It's difficult to write tension in a romance that's actual tension. You can't have one of them married. You can't make one of them be a real jerk or unlikeable. You have to find a way to get tension, but still end up with a happy ending. Actually, it's not difficult, you just need a good plot.
I never liked the "empty shell" female leads you see in some romances. Those characters that have little to no personality because they are meant as a blank canvas for the reader to project on and pretend it is their experience instead of having a character that is simply relatable, complex and actually a PERSON. That drives me up the wall.
It's not just in romance, those empty shell characters appear all over the place. Look how bland Keanu Reeves is in the Matrix, or how little character Harry Potter has, or Arthur Dent in Hitch-hiker's Guide... There are many audience surrogates, like Scout in TKAMB, or Luke Skywalker, or Bilbo/ Frodo Baggins.
I was actually just thinking about Neo in the Matrix after making that post! He's just god-awful boring. I think I just generalized romances at first because my mind immediately went to Bella from Twilight when proposed with the "character types you hate" question. But yeah, I've totally seen those types of characters outside of romances and it's just an annoying writing style. You don't know ANYTHING about who these characters are as a person and the story just becomes a slog to get through because you can't bring yourself to care about them at all because their introspection consists of them reacting to other characters instead of exploring the main character themselves.
I agree with you entirely. I find it hard to care about purely reactive characters. When everyone around them is more interesting and more assertive, all I think is, why can't I read one of their POVs? I also couldn't bring myself to use the name N**. I mean if I escaped the Matrix and was asked to come up with a name for myself and I said anything resembling Neo, Morpheus, Trinity etc, I hope someone whould give me a hard slap and/or laugh in my face while calling me a fuckwit. I hope I would get the same reaction if I put on a leather trench coat and stupid fucking sun-glasses without arms.
Emma Swan from Once upon a time . I just hate that character . She did everything wrong herself and when she finds her parents did it even though they did it to save her , she is all bossy and rude to them. FFS come on girl get your Sh-t together . in general sense Characters that judge others for doing things that they have done or would have done in same circumstances.
Oddly enough, I hated Emma's mother - Snow white. She seemed so whiny and stupid and she never made the smart decision. Though to be fair, I think the entire show is ridiculous and should have been canceled last season.
Both of the leads from The Fault in Our Stars. The more those two spoke in that hideous overwrought dialogue, every inane pondering about the nature of life as viewed in a plate of eggs, every pretentious line about the metaphor and imagery of whatever they happened to be doing at the time, just made them feel less and less like real people, much less like real teenagers. Considering the story required me to relate to them in some way, else at least see their deaths as a loss.... yeah, I couldn't believe them as people, and couldn't care less whether they lived or died, unfortunately.
Achilles, a character from Homer's lliad that has always fascinated me. But in terms of his portrayal by Brad Pitt in 2004's Troy directed by Wolfgang Peterson, I liked his work and him as a character right up until him killing Hector. But then after that, I hated him, right alongside the rest of the Trojans! Typically with an antihero, it's the other way around. You don't necessarily like them from the start, but by the end you do. Achilles is one particular example of the opposite of that.
Don't forget that half the time, Hazel seems to lean on the fourth wall with "...if this were any other book about cancer..." I mean, I get that she (well, John Green) is trying to refute the offensive stereotype that all cancer-ridden people must serve as beacons of inspiration for us non-cancer-ridden people, but c'mon! A little subtly would be nice, Hazelnut Grace. I could almost imagine her elbowing the book and winking at it while Gus waxed on about metaphors for the tenth-billionth time. I thought you two were supposed to be teenagers, not walking symbols of refuting-stereotypes-of-cancer-patients.
My latest cringe characters: Fae. My apologies to all the forum members who write about vampires, werewolves, dragons and fae. Sigh.
Yes , i don't know why they are doing it, they just continue to make their characters look stupid . I agree they are just trying to drag the show now.
Is that like a character group? I remember in Mercy Thompson books there were some folk called the Fae, but they weren't all the same. I think they were fairies and gnomes or something, but there were different personalities among them. There may have been fae in Sandman Slims novels as well (both Mercy and Slim are urban fantasy), but I can't even remember what they did. Oh yeah, Sandman Slim's character type is something I reeeally don't like. I read the first 2 books in the series, and usually I like men who are a bit macho, who kick ass and take no prisoners, but he came off such a dilettante (although the author probably intended him to be the real deal) I was rolling my eyes every ten pages or so. So the Dilettante Hero. Prevalent in books written by people who didn't research fighting, guns, etc. and just wrote whatever they saw on TV.
I agree with a lot of these, but here's two thoughts: 1. There's a lot of emphasis on realism here, and for the most part that's fine. However, there are certain books/genres that deliberately reduce characters to cartoon characters (eg. Neil Gaiman's Coraline -- a wonderfully written children's book). Realism is often important, but we also need to remember that fiction is based on simplified reality. Elegantly cartoonish characters can still be valuable, if it fits the genre. 2. Writers spend a lot of time talking about "badly written" but popular works like 50 Shades or whatever. Sometimes I wonder if this bashing stops us from becoming better writers. There must be a reason for their success. Even if we don't like these works, surely, there's something to learn from them. I wish we'd spent more time thinking about that.
I think this is really important. Writers can write for a very small market of other writers, or they can write for a much larger market of people who just want a good story, or whatever the hell it is that makes all these "poorly written" books so popular. What is it about Twilight and 50 Shades that makes people want to read them? I think it's a great idea to take those books more seriously. It doesn't mean we have to emulate their writing style, but if we can extract whatever it is from them and use it ourselves, we have a better chance of reaching a lot of readers and giving them something they'll enjoy. If you're trying to create a great work of art, disregard this approach. If you're trying to write something that will touch and entertain a hell of a lot of people? I think it's something to consider.
Oh that's easy, a teenage girl falling in love for the first time (first time) < key words, with no other than a...... vampire. And not just any vampire, but one who has remained in a teenage boy's body for a few centuries and is just dieing to drink her blood. ^^ Meyer took that little concept, which supposedly came to her in a dream, and sustained it for almost 500 pages! How do you do that? How do take a concept that came to you in a dream and then write that concept as a novel? As 500 pages? As that's essentially what she did. Poorly written or not, it caught on because of the love story and all the teenage girls that could relate to main character Bella. And all the teenage girls that WANT to fall in love for the first time just like Bella, WITH.... ...someone just like Edward. She rolled with it. She finished it. And it caught on big time. When you have word of mouth that is that strong after the work has been published, quality of writing no longer matters. And 50 Shades of Grey is in the same boat.
The types of characters I dislike the most include people who kill for no reason, spotlessly perfect characters who have no character flaws and always succeed, and whiny types who never smile, even when something good is happening to them. I can't watch films like Twilight for that third one. You just got married to the unrealistic man of your dreams, smile! Smile, damn-it! And don't get me started on that creepy grown man who falls in love with the baby. I can't imagine how anyone can find that acceptable. Still, the books sold well. I'll be sure to keep my babies away from the readers.
There are plenty of good books with fae, assuming you get away from the whole YA/paranormal romance side of the equation. Read some stuff by Charles de Lint or Robert Holdstock and you get an entirely different (and often more frightening) view of fae.
Assuming this refers to the age differences between vampires and mortals, it's kind of a lame criticism of Twilight, since that particular vampire trope is basically a tradition at this point. Mina and Lucy in Bram Stoker's Dracula are, what, 18 or 19? And there are definite sexual overtones there. The sex aspect of vampires and mortal women runs all through the genre. Most recently, you've got Tanya Huff's stories, Buffy and Angel, Twilight, and so on. In Octavia Butler's book Fledgling, the main character is of a vampire-like race called Ina, and though she's 53 years old in real time, she has the physical appearance of an ten or eleven year old girl, and there is a fairly overt depiction of her sexual relations with grown men. And how about Let the Right One In? Oskar is 12 years old. Eli is what, 200+ years? There's some definite sexual aspect to what is going on with them, though understated. Fixating on age differences in vampire novels seems kind of silly. If the comment was in reference to something else, I've forgotten about it and the above should be taken as a general comment
As I understand it, Twilight literally has a full grown adult (werewolf?) fall in love with a baby. I have neither read those books, nor seen those films, but I remember there being a bit of a fuss about it a few years back.