Christina here and today I’m going to have a little rant. A while back, I read a trilogy with a hero I absolutely adored, but at the same time I couldn’t stand the heroine. I found her intensely annoying, not in any way worthy of the hero’s love and devotion, and so immature I wanted to slap her! I carried on reading the entire series because I wanted to know how things ended for the hero, and whether the heroine would redeem herself in the end, but I almost had to force myself. That’s not how it should be, is it?
A heroine ought to be someone we like and empathise with. Sure, she can be naïve or immature at the beginning of a story (or a series in this case), because we’ve all been there and lessons need to be learned before we grow up and understand certain things. She doesn’t have to be perfect – none of us are, after all – but she does need to be likeable. At the very least, she should have some very good reasons for NOT being likeable, if that’s the way the author wants to play it.
What we absolutely don’t want is a heroine we dislike intensely.
(I’m not going to name the series because we all have different opinions and in any case, I know the author slaved over these books for years and I would never denigrate anyone’s work. There are probably plenty of readers who don’t like my heroines, but I very much hope they at least find that they can empathise with them.)
So this girl starts off naïve and immature, and she meets a guy who is a little bit older and a lot wiser, not to mention experienced. Rather than taking advantage of her, he is very careful of how he treats her and takes things slowly. He tries to shield her from bad things, but instead of being grateful, the heroine is annoyed that he won’t let her do stuff, as if he’s thwarting her just for the sake of it. He’s also got a past, and the heroine is incredibly jealous of one of his exes in particular. Instead of confronting him like an adult, she accuses him of being unfaithful without listening to his explanations and basically has a temper tantrum like a toddler. Gah!
They eventually make up and she realises he hasn’t cheated on her in any way, but as a reader, I had no idea why he’d even try to get her back. If I’d been him, I would have given up on her a long time ago. Was it really worth all that drama?
The whole rest of the series, this sort of behaviour is repeated. Whenever the heroine gets an idea into her head, she refuses to listen to reason. She thinks she's Superwoman and hares off on one ill-advised escapade after another, and when the hero tries to protect her or reason with her, she gets furious because he’s not “treating her as an equal”. Well, the fact of the matter is that she’s NOT his equal because she’s not nearly as strong or experienced as him. Plus, she’s making his job a hundred times more difficult by not doing as she’s told and going against his advice again and again, putting herself in danger unnecessarily.
To make it even worse, she starts to lie and keep secrets from him, having accused him multiple times of doing just that. Hypocrite much?
Honestly? I could not understand why the poor guy persisted.
I watch a lot of crime series on TV and it’s usually the same thing – there’s always a headstrong female (usually the daughter of the policeman in charge of the investigation) who rebels and goes off to do her own thing. Of course, she then falls into the clutches of the bad guys and her father has to rescue her. Why is it that these headstrong heroines just can’t follow a simple order? Why do they always have to do the one thing they’re told not to do? I know it creates more drama, but if they come across as merely stupid for not listening, this plot device simply doesn’t work for me.
It is difficult to write sympathetic characters – I know that. As an author, I do my best to make my readers understand why my heroines act the way they do, especially if it isn’t how they ought to behave. Sometimes, it may be that they seem fine to me, but others don’t agree. In that case, I have to take the blame because it means I haven’t done my job right. I haven’t conveyed on the page what was in my mind and that can happen.
When we come across characters that we don’t like or empathise with, how long into the story should we persevere? In the past, I would have read to the end of every book I started, but the older I get, the more impatient I am as well. That means I’m more likely to wall-bang a book after the first hundred pages or so. As I said, I only carried on with this particular series because of the hero.
Have you come across any heroines you’d like to shake some sense into? And would you tell the author in your reviews? I don’t, because I still adhere to the motto voiced by little Thumper from the Bambi movie – “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say nothing at all”. Why hurt someone’s feelings unnecessarily? It is just my opinion after all and others may disagree. But I will think twice before buying that author’s books again.
In this instance, I felt strongly enough to vent by way of this blog and I hope you’ll forgive me.
Do please tell me you’ve wanted to strangle a heroine or two as well and that I’m not alone!