Reading HG Wells’ The First Men in the Moon got me thinking about writing unsympathetic characters. This is far from the first book I’ve read and reviewed which featured an unsympathetic major character, but it combined with a piece one of my writing group members is writing, and my own reflections on characterization, to prompt me to delve into the topic. The first thing it is necessary to make clear is that an unsympathetic character is distinct from an unlikable character or an antihero. There are plenty of characters I might not like, and certainly most of them with whom I would not be friends if they stepped out of the page, but that does not preclude me sympathizing with them. Sympathy is only partially tied to the characters themselves; it is as much tied to how they are presented by the author.
Perhaps the most famous example of an unsympathetic character is the protagonist in Lord Foul’s Bane. He also happens to be an antihero, but he is presented in a deliberately unsympathetic way. His eternal refrains of “leper-outcast-unclean” and his put-upon worldview do more to push the reader away than any immoral action or questionable character traits. Whereas an antagonist we don’t want to succeed because we don’t like the outcome or how it would affect our protagonist, an unsympathetic character we either don’t care about, or don’t want to succeed because we don’t think they deserve success.
A common way this can happen is if an author makes a character to passive. If this goes on too long, or is presented badly, the reader will stop rooting for the character to become active, and instead stop sympathizing with the character. Sanderson wrote extensively about the difficulty of writing interesting, sympathetic, passive characters with respect to Sazed (Mistborn) and Kaladin (The Way of Kings). Of course, his examples also prove that it can be done, and with spectacularly satisfying results.
Passivity is not the only way of making a character unsympathetic. Take the narrator in The First Men in the Moon. He is certainly active – arguably more active in determining his own fate and destiny than Cavor, his intellectual companion – but he is decidedly unsympathetic because his actions don’t correspond with the actions I as a reader want to see. I want to be attempting to communicate with the Selenites, like Cavor suggests, not dismissing them as subhuman and flailing about with a crowbar while drooling over gold. Wells does not present the reader with a convincing case for the narrator’s refusal to behave reasonably in his circumstances. I cannot tell whether this is deliberate, or because mores have changed over time, but I think it was deliberate. It makes the reveal in the last few chapters, in which Cavor turns out to have survived and is being honored in the Moon, all the more satisfying if the reader is predisposed against the narrator.
This is not to say that you cannot write a character with drastically different morals or worldview than your typical reader. It has to be handled carefully, but such a character can be sympathetic, even deeply so, and can be especially satisfying to write because of how they twist a reader around, make them sympathize with someone with whom they disagree – that’s the true power of storytelling. Think of the villains who we come to understand and even like, despite the terrible things they do. However, this is not a post about writing sympathetic characters.
Quite the opposite. The simplest advice for writing unsympathetic characters is to think of the traits that make it hard for you to sympathize with real people. Passivity is a common one. Lack of self-insight is another useful tool. Characters who make problems for themselves, complain about those problems, and don’t realize they’re the source of the problems will tend to be unsympathetic; complaining by itself can decrease our sympathy for a character. It is worth noting that not all readers will respond the same way to your efforts to create an unsympathetic character, but that can and should be said of any writing technique.
I would not recommend making your main character unsympathetic, or, if you do, you should probably have a few other major characters to whom readers can better relate. The First Men in the Moon kind of works because Cavor is more sympathetic than the narrator, but only kind-of. One of my writing group members wrote a piece with a prelude in second person (always a hard sell, though it sort of works thanks to its brevity and intensity), followed by a prologue featuring three unsympathetic characters (who are unsympathetic because their reactions are so far afield from the reader’s); I was greatly relieved when chapter 1 switched to focusing on a pair of far more relatable, sympathetic characters. However, it’s a useful tool to keep in mind. After all, the best stories reflect the richness of the real-world characters with whom we interact, and plenty of real people are certainly unsympathetic.
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