Discussion Empathy with fiction characters

Some girls are just attracted to murderers for some reason. People send Chris Watts love letters in prison even after he was on national news for murdering his wife and daughters and dumping them in an oil tank

 

I definitely empathize with characters. It's one of the reasons I have so much trouble continuing to read novels when the MC starts going all murder hobo or robber hobo. And it happens so often in some genres. It's annoying to be liking and enjoying a story and suddenly it turns to "well I've gotta go murder everyone who's ever looked at me sideways because I'm strong now". I don't just empathize with the MC but even the random characters. I don't get emotional when they die or are maimed but it pisses me off and I stop reading.

 

I at the very least try to empathize with them, but that is under the assumption that they are written well enough to actually feel like proper characters and not just tools used by the author.
As for comparing novel characters to anime or other media, I don't think it is inherently better or worse, but rather that novels have the potential to be both the worst and the best at it.

 

He is either lying or hasn't read a good book.

My money is on him lying.

He is just like a guy who tells his wife he is not affected even if another female strips naked in front of him.
So it's okay for him to go to a strip club for a bachelor party

 

People have been feeling empathetic for fictional characters for thousands of years. Your friend just probably hasn't read any books.

That being said I'm not empathetic to your levels of not being able to like villains or crying.

 

Invoking empathy is about half the point of storytelling to begin with. Most of the time liking the character in question is far less important than understanding where that character is coming from. Realistically this should go for all the characters in a story and not just the protagonist, and the ability to do this is one of the most obvious differences between good and bad writers. I should note though that empathy doesn't just mean feeling for characters who suffer.

Note the definition for empathy:
the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner

also : the capacity for this

It's about getting a response from every aspect of the characters.

As for the question about empathy being manipulative, all of creative writing is manipulative. At the end of the day, getting the audience to respond the way the writer wants them to is one of the main goals so I don't know how it's much of a criticism. Sure, the methods the writer uses can vary massively but that's been true of every other writing mechanic out there as well.

 

I have empathy towards fiction characters right up until the first time I notice the author is using them as cheap devices to create drama. IE, if authors have a tendency of killing off characters, that's not a problem, until I notice that the author is writing them into the story to kill them like GRRM. if the author uses the side characters as just numbers to be butchered to make the MC look more BA? I am going to stop empathizing with characters in the story really fast.

ngl, those also tend to be the fastest ways for me to be turned off by stories as well. I want to empathize with characters. I want to feel bad for them when bad stuff happens. but when the author seems to be reveling in the bad stuff? or has a tendency of delaying powerups until bad stuff happens shonen manga style? or just wants to be known as the guy "not afraid to kill his characters"? there is nothing that causes me to lose empathy with your characters faster. in the end I recognize that the characters exist within the story and that what happens has to fit the internal logic of the story, but it's a fine line between realizing that in this place, the plot demands that this character dies and writing the character into the story just to kill them next chapter or at the end of that arc.

classic example was when I saw through martin. he wrote that martell character into the last couple books fully intending to kill him at the end of the last book. When you look at the entire summation of every chapter from his POV you could honestly have summed up all of the plot that occurred in those chapters to 2 lines from another pov's perspective. So not only did all of those chapters amount to filler, but they also revealed that every other time a POV character had died up til that point had been just GRRM intentionally writing characters into his story just to kill them. how dare this dude act all superior to another author who said she felt bad killing characters in her last book. She actually cared about her characters, she wrote them in to breath life into them. when she killed them, it was a brave thing. When george kills his characters he is basically just fulfilling the intent he had from the beginning, they were meant to die from the moment he included them into the story and only that martell character was the one that gave it all away after all those years.

edit: I honestly couldn't sleep for 2 nights after the end of where the red fern grows. if people don't feel sad after reading that or old yeller... I dunno, maybe they are sociopaths.

 

The rape in the first episode was put off from watching Game of Thrones. I wanted to read the books since the dramas seems to add needless rape to the story and the book was better but the killing off of characters just for cheap drama changed my mind.
It gets easy to spot from a mile away as you get older.
It is why even though I mostly watch Asian TV series, I avoid the popular ones since it is usually melodrama with cheap deaths.
Tragedy sells but when it is so obvious, or you are told from episode 1 then it feels very cheap.
I know stories like Memento are popular but knowing that the character dies from the first act disinterests me, the writer has to be very good to make me interested and they usually aren't

 

that scene you mentioned was in the book too. honestly, when I first encountered it I was still a teen and thought it was interesting that the author wasn't afraid to show horrible stuff happening to pov characters. as I got older, I eventually realized that was his gimmick. then I realized it wasn't that horrible things were happening to characters to match the plot, but that the plot was being manipulated by the author to allow horrible things to happen to the characters to match it....

once you see through that illusion, it becomes very hard to care about the characters anymore and going back to my point where he was being so condescending to that other author, it just leaves you wondering why you ever thought highly of him to begin with.

 

The same reason I avoid gore and horror.
Both genres are popular for shock factor not because they have any substance.
I know a girl who is too afraid to sleep with the lights off well she is a woman, and she keeps watching horror.
Real life is shit, I want stories that are either happy endings or add something to my life.
It is one reason I love this genre of Japanese dramas called Human dramas.
I first discovered the actor in Lovely Complex live-action movie:
https://asianwiki.com/Bones_of_Steel
Now that I am older, I intend to re-watch such Human dramas, even provide English subtitles to ones that lack it.
I believe that humans are very impressionable, I am very wary of what types of media I consume.
All these psychopath MCs look good on the surface but they just make you feel defeated since you are not inspired by them. They add nothing to you that you can use in real life.
The joy is too fleeting since you have to face the fact that you cannot emulate them.

 

I can like villains, but there is a limit, if the author is able to write about a reason, and about the villains true emotions to Certain things, then yes I'll empathize, although probably not when they did certain things(like they're a serial killer, or rapist or something like that). It depends on the things they did.

 

What about Boxxy T. Morningwood?

 

In a good book, yes..

In a run of the mill novels, sometimes. Depends on whether I question the logic in every decisions that the character makes. There are just times that I don't care whether everything is reasonable and I'm just using it to pass time.