Creating Sympathetic Characters
Today we’re going to talk about how to create sympathetic characters. Not necessarily likeable characters, but ones for whom the reader will sympathize and even root for.
Because a character doesn’t have to be likeable in order to be sympathetic, though it is easy to be sympathetic to a likeable character.
Walter White from BREAKING BAD is a prominent recent example. Walter was a very bad man who got worse over the course of the series, but most of the show’s viewership found him sympathetic and even rooted for him. An older example would be Darth Vader. In the original STAR WARS films and the various other shows and comics and books that have come out since, he is consistently shown to have done some pretty horrible things, yet he remains one of the most popular characters in the STAR WARS franchise.
Which leads to the obvious question – how do you make a character sympathetic to the audience? As we said, the character doesn’t necessarily need to be likeable – depending on the story, we sometimes find ourselves rooting for some pretty unlikable or even downright awful people, like the Walter White and Darth Vader examples above.
For that matter, why do the villains sometimes appeal more to the reader than the protagonists?
I think the key to creating a sympathetic or unsympathetic character doesn’t have anything to do with likability or unlikability. Rather, it has more to do with something more elemental – empathy. Can the reader empathize with the character’s situation or predicament? Humans are wildly different from one another, but we all have the same essential physical needs – without food, water, and shelter, we will die. We also have a lot of the same emotional needs, and it is through those emotional needs that it’s possible for a writer to create a sympathetic character.
If the reader can relate to the character’s emotional needs, you have created a sympathetic character.
This is why sometimes a villain is more popular than a protagonist. The writer, whether accidentally or deliberately, created a villain with emotional needs that are more relatable to the audience.
So, here are six ways that you can use emotional drives to create sympathetic characters. Very often you will find that these emotional drives can overlap in a single character, but that’s all right, since humans are emotionally complex.
1.) Fear of Loss.
Loss is something that every human will experience during their lives. It could be loss of a loved one, or loss of position, prestige, or property, or the loss of physical ability that can come through illness, accident, or inevitable aging. From a storytelling perspective, attempting to avoid these losses or avert them can create a compelling character.
Like, in a fantasy novel, the protagonist could be fighting to defend their home from orcs or the rapacious local lord, knowing that they’re in danger of losing their village. In a thriller novel, a common plot is for the protagonist’s child or spouse or lover to be kidnapped. In a less fraught setting than orcs and kidnappers, a common trope in romance novels is the heroine in danger of losing her business or her job because of the actions of her potential love interest. For villains, fear of loss is also an effective motivator – an evil CEO might fear losing his company to his rivals, or an evil queen might fear losing her daughter to the side of the rebellion.
The fear of that loss, and the characters’ efforts to avoid it, helps drive the plot, and also makes the characters’ emotional needs more sympathetic because we have all experienced the fear of loss at various times in our lives.
I personally got a lot of mileage out of this concept in the CLOAK GAMES series – Nadia’s fear of losing her brother is what drives her actions throughout the books.
2.) Experienced Loss.
The next phase of this, of course, is for the character to have actually experienced loss. Losing a loved one can be a common storytelling trope – the grim detective who lost his or her spouse, or the protagonist dealing with the loss of a sibling. It is common for characters to be orphans, as well – both Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter were orphans. Loss is also a common trope for villains. The loss of a loved one is also a common motivator for villains to embark on their start of darkness or a revenge-fueled rampage.
There are less fraught forms of loss that are nonetheless emotionally sympathetic in a character. The loss of a job, for example, especially when the character’s entire identity is tied up in their career. I think I’ve read a couple of detective novels where the protagonist has a breakdown after getting suspended from the force. The loss of one’s home can also be a severe emotional blow – from something like a house fire to peasants in a fantasy novel who are forced to flee their home to escape orcish invaders.
Either way, the emotion of loss is an excellent way to create sympathy for a character. It’s very possible for this to mix with “Fear Of Loss” as well. The character, having experienced a loss, is afraid of undergoing it again – a warrior who was badly wounded fighting orcs, for example, or a man who went bankrupt once and is afraid of experiencing it again.
3.) Ambition.
An ambition is also a good way to create emotional sympathy in a character. We all want to achieve things in our lives – whether finishing graduate school, having a fulfilling career, or finding a spouse and having healthy and successful children. In fantasy fiction, it’s common for the villain to have overweening ambitions – to usurp the throne, to become the most powerful wizard in the world, to become a god, etc. The protagonists tend to have less grand ambitions in those kinds of novels, usually focusing on providing for their families and loved ones. And, of course, it’s common for protagonists in fantasy novels to have Quests, and fulfilling the Quest definitely qualifies as an ambition.
But ambition is a common emotional drive across all genres of fiction. In crime novels, the detective might want to prove himself to his superiors by cracking the big case. A thriller protagonist might want to advance in rank in his elite special forces squad or capture the world’s most famous terrorist. A science fiction protagonist might want to explore a new planet, or unlock a new scientific discovery. It’s very common for characters to want something, and while that can lead to all sorts of plot developments, it can also provide sympathy from the audience.
Depending on what the character wants, of course – if the character’s ambition is to, say, betray his lord to the invading orcs in exchange for money and a high position in the orcish horde, that is unlikely to inspire emotional sympathy.
Ambition also leads nicely into the next emotional drive we will discuss.
4.) Thwarted Ambition.
This occurs when the character has an ambition that can be blocked in some way. This can happen unjustly – a fantasy novel, for example, where the rightful heir to the castle is disowned due to the scheming of the evil chancellor. It can also happen for logical and deserved reasons – a military officer is denied a promotion because his performance isn’t good enough, a student can’t pass the bar exam to become a lawyer, a woman wants to start her own business but can’t get a commercial loan because her credit score is bad. As with the previous example, this works equally well for both protagonists and antagonists, since the villain might have an evil ambition he wants to achieve, only to find himself thwarted again and again.
In Real Life, we’ve all had times when we’ve wanted to achieve something only to have it go wrong, allowing us to sympathize with fictional characters in the same situation. Additionally, a thwarted ambition has the additional bonus of providing excellent levers to drive the plot forward. In fiction, it is necessary for the protagonist to act, and having the protagonist act to achieve his or her thwarted ambition is an excellent way to advance the plot.
5.) Injustice or unfairness.
When a character is at the receiving end of an injustice, that can easily create sympathy in the reader because everyone has been treated unfairly at some point in their lives. I suspect a lot of people’s first encounter with the concept of “unfairness” came as children when the teacher decided to punish the entire class because one student was misbehaving. Granted, there are far more serious examples of injustice or unfairness we could name, and while they are unpleasant in Real Life, they can help make for very sympathetic characters in fiction.
Some common examples of this concept in fiction are a character unfairly accused of a crime, a character successfully framed for something they didn’t do, or a character held in disdain by the local community for something done by his or her parents or siblings. This sort of situation is commonly a backstory for both protagonists and villains. For the protagonists, it is often a situation that they rise above, whether by proving their innocence or going through an internal struggle to gain the inner strength not to care what people think of them. (Obviously, for a situation involving a false accusation of murder, solving the murder might take precedence.) For villains, this can be the start of their path of evil, where they decide to take retribution upon the community that ostracized them.
Which leads us nicely into the final method of character sympathy we will discuss.
6.) Revenge.
In the Bible, the LORD says that revenge belongs to Him and that it is His to avenge. However, in fiction depending on the circumstances of the original wrong, the quest for revenge can be incredibly effective in making a character sympathetic. In THE PRINCESS BRIDE film, Inigo Montoya’s quest is to avenge his father’s death at the hands of Count Rugen. Even though Inigo is initially an antagonist, he eventually flips over to the hero’s side. Given how evil Count Rugen, is Montoya’s desire for revenge makes him even more sympathetic.
The need for revenge can also make a villain sympathetic. For example, consider a detective novel about a string of murders. The detective discovers that the victims were all part of a conspiracy that got an innocent person man killed, and the dead man’s wife or brother or perhaps parents are the ones committing the murders. This would make the murderer far more sympathetic than they would be otherwise. Of course, depending on how sympathetic the writer wants the villain to be, the murderer could go too far, and start targeting the innocent relatives of the conspiracy members.
In villains, the amount of sympathy generated in the reader depends on the nature of what is being avenged. If the villain turns to evil to, for example, avenge the death of his son, that is inherently sympathetic. But if the villain is, say, a property developer who starts killing the people who blocked his crooked land deal, that makes him far less sympathetic.
So those are six ways you can try to make your characters sympathetic to the reader. Obviously, you can’t inspire the same emotion in every reader, but if you want the readers to find a character emotionally compelling, one of (or an overlap) of these six emotional drives will definitely help.
-JM