On Writing Likable Characters

A woman lies face down on the floor of an abandoned visitors' center. She's slit her wrist, but not enough to kill her. Enough, she hopes, that her captor thinks she's dead. Her captor returns to the center, unlocking the door and sees her lying on the floor. He bends over her and she moves, hitting him in the head and bolts for the door. She runs into the wilderness, a swampy, semi-tropical forest with her captor chasing her from behind. After trampling through some trees and underbrush she comes to a road where she flags down a car. The car is full of teenagers and she believes they want her for sex. So she backs off from the road. This gives her captor time to grab and pull her into the camouflage of the forest. Are we disappointed that she lost this battle? No. 'Cause the captor is none other than Dexter Morgan, a forensic blood-spatter scientist by day, a serial killer by night, and we the audience have been rooting for him for five seasons.

Common advise among writing circles is that the protagonist must be likable. She may have flaws, but at the end of the day, we want her to win. Ergo, we must like her. Right? Wrong. Take Dexter, for example. From the beginning we are invited into his world, his thoughts, his warped sense of justice. If he has redeeming qualities, it's maybe that he (usually) only kills the bad guys. So he's a vigilante, appealing to the "dark passenger" in each of us of wishing the bad guys get their just deserves not with courts or law, but with the blind force of rage. But his victims are usually guilty. Sometimes new evidence comes to light that shows the victim's innocence. Sometimes someone gets too close and he must kill them to protect his secret. In season 2 Dexter framed a man for his own murders. The man was guilty only of being an asshole. Dexter probably would've killed the man but Dexter's mistress did it for him. As thanks, Dexter murdered her to protect his secret hobby. Through the thick and thin of it all the audience roots for Dexter. Maybe we can empathize with him because his traumatic childhood made him who he is. But if Dexter were real and I knew who he was, I'd stay as far away from him as possible. And I'd turn him into the cops. In real life, I would want the cops to win. In fiction, I'll root for him all the time. Likable he is not.

So why does Dexter have a following? It has five seasons and several rewards and nominations. But it violates this "rule" that the main character must be likable. Melanie Tem, a well published author I know, said that the key to the protagonist is that she or he is interesting. Dexter is definitely that. We watch because he is complex and nuanced. He reveals our dark nature and--through him--we revel in it. In a way he's cathartic. He forces us to examine where our sympathies and empathies lie. He's certainly a fine definition of an antihero. As there were antiheroes before, there will be antiheroes after, always proving the rule of likable characters wrong. We like antiheroes not because we like them, but because they force us to examine ourselves.