walt’s seriousness and lack of humor. Sometimes the contrast alone between how different they are is enough to be funny. When I wrote Never Saw Me Coming I never set out to write it funny, it just sort of happened because Chloe—who is an awful person—is snarky. The thing is, it’s hard to not like people who are funny. I like to think of myself as funny and do I weaponize this? 100%. I’ve had people be mad at me to my face, but if I can get them to laugh it diffuses the situation. You can’t really dislike me if I make you laugh.

He generally tries to be good to other people.

This relates to my comment about above being “otherwise sympathetic.” I’m not saying he goes around doing charitable works. But this is the litmus test of “is this person rude to waiters?” Is this person generally upset by things that make a reasonable person upset? (what Jesse Plemsons does to the tarantula kid.) Do they come in hot and angry for no reason? Do they kick dogs in the street? If someone else is upset, are they like, “Hey, why are you upset?” (If you wonder why I think Carrie Bradshaw is a shit, go back and watch the show- every time one of her friends is like, “So I was hit by a car yesterday” Carrie is like, “Anyway, about me and Big..” )

He knows he is bad.

Probably one of the most important things. Jesse questions his own morality multiple times—if we didn’t we would know that he is either not self-aware or doesn’t think anything he did was wrong. At one point someone even says something to him implying he’s not that bad a person, and he says something like, “I make poison for addicts.” There’s a few times when he and Walt are at some decision point and he’s like, “but isn’t that bad/ won’t that have bad consequences?” Sometimes in a work of fiction when there is an actual problem for the writer (often about plausibility) the best thing to do is have one of the characters address it directly. For example, your characters are planning a heist that depends on a small probability event: a person turning left instead of right at the end of a hallway. You need it to make the plot work. You address it by having one of the characters say, “but there’s some chance they won’t turn that way.” You have someone say, “But that’s a terrible plan!” and then you need to have some explanation as to why it is the only plan that may work. For example, in my second book, it doesn’t necessarily say on the back of the book that there is any supernatural angle. If you read my first book, you’d probably assume that the second book similarly takes place in the world as we know it. The characters in ASPD, as far as they know, are living in the normal world. At some point they start to confront evidence that maybe something supernatural is going on: Jia has predicted things that have come true. A man who is dead is somehow alive. I had these characters talk about these things with each other because that is what you would do in real life. But Jia can’t predict the future because that’s not a thing. Or prove it. A guy can’t come back form the dead—it must be a different guy who saw who looks similar. Having a character who has some negative characteristic who addresses that characteristic is more interesting than one who doesn’t. (Carrie Bradshaw probably thinks she’s a good person and a great friend…) More interestingly: after Jesse kills someone he ends up falling into an addiction spiral and goes to rehab. He comes back from rehab in a strangely zen state. Walt is like.. oh, ok— you’re okay now..? What we find out is that Jesse’s zen state is that he has learned to accept himself for who he is. But he has defined who he is as “I’m a bad person.” So he tries to double down on his badness (this is when he tries to sell meth at NA meetings.) He is someone who has confronted his badness. By the end of the show, he is throwing stacks of cash out the window of his car, literally asking to be picked up by the police.

So take a second to think about your morally grey characters and your not so morally grey characters. If they’re all bad, they are probably not interesting. If they are all good, they are probably insufferable. Do we want to root for them to succeed at their bad thing? Do we want to root for them to be better in a prolonged morality struggle? Do we want them to fail? Do we want Elrond to slap them upside the head?

FYSA: next week because of the holiday I will be reposting an oldie-but-goodie post.

Has resting psychopath face. Violent, emotionally needy, disruptive, self-centered. And yet…

Photo by Elizabeth on Unsplash