Yeah I get what you are saying. I am with you and need a nice dose of Anne of Green Gables, LOL.

((hugs back )) 🙂 I don’t mean all fiction with a good moral MC has to be light or nice though.

LOL. I never saw you as a troll. Some fiction is light and nice and there is a market for that, ergo the remake of “Anne of Green Gables.” That’s why I said it was in the end preference. ((HUGS))

I love gritty characters, from a magical clone trying to separate her self from her masters and prove she has a soul, to an assassin that sacrifices everything because he’s the only one that can.

II think that’s the whole problem, we are sick of Mary Sues and Gary Stue’s, we want what’s closer to real life but make them bigger then life.

If characters can grow and change in a book then people in real life can too, I think that’s what’s happening, very slow but it’s there.

I wasn’t criticising your examples, just the general trend. And I did read several books of GoT before I had to stop because it was depressing. It wasn’t just one or two horrible characters, and they weren’t all horrible of course, but there was so much nastiness and it kept getting unrelentingly worse.

I’m not saying no stories should be about people with a dark side. But you said “one of the trends I am seeing is the trend of horrible people [as protags]” and you depict that as a good thing, implying that writers should keep doing this more.

By the way, I’m not a troll, I’ve been reading your blog for years, occasionally commenting, and recommend it to writer friends. I just believe writers do have an influence on society and I feel the responsibility that it should be a good one rather than a negative one. Not that I’ve got past the first draft stage and I do feel the pressure of this social responsibility! Maybe too much. But I would like to see more well-rounded heroic heroes than “horrible” antiheroes.

And I guess when I mean “horrible people” I am talking those who are misunderstood. In the 90s when sit-coms were all the rage, I felt so alone, like I was outside of it all. My father abandoned us when I was a kid. My mother went off the deep end and was committed. I was a high school drop out twice. We lived in poverty, always afraid the lights would go out, scrabbling for enough food. To top it off the rich girls at school took great pleasure in tormenting me every single day of my life because I owned two pairs of pants and four shirts.

I was NOT a nice person from all the things done to me and I never felt there was anyone in story who really spoke for me. All the romance novels were these perfect innocent damsels. TV was full of rich happy families who got along. That wasn’t life. At least not my life. I think when some of us damaged folks see our lives in hyperbole and see that a bad background doesn’t mean you can’t rise to be a hero, it speaks to us. Not the sanitized nonsense of the 90s.

Have you read any of the examples I gave? In “Big Little Lies”, they stand up to bullying and a woman is freed from her husband who is secretly beating her. In “Girl on the Train” she rises above alcoholism because she gets pulled into a murder mystery. In Bosch, he rises above his anger to solve the mystery of his murdered mother who was a prostitute and the system dismissed. In “A Man Called Ove” he is angry because his wife and the only thing he loved has died. It is an immigrant family who reaches out and befriends him who changes his heart. In “Luckiest Girl Alive”, yeah she is mean and sniping, but it is because she was brutally raped and the story gives her the courage to stand up to the powerful people who attacked her and bring them to justice.

And in “Game of Thrones”, sure there are terrible people, but the protagonist John Snow is noble and good and rises above it all. And yeah Cersei is awful but if you understand her story, she has good reason for being who she is and she was brutalized and victimized by High Sparrow who she takes out (re: rape culture)

Many of these stories have “horrible people” because they show they are seriously damaged and it gives them somewhere to arc. You mention “rape culture” but almost every example I gave involved people who had been brutalized who at first seem terrible who become heroes despite the damage done to them.

Often people who are actually victims come across as terrible. It is only through story we see they really are heroes. People who go through this kind of stuff are in a bad place and “being a good guy” falls flat if life is all daisies. It is only through big obstacles and the crucible we see them for truly being heroic.

Before you criticize, maybe try reading more. And in the end, it is all preference.