Warning: Unlikeable Female Protagonist Ahead
How come we never tone down difficult male characters?
P.S. No issue last week because apparently, moving across continents takes more outta you than you’d expect. Thanks for sticking around, and a warm welcome to the new readers! :)
Who would you pick if I asked you to choose the most interesting fictional character you’ve come across?
When it comes to female characters, I’ve noticed we’ll always go for the put-together one, the strong girl or woman who always overcomes her odds. She is never too unlikeable or difficult; despite all her issues — she always gets over them.
Most of us would choose male characters we admired or related to, ones we felt deserved to be liked because or despite the way they are — some would be greatly interesting but morally flawed, others villainous but dashing. Regardless of who it is, you’d still root for them even in their darkest moments.
Unlikeable female protagonists aren’t very welcome in media or weren’t until a little while ago. Years ago, in another life as a book blogger, I consumed YA books by the dozen. Dashing, suave villains who were also somehow desirable were all the rage (and continue to be, to some extent). I was one of the numerous girls/people who fell in love with such flawed male characters and loved them a little too much.
But I was quick to criticize female protagonists — they were too rigid, too boring, too much, or too little. It wasn’t uncommon to come across reviews of books with strong-headed female protagonists that said readers couldn’t root for her because they couldn’t relate to how irritating or pigheaded she was. Or how she wasn’t doing things the way the reader instinctively expected her to.1
Can we make Walter White a bit more relatable, please?
Coincidentally,2 when I was researching for this issue, Kelly Clarkson’s interview with the two actresses from Bridgerton Season 2 popped up on my feed.
“We’re all fully rounded human beings on this show, our characters do unlikeable things. You know, you have to allow it. People do unlikeable things. [...] No one watches Breaking Bad and goes; let’s make Walter White a little softer. So we can relate to him.
Can you tone him down a little?”
And I immediately recognized the many, many times I’d asked for the female characters to be likeable, to be more relatable — in my head or in reviews; either way, I wasn’t asking the same of male characters. Few of us would.
Why are we so afraid of unlikable female characters?
When I think about it a little more, it’s because we bring in our internal, implicit, and learned expectations of how women and girls should behave, act, and be in the books we read. So if they’re not strong enough to justify their rudeness, we can’t accept it. If they’re not weak enough to justify why they’re so irritating, we can’t understand it. So they have to be somewhat binary but never fully rounded, which is not at all like real life.
But also, it’s very much like real life because we often don’t allow women to exist as flawed human beings in media.
“As women, we are socialized to be pleasant. Nice. Polite. To be gracious and amenable. …We’re taught to cater to the needs of others. We do this at the expense of our own.
Those of us who don’t meet these expectations? We’re branded as difficult. Unruly. Unlikable.”
More often than not, when female characters are flawed, they’re often punished for it — left by the hero/protagonist for another, softer woman. Or maybe they’re humbled by another woman who’s more likable and kinder — a lovely display of internalized misogyny once you recognize it for what it is. These characters must give up on love, companionship, respect, understanding, and more until they ‘come back to their senses’ and behave like they’re expected to.
I hadn’t realized this at all until I picked up Book Lovers by Emily Henry, where the protagonist is the one who’s dumped for the lovely, kind woman in the small town. She’s the career-hungry woman with a heart of ice, unwilling to compromise on her principles, but in most movies and books, those principles are always depicted as wrong and unnecessary.
Think about Fleabag — the first and cleanest example I could think of a ‘popular’ unlikeable protagonist. She’s too real, too nasty, too much to really root for, but we do anyway because finally, we’ve been given a chance to like the unlikeable female in all her glory.
“It’s always been a tough trope to navigate, in part because so much of the behavior that’s meant to signal that a female protagonist is difficult is often too familiar to conjure up much sympathy. And many of the shows that fit into the “unlikable woman” genre are seeking sympathy or at least some kind of narrative redemption for the protagonist—some kind of evidence that she is not singular in her awfulness. Waller-Bridge, thankfully, has no interest in that kind of confessional redemption.”
In this academic paper, ' In Praise of Unlikeable Women’, the author calls them anti-heroines. And while I like that term, I also want to note that unlikeable male characters, ones you can’t root for if you’ve got your morals straight, are not often termed anti-heroes. The word ‘villain’ itself has such a sexy connotation that hero and villain are almost synonymous when it comes to who the fans love.
Characters are meant to make us think — in whatever way. So whether it's frivolous or profound art, female characters should be allowed to be as intense, unlikeable, and morally grey as male characters have had the freedom to be for centuries. Thankfully, more folks are writing real, flawed, and that includes — unlikeable — female characters.
“I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things — human.” — Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist
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Nia's Newsletter Rec
Kitchen Witch is a newsletter celebrating all the magic that can be made in the kitchen. You'll read about anything that hits the intersection of food and witchcraft—whether that's a recipe for a honey jar, the history of altar cakes, or even a deep dive into food-adjacent topics, like ancient Icelandic farting spells and how they relate to food.
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Here's an issue I really liked written by Lola Méndez, a writer I admire:
Stuff to check out this week 💌
We still need to go a long way in terms of climate action (looking at you, big oil companies, and governments), but here's some positive news: these animals are no longer endangered as of 2022! Although pandas seem to be trying to be still endangered. 💀
Did you know that urine comes from your blood, not from the food/water you consume? A bunch of us (me included) seem to have realized this recently.
Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute of The Office) explains why your 20s should be a waste of time and how sad it is that that's not the case for most of us anymore. I think it has a lot to do with hustle culture and the constant feeling that we must do everything and figure it out right now.
Last week, I shared a book recommendation in Elizabeth Held's fabulous newsletter — What to Read If. There are also fantastic book recs from Books on GIF and Aya Martin-Seaver.
I leave you with this nugget of info:
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to hit like and share this issue if you enjoyed it. 🖤
Of course, these rules don’t apply to the 103-year-old (but looks 24) male villain who has murdered more than his fair share of humans. Or to the average human male protagonist — we expect him to have two emotions, so when he has a third one and expresses it, it’s a big thing, and we immediately jump for joy.
Coincidence, my ass; they’re literally tracking every single keystroke by the looks of it.
I know I'm in the minority (maybe not so much anymore) but I've always LOVED unlikeable female characters. I think I see my own flaws in them and realize others can also have them, and while sure, it'd be great to be perfect (eh, maybe not), the flaws are what make people interesting. I'm reading When You Get the Chance by Emma Lord right now, and while the main character isn't unlikeable in the way we might expect, she's extremely emotional and rash, and I see a lot of myself in her, which I'm loving, as I've never seen those characteristics in the main character. It's usually saved for the popular girl villain character.
When you say to think of the most interesting characters, the first that came to mind was the narrator in Gone Girl. The most unlikeable female character. But gosh, she’s just so memorable.