I actually find anti-heroes and irredeemable arseholes more sympathetic as characters than your generic hero. There's a reason Vimes is more popular - and a way better story-carrying character - than Carrot. (Although I consider Vimes more of a redeemable arsehole, I must admit.) It's why everyone likes Batman more than Superman, and Lestat more than Louis. Me, I'm the girl hanging out with Emily and Charlotte reading "BYRONIC" magazine while Anne sits off to the side calling us idiots.
I actually can't think of a character I really, really like who isn't deeply flawed. My favourite books revolve around main characters who are really unpleasant. Phantom of the Opera has its murderous and crazed Erik, Lolita has its Humbert Humbert (who I can't help but like even though he's technically a ephebophiliac rapist, because oh my god, seriously).
I mean let's face it. No one watches Silence of the Lambs for Clarice Starling, and no one watches it for the antagonist Jame Gumb. They watch it for goddamn Hannibal Lecter. I was so damn happy at the end of Hannibal (the book) where he....... wait, spoilerz. In that one especially our Hannibal the Cannibal technically falls on the "protagonist" end of the spectrum, despite actually eating people. And you like him anyway because damnit, he's got style.
I find it quite hard to root for a protagonist who's just a good person without a massive list of flaws. In various novels driven by such characters I throw my emotional investment behind a supporting character who has these flaws - for example, in the Belgariad it was Silk and the Emperor.
That said, I find it difficult to write characters with massive flaws myself, unless they're men. What am I saying. Men are easy, actually. Most of my major player male characters have massive issues. One of them is an emotionally unbalanced drug addict, two of them spend a lot of time either drunk or hung over and another spends most of his time in a haze of self-hatred. Having said that, my favourite is an absolute charmer whose only real character flaws are general arrogance, a tendency to spend five straight hours working on a poem and preferring caffeine to food. But you'd understand if you met him. I'm a little bit in love with him, not least because he actually got the plot moving when the MC was depressed, apathetic and not doing anything.
I think female protagonists catch a lot more flak for being arseholes than male ones, because they just fall into the "bitch" category and don't come out. So they're harder to write, and harder to sympathise with... but I think that's a societal thing more than anything else, you know? (As an aside, I really hated that O'Hara woman, although I've only seen the movie. Didn't really think ANYONE liked her, to be honest. She's just so unintelligent and irritating. It wasn't a bad movie, but spent most of the movie going "WTF IS IT SERIOUSLY NOT OVER YET?! How LONG is this movie?!" and swooning over Clark Gable and I think I fell asleep like an hour before the end.) Given that most of my protagonists are female, this means their flaws are usually minimal, and less about being mean cruel bitches and more about being emotional screw-ups. I did have one that was technically an antagonist in one of them, and I tried to make her something of a careless, heartless femme fatale. In the end she and the protagonist fell in love, or at least in lust. I started out with the intention of making them both irredeemable arseholes and then killing them off at the end, but I couldn't bear to do it, so instead they lived happily ever after for the foreseeable future.
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(DUDE WATCHIN' WITH THE BRONTES!)
I actually can't think of a character I really, really like who isn't deeply flawed. My favourite books revolve around main characters who are really unpleasant. Phantom of the Opera has its murderous and crazed Erik, Lolita has its Humbert Humbert (who I can't help but like even though he's technically a ephebophiliac rapist, because oh my god, seriously).
I mean let's face it. No one watches Silence of the Lambs for Clarice Starling, and no one watches it for the antagonist Jame Gumb. They watch it for goddamn Hannibal Lecter. I was so damn happy at the end of Hannibal (the book) where he....... wait, spoilerz. In that one especially our Hannibal the Cannibal technically falls on the "protagonist" end of the spectrum, despite actually eating people. And you like him anyway because damnit, he's got style.
I find it quite hard to root for a protagonist who's just a good person without a massive list of flaws. In various novels driven by such characters I throw my emotional investment behind a supporting character who has these flaws - for example, in the Belgariad it was Silk and the Emperor.
That said, I find it difficult to write characters with massive flaws myself, unless they're men. What am I saying. Men are easy, actually. Most of my major player male characters have massive issues. One of them is an emotionally unbalanced drug addict, two of them spend a lot of time either drunk or hung over and another spends most of his time in a haze of self-hatred. Having said that, my favourite is an absolute charmer whose only real character flaws are general arrogance, a tendency to spend five straight hours working on a poem and preferring caffeine to food. But you'd understand if you met him. I'm a little bit in love with him, not least because he actually got the plot moving when the MC was depressed, apathetic and not doing anything.
I think female protagonists catch a lot more flak for being arseholes than male ones, because they just fall into the "bitch" category and don't come out. So they're harder to write, and harder to sympathise with... but I think that's a societal thing more than anything else, you know? (As an aside, I really hated that O'Hara woman, although I've only seen the movie. Didn't really think ANYONE liked her, to be honest. She's just so unintelligent and irritating. It wasn't a bad movie, but spent most of the movie going "WTF IS IT SERIOUSLY NOT OVER YET?! How LONG is this movie?!" and swooning over Clark Gable and I think I fell asleep like an hour before the end.) Given that most of my protagonists are female, this means their flaws are usually minimal, and less about being mean cruel bitches and more about being emotional screw-ups. I did have one that was technically an antagonist in one of them, and I tried to make her something of a careless, heartless femme fatale. In the end she and the protagonist fell in love, or at least in lust. I started out with the intention of making them both irredeemable arseholes and then killing them off at the end, but I couldn't bear to do it, so instead they lived happily
ever afterfor the foreseeable future.