tl;dr version: It'd be cool if Katniss was a terrible person, but the author isn't writing well enough to make it work/doesn't even realise she's portraying her badly.
Hm... There are plenty of protagonists who are horrible people, like Humbert from Lolita, Alucard from Hellsing, Revy from Black Lagoon, or from V for Vendetta (the comic, not the movie). However, they're not nearly as irritating to watch/read/listen to.
I think maybe this is because you're never really told they're good people outside of their own narrative. Also, since the author is aware that they're not good people, they don't center the work's morality around the protagonist, making everyone condone and praise the protagonist's actions. Perhaps there are people on the protagonist's side who are worth rooting for, or maybe there's a good cause that he/she's helping incidentally, and while you may not empathize with the protagonist, the people he's helping are what keep you from downright rooting for the villains. Maybe it could be because the villain is that *worse*.
The last reason, I find, is the one that's commonly written the most poorly. It could be often in this case, the writer isn't even aware that the protagonist they're writing is not sympathetic. It could also be because when two sides are morally reprehensible then you really don't have much to cling to and you stop caring about the story. It could be because by making everyone else immoral, the protagonist loses that interesting sociopathic streak that set him/her apart from the rest of the cast, and isn't "special" enough to care about anymore - just a gritty character in an equally gritty world.
Anyway, Suzanne Collins probably finds most of Katniss' actions/thoughts justified somehow, *doesn't* see Katniss as being a bad person and then goes on to write the book's world in a way that makes Katniss right about everything. This just makes Katniss irritatingly sueish instead of interestingly abhorrent yet somehow relatable.
I mean, a lot of Katniss' actions reek of some sort of antisocial personality disorder, but not consistently and not realistically. She calmly sits in a tree, thoughtfully considering killing a girl down beneath her who is posing no threat, who other people will almost certainly come by to kill at any moment, just because she's annoyed. While this could be interesting if this was a character trait of hers that was acknowledged by the rest of the world, it isn't. The book seems rather focused on how awesome she is, or how tragic it is that other people don't see how awesome she is. Also love interest.
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Protagonists as bad people
Date: 2011-04-02 11:16 pm (UTC)Hm... There are plenty of protagonists who are horrible people, like Humbert from Lolita, Alucard from Hellsing, Revy from Black Lagoon, or from V for Vendetta (the comic, not the movie). However, they're not nearly as irritating to watch/read/listen to.
I think maybe this is because you're never really told they're good people outside of their own narrative. Also, since the author is aware that they're not good people, they don't center the work's morality around the protagonist, making everyone condone and praise the protagonist's actions. Perhaps there are people on the protagonist's side who are worth rooting for, or maybe there's a good cause that he/she's helping incidentally, and while you may not empathize with the protagonist, the people he's helping are what keep you from downright rooting for the villains. Maybe it could be because the villain is that *worse*.
The last reason, I find, is the one that's commonly written the most poorly. It could be often in this case, the writer isn't even aware that the protagonist they're writing is not sympathetic. It could also be because when two sides are morally reprehensible then you really don't have much to cling to and you stop caring about the story. It could be because by making everyone else immoral, the protagonist loses that interesting sociopathic streak that set him/her apart from the rest of the cast, and isn't "special" enough to care about anymore - just a gritty character in an equally gritty world.
Anyway, Suzanne Collins probably finds most of Katniss' actions/thoughts justified somehow, *doesn't* see Katniss as being a bad person and then goes on to write the book's world in a way that makes Katniss right about everything. This just makes Katniss irritatingly sueish instead of interestingly abhorrent yet somehow relatable.
I mean, a lot of Katniss' actions reek of some sort of antisocial personality disorder, but not consistently and not realistically. She calmly sits in a tree, thoughtfully considering killing a girl down beneath her who is posing no threat, who other people will almost certainly come by to kill at any moment, just because she's annoyed. While this could be interesting if this was a character trait of hers that was acknowledged by the rest of the world, it isn't. The book seems rather focused on how awesome she is, or how tragic it is that other people don't see how awesome she is. Also love interest.