How do you make extremely unappealing premises work? (Warning, 18+)

[Ragenaut]

Coming here from reading this. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudienceAlienatingPremise

I believe I have a fairly appealing premise, but an extremely unappealing protagonist. In my story, called "The Bloodlands", criminals in a Super-Max prison find themselves going between their lives in prison, and into a nightmarish, violent world filled with sadistic killers and horrid abominations. I think this part will be just fine.

The issue comes with the protagonist, an 18 year old high schooler who found his way in prison after hunting down all his bullies and those he thought didn't help him or betrayed him, and gun them down. The opening chapter is dedicated to this shooting, and it only ends after an officer shoots him in his side, which knocks him down and out, with the pain rendering him unconscious.

So yeah, a teenaged school shooter, how much more sympathetic can ya get! Seriously though, do you think this would make a good main character, given the setting?

 

[SoundOfSilence]

It could be a good character, it all depends on how you write him!

The same goes for most characters. As long as it isn't like, a warlock that you are attempting to shove into a slice of life (though that might work if you try to do it for comedy), you can really make you're character just about anything.

Just make sure they have a personality, that is interesting. They don't even have to be likable, just interesting.

 

[Ouverture]

Give traits and exposition that make a character appealing and/or sympathetic before they are identified as the school shooter. Make readers feel his pain before witnessing his extreme response. You can use your in medias res trick by not giving your shooter a name or discernable physical characteristics in your opening scene, so that the audience doesn't necessarily connect him to your main character at first when you go back in time to flesh him out. It also helps to write the narration of your opening scene from a different point of view, to throw the reader off. Preferably a character that ends up surviving. Like one of his past bullies who survives the shooting (being portrayed as a scared kid in said scene) or even the officer that takes him down. That way you have a character a reader already has a connection with to use later again in the story.

 

[Nilum]

Oh, dear god. Um.

There's usually two ways to do this.

A. Crapsack character in a crapsack world, who lashes out at the crapsack world with its own methods. IE: The Pay Evil Unto Evil trope. You still need to humanize them, but you can usually get away with doing normally heinous actions if you commit them upon characters who are verifiable to be just as bad or worse than the protagonist. (Ex: Agent 47 being paid to murder people is a lot easier to swallow when he's killing mob bosses and not orphans.)

B. Just don't say what your character was imprisoned for and try to give him sympathetic qualities first. You can humanize characters who commit unthinkable acts, you just have to ensure that your audience isn't immediately turned off of them first. Even then, you're normally going to have to get into the psychological aspects of it.

Alternatively, just read/watch A Clockwork Orange and get some ideas from there.

 

[Ursa]

I think the idea of an 18 year old shooter in this world doesn't work. Just from what I am given it makes no sense that he would land in a super max prison, even for this act. I also think that this is something that a lot of people have done. The young man turned evil through bullies.

I think it would be more interesting if you had one of the criminals in the super max be the protagonist. Make him older and been just abused by the world and the prison system. I think that would make the story a lot more interesting than seeing this 18 year old with men that have done a lot more terrible things.

And also, who ever said you have to have a likable protagonist. In Charles Dickson's Great Expectations had an unlikable protagonist but the story was still engaging. It is all about a balance between all your characters.

 

[Jasonchu]

This is actually really related to a question I had, so after I give my two cents I have a related dilemma of my own to ask about.

From my experience with creation, reception, and observing the reception of others, the MOST important thing is to avoid trying to force your reader into an opinion. In a story like this, you don't need the reader to empathize or sympathize with the protag for them to be appealing or interesting, you just need them to be able to understand them to enough of a degree that it doesn't ruin their immersion. If you try to generate sympathy for him before revealing what he did, then the reader might experience enough dissonance that it pulls them from the story, and instead of just disliking/hating/judging the protag it makes them think about the person who wrote it. Whenever my wife reads anything that uses rape as a plot device or character background she immediately criticizes the author instead of the character, but she doesn't have any issue with Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) because the author has the skill and experience to submit the character to you without telling you how to feel about them. It's a difficult, fine line to walk between trying to force the audience to feel a certain way for your character and not giving enough emotional detail about them, but with effort, practice, and a few tactful friends to test material out on, it's a skill worth developing.

My situation is the flip of yours, especially due to the fact that it's a setting for a tabletop game (so of course the players find their characters likable). The game focuses on themes of despair, fatalism, and suicide, and the drama of the game comes from trying to succeed at your objectives while maintaining your hope and mental health to avoid your character killing themselves. It's not Lovecraftian or anything else where this is through some insanity inducing effects, it's purely from a sense of hopelessness and the general vibe of the game encouraging you to just give up and die. OBVIOUSLY this represents a huge challenge to keep the game on the right side of intriguing vs depressing, and one of the things that him trying to carefully craft is a stock "bad end" line for PCs who lose their Willpower (stat) and end their lives. My main concerns are to not throw salt on the wound for the player losing their character (but without diminishing the loss), and avoiding making the player depressed IRL. Currently I'm going with: “Having lost the last of your Willpower, your thoughts spiral into darkness. When you do not meet up with the others again, they do not have much doubt as to what became of you.”

 

[Rainbow Rose]

My advice? Delve into his psyche. What made him do what he did? Did he WANT to hurt people or was he blinded by rage? Could he have multiple personalities egging him on or some other mental disorder? Is he truly a bad guy or does he regret what he did? Would he have done it again, giving the chance? What DID the bullies do to him to push him so far?

All of these questions make a character interesting. The reader WANTS to know about the protagonist and why he is the way he is. Throwing him into this kind of setting could also help him grow as a character. Maybe instead of killing people, he needs to learn how to get along and work together or die trying to fight alone.

 

[Jasonchu]

My advice? Delve into his psyche. What made him do what he did? Did he WANT to hurt people or was he blinded by rage? Could he have multiple personalities egging him on or some other mental disorder? Is he truly a bad guy or does he regret what he did? Would he have done it again, giving the chance? What DID the bullies do to him to push him so far?

All of these questions make a character interesting. The reader WANTS to know about the protagonist and why he is the way he is. Throwing him into this kind of setting could also help him grow as a character. Maybe instead of killing people, he needs to learn how to get along and work together or die trying to fight alone.

"Without condoning... or condemning. I understand."

 

[Rainbow Rose]

"Without condoning... or condemning. I understand."

Exactly. It's common sense that killing is wrong, so the reader doesn't need that hammered into their head. It can get pretty annoying when a book gets preachy about things that we all know are bad, so it just comes off as redundant. The reader doesn't want to hear the "killing are bad" speech, they want to know what drove a character to do such a thing. Of course, if the story is being told from first person, then obviously we need to hear what the protagonist thinks of killing, so it's not like saying "killing is bad" is completely out of the picture, but from first person, you have to tell it from the protagonist's point of view. Maybe he hates it, maybe he loves it, maybe he doesn't know what to think. All of these tell us about the character and make us want to learn more about him.

 

[Meredith]

You could maybe keep him anonymous in the first chapter - not using names, instead perhaps a first-person flashback of the incident as a prologue - and slowly let the reader become aware of his role as he becomes a more sympathetic character. This could let the reader have a sort of feeling or horror or disgust with the protagonist - but only if he has friends or side characters that have less heinous actions under their belt.