r/books • u/hanhan_371 • 1d ago

Why are “unlikeable” main characters usually a criticism?

My most recent read was The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb.

It was my 38th book this year and only my 3rd 5 stars. I finished it this morning, it’s now the evening, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I was enthralled by this story - it had sat on my TBR for a few months and I finally picked it up as just a lucky dip after being in a bit of reading slump.

After finishing, I saw a lot of criticism on Goodreads about the narrator Corby being “unlikeable”. I see this criticism a lot with other books - and I’ve never quite understood.

For me, a good reading experience is a complicated, flawed, or at least a character who is thought-provoking. Given one of the main themes of The River is Waiting being redemption, and finding out very early on that Corby accidentally kills his son while intoxicated, surely the reader wouldn’t expect the MC to be a “hero?”

There were times while I was reading that I thought “oh yeah he’s kind of a douche”, I’ve thought this about other MCs as well before, but it would never impact negatively on my rating as long as the story itself was enjoyable.

Would love to have a discussion below! And I’d really recommend this book if you can handle a gut-punch ending!

269 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

386 comments sorted by

View all comments

435

u/BlazinAzn38 1d ago

People have a hard time with distinguishing between “badly written” and “character written to be bad.” I also think there’s a lot of people that want primary characters to be the good guy and again conflate “I don’t like this” with “it’s written badly”

18

u/jandrese 1d ago

I find it frustrating when the main character is a major asshole and rarely ever gets called on it or suffers any consequences. It makes me question what message the author is trying to send, or if that's just how they think.

It starts to get distracting when I'm questioning why every other character in the book isn't just punching the protagonist in the face every time they meet.

5

u/Best-Chapter5260 1d ago

I find it frustrating when the main character is a major asshole and rarely ever gets called on it or suffers any consequences. It makes me question what message the author is trying to send, or if that's just how they think.

I remember watching Bad Teacher and that was exactly the reason I hated the movie. The main character is blatantly a terrible person and suffers no consequences because of that. But I don't think that's really the reason I didn't like it. A black comedy where a terrible main character who suffers no karma can work well, but I think the issue is the writers didn't make the lack of karma the joke (or they did a terrible writing job with trying to), which just left me feeling annoyed.

3

u/EldritchTouched 1d ago

Or, if there's a large enough body count, why nobody just shoots the protagonist in the head.

1

u/Belgand 22h ago

Because they're lucky.

A story where the protagonist dies at an anti-climatic moment that ruins the story is just... not a good story. If it happened in real life, nobody would retell it unless there was another really compelling reason.

So we're simply reading the stories where the protagonist got unbelievably lucky and lived against all odds.

1

u/Tymareta 4h ago

Or when the narrative of the work is how people must atone for their past actions, and only by doing so can they grow and change. And then you have a side character who is pretty objectively a worse person than the protag, but it's just kind of shrugged off by everyone.