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Last week I put a poll up asking what you readers would choose when faced with the same “one bullet” decision Suzie had to make. By an overwhelming margin, most of you opted for shooting Muriel. Couple that with the previous poll’s runaway answer that you didn’t care what her reasonings were, she needed to die, and I’m beginning to get the feeling y’all don’t like her much!
I’ve mentioned before how I’m fond of my grey areas in terms of heroes and villains, but it’s true that I’ve been building up Mrs. McCarty as the big antagonist of this first storyline since we were first treated to her delicate countenance and dulcet tones at the end of Episode 2. If there’s a sin on my part here it’s maybe that she’s an “easy” villain, displaying few redeeming qualities. It’s entirely possible that the presentation is skewed so that you’re only seeing her at her worst, but let’s face it — it’s not much of an accomplishment to get people to hate her. I just hope there’s enough twisted motivation evident in her actions that she doesn’t seem driven by pure madness. Unfathomable madness can be sort of boring in a villain, as is the whole idea of “doing it for darkness“, i.e. evil for evil’s sake.
It’s been pointed out (and perhaps not unfairly so) that Muriel and her posse come off more as caricatures than actual people. Is this a bad thing? Does every mook in fiction need or deserve a backstory? Should the writer(s) make you value them as characters, or is it enough that you want to see them fail?
On the other end of the spectrum, how much time as a writer do you need to devote to a character before your audience wants to see them succeed? Or at least not die? I have it on record that at least one reader felt sorry when Zeke met his end, and there was a comment back towards the beginning of Episode 5 where someone hoped “the ranch hands” (which I took to mean Brett & Lacey) would survive unscathed. But I’m fully accepting of the idea that putting Brett in mortal danger is not necessarily going to get the same sort of rise out of you folks as I’d get if Suzie or Frank were in his place.
For that matter, how many of you would care about Suzie or Frank being in mortal danger? That’s a good question, and one I dearly hope at this point would be answered with at least some of you giving a damn. You don’t have to love them, necessarily, but I’d like to think at least a portion of the current hate against Muriel is related to some feeling of wanting the young miss Zane and her crew to get through this intact.
This is one of the hardest things about writing a story, and at the same time one of the most crucial things. The twists and turns of your plot, the richness of your world… all of it still hangs on the balance of your characters being people your audience feels like they can give a damn about, whether that feeling is positive or negative. Then on top of that, you want them interested in seeing your protagonist(s) win and your antagonist(s) lose, even if your intent is to horribly subvert that and let the bad guys win. Or you might be George R. R. Martin and just play with your audience’s feelings the way a cat plays with a yarn ball, never letting them get comfortable. Dawn had to stop reading that saga because by the third book she was feeling downright abused by the constant obliteration or undermining of everyone she had allowed herself to identify with… but now of course she’s getting to watch it all over again on television.
I digress, though, because GRRM certainly makes you care, otherwise it wouldn’t hurt so much. The death of any story is if the reader remains no more invested in it than if they were reading an iPhone tutorial, and the tricky part about this is that the only way to discover whether you succeeded is to put it out there and have them experience it. Even if you have some friends, an editor, and/or a writing club to give feedback on your work, the ultimate test still rests in tossing your tale to the mercy of total strangers and seeing if your carefully baited lines reel ’em in.
So in that sense, I’m quite gratified that Muriel McCarty seems to have struck a chord (or discord, if you will). I like my grey areas, but then even a series as grey as Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones has a place for its “Joffreys”, right?
5 thoughts on “On love, hate, or just plain giving a damn.”
James
Getting people to feel anything about any of your characters is awesome. It means that they’ve suspended disbelief long enough to identify with the character, and that your characters feel real enough to actually think about them and their fate.
As for showing the backstory for minor villains, I’m of the firm opinion that the writer should know the backstory, even if it is never shown to the readers.
Clint
Yeah, there’s the whole crux of “only seeing them at their worst”. If you as a writer have no clue what they’re about other than them being bad guys, you’re in trouble… but a lot of villains in fiction live and die with the audience never knowing what their hobbies were, for example. When there are exceptions, you can get great stuff like Little Bill in Unforgiven, or not-so-great stuff like Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader was more effective with us only having the vaguest idea of his rise and fall.
Gillsing
I wouldn’t worry too much about Suzie in any kind of life-or-death situation. She’s the main character, so she must surely have plot armour. Though to be fair, I usually don’t care about any characters. I’m a sucker for stories, and I think that stories become more interesting when life-or-death situations can actually result in death. And for that to be true, characters have to be mortal. (You’d think that I would’ve taken the time to read Game of Thrones by now, but no. I just never got around to it.)
It’s really hard for me to feel anything for a character, and it pretty much requires an emotional sledgehammer on the verge of being ridiculous. And that only makes it harder to get through to me in the future. So obviously my callous reasoning is not something that anyone should take into consideration when crafting an emotional story.
As for Muriel’s family being caricatures, well, that’s not due to their lack of backstories. They would seem real enough if they seemed to take this conflict seriously. But when they treat it like ‘fun and games until someone actually loses an eye’, I get the impression that they’re not to be taken seriously themselves. Not necessarily anything wrong with that, but there it is.
Clint
Muriel’s kin being by and large more concerned with beer than vengeance is definitely intentional on my part. They’re hungry, thirsty, tired, and just don’t share the same “drive” that she does.
Well, except for the guy that just whacked Suzie, he seems to share some of Mrs. McCarty’s enthusiasm. We’ll see how the rest are now that Muriel’s taken it upon herself to raise the stakes.
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