Writing Tips and Reviews

Character will kill you but also expects you to feel sorry for them

I want to make it clear that I don't hate this concept, I hate it when the effort isn't put into the arc.

Too many times I've seen "she'll kill you if you do X" and then two seconds later "she needs to be loved and cared because she's just a poor victim." Yeah, that's not how it works. There's a middle point in there that people tend to forget. You can't have this character who ruthlessly murders people for looking at them weird and expect those same people to be sympathetic. What happens when you're bullied everyday by someone and then learn that they're bullied at home? You feel bad, but you also feel "screw you." It's hard to sympathize with someone who's hurt you, so... why is that a hard concept in writing?

I'm tired of hearing about how a character is murderous, pure evil, or going to destroy cities but is this baby who needs to sympathy with no work put into it. Demon Slayer does it right by making the demons terrible people who act out due to their past, but upon learning why, the audience feels sorry for them. We're not given whiplash. We don't feel sorry for Rui just because his family died, we feel sorry because he realized that he killed the bond they hand and his search for a real family was never going to work. He learns from watching Tanjiro and Nezuko about what a real family means and that makes him question his fake family. No one would feel bad for him if they were told he lost his family and that was it, the response would be: "oh, that's too bad. Now kill him Tanjiro, no mercy."

The writers didn't expect the audience to feel sorry for Rui because they briefly mentioned his tragic past and that somehow made everything okay and made Rui this poor baby. It doesn't erase what he did. Some people think adding on a tragic backstory will make everything okay because that murderous character is now sympathetic, but you have to put some more leg work into it. It's not enough to have the character try to kill another but then start crying and wanting sympathy without a reason. I remember a roleplay where a character was trying to kill someone, and stared crying about her horrible backstory in the middle of the fight. And I was not sure what even prompted it. She started talking about how she came from a poor family and her family was abusive and I was thinking "wrong place and wrong time, you do that AFTER you beat the shit out of each other." A character crying isn't going to make everything okay.

Main point: don't give the readers whiplash by a character saying how they're going to kill everyone in sight, and then two seconds later, have the character say how they're poor victims. Put something in between, at least longer than a bullet list. That's the only place I'd find that acceptable. Step one: make character an asshole who no one is going to like. Step two: make the audience care about them. Please, put something between step one and two. I don't want to hear how I'll be killed in my sleep if I keep the door open then be told I need to feel sorry for the person who's going to kill me because of a tragic backstory I don't care about. Surprisingly, I'm not going to feel sorry for them when I don't know who they are and just keep hearing about their tragic backstory.

Does the tragic backstory even matter at that point? Do you care when a character is killing another but screaming about it and how people should feel sorry for them? I'm no judge or jury, but I feel like no one is going to care about it when the person being prosecuted just killed a man.

To be a little more accurate, is more like: "you just ate the last slice of pizza, I'm going to rip your head off and burn down the house with everyone inside it. But feel sorry for me because I'm going to go to bed hungry now." WHIPLASH.