Sociopathic characters in fiction
Oct. 10th, 2017 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI've read several examples of sociopathic characters in several different books, and been left with a bunch of thoughts.
Edward (Anita Blake chronicles)
Edward is like urban-fantasy heroine Anita, but more so. In many ways he serves as a living example of what Anita could be if she prioritised effectiveness and ruthlessness over being a normal human. They talk about their mutual interest in firearms, how they're trained to fight, including killing without hesitation when necessary. And he's obsessed with how good he is at killing, and whether he's the best.
And yet, compared to the other characters I'm about to mention, in some ways he's a lot closer to normal. Like someone who's served unpleasantly in a military, he's been inured to a lot of death, and has few inhibitions against violence. But the same applies to many police and most doctors, it may not be *healthy* but it's also something that you can de-acclimatise from over time. But he does make human attachments. The people he kills are either in self-defence, or are people who are likely to go on killing more people if he didn't. He doesn't exhibit other serial killer profiles.
Whereas his associate Olaf is a textbook serial killer (see bleow).
And I notice, many readers including me, often *like* Edward-the-character, even as he's not an especially nice person.
I think that's part of a pattern which repeats. Of a character who is *interesting* because they're complicated and never take any crap from anyone. And is *liked* because they do all the horrible stuff off-screen and are horrible to everyone else but neutral and occasionally nice to the protagonist and that makes the protagonist feel special.
A milder form are any decisive-arsehole characters like BBC-Sherlock, where I think people are drawn to them for the same reasons. And it often applies to outright villains too, where they seem sympathetic in some ways.
And I'm often fascinated by those characters, when I feel like I should pay more attention to, you know, basically any other characters. And I'm not sure how much I'm falling for the wish-fulfilment illusion and/or "hate everyone else but like *you*" thing, and how much I'm interested in the (apparent) complexity of the character, and how much I'm just interested in a way that shouldn't be worrying.
So you want to be a serial killer
The protagonist is a teenage boy, who's parents work in a mortuary, who is obsessed with serial killers, and has all the hallmarks of serial killers, and knows he's at risk for sliding into that behaviour, but is also determined to prevent himself.
He forms emotional connections to people, but usually weakly, or as an obsession. He is usually smooth socially and good company whatever he is like on the inside. He has tendencies toward arson and killing animals and people, while (so far) managing to avoid fulfilling them.
He assembles a detailed list of "how he should behave" and follows that in lieu of having normal instincts.
Now we get to something I more specifically empathise with. I don't have any of the "this is worrying" symptoms. But I recognise the "learning how to be nice to people by rote". It's not that I *don't* have empathy with people, but it often seems to come strongly or not at all, somewhat unrelated to when it feels like it *should* naturally come. And I don't know if other people do naturally have empathy on cue, or if they find it more natural to intuit how to behave empathetically when they're not viscerally experiencing the emotions right then. (In retrospect, the second now sounds obvious.)
Cas and Rio, Russel's Attic
Cas is the heroine, except in an urban fantasy about bullets and mathematics instead of bullets and vampires. Rio as a character is like Edward in very many ways, who serves as the bad-ass even in comparison to the bad-ass protagonist. Except that he very explicitly is very very serial-killer-y, except that he has chosen to adhere to a strict morality based on his religious upbringing in place of having a more "intuitive" morality. But his tendency to be a serial killer is managed, not cured: he chooses to murder people like warlords and gangsters who are doing a lot of harm, and this seems to fulfil his need, but if he didn't do that he'd need to be committed. And the book presents this as a bad compromise, not a laudable outcome.
And he has *some* connection to other humans, but not a lot. In some ways, it's like the author read some of the genius-arsehole characters and did something similar, but didn't do the hoops most authors instinctively do to not make it too disturbing. There's a short story where Rio takes care of an abandoned puppy, and it's cute in that he *does* but very disturbing in that he constantly has the growing urge to mutilate it.
Whereas Cas is disconnected from other humans in a very different way. I don't think she's coded as autistic but she has several skills, traits and problems that are common in people who are. Her tendency is treat interacting with people as complicated and pointless, even though she clearly benefits from human connections when she and they have the patience and willingness to forge them. I'm kind of disturbed at the implicit contrast between her and Rio.
One thing that stood out, although it only slowly became clear, was that she was basically on top of her life as long as she had a clear immediate goal, but went off the rails actually really really badly as soon as she didn't. And she just learned to function around those constraints, except when her friends pushed her try to consider something in a more longterm way (which usually is bad in the short term)
ETA: And Bothari, I guess, but the narrative didn't dwell as much on *being* him.
Edward (Anita Blake chronicles)
Edward is like urban-fantasy heroine Anita, but more so. In many ways he serves as a living example of what Anita could be if she prioritised effectiveness and ruthlessness over being a normal human. They talk about their mutual interest in firearms, how they're trained to fight, including killing without hesitation when necessary. And he's obsessed with how good he is at killing, and whether he's the best.
And yet, compared to the other characters I'm about to mention, in some ways he's a lot closer to normal. Like someone who's served unpleasantly in a military, he's been inured to a lot of death, and has few inhibitions against violence. But the same applies to many police and most doctors, it may not be *healthy* but it's also something that you can de-acclimatise from over time. But he does make human attachments. The people he kills are either in self-defence, or are people who are likely to go on killing more people if he didn't. He doesn't exhibit other serial killer profiles.
Whereas his associate Olaf is a textbook serial killer (see bleow).
And I notice, many readers including me, often *like* Edward-the-character, even as he's not an especially nice person.
I think that's part of a pattern which repeats. Of a character who is *interesting* because they're complicated and never take any crap from anyone. And is *liked* because they do all the horrible stuff off-screen and are horrible to everyone else but neutral and occasionally nice to the protagonist and that makes the protagonist feel special.
A milder form are any decisive-arsehole characters like BBC-Sherlock, where I think people are drawn to them for the same reasons. And it often applies to outright villains too, where they seem sympathetic in some ways.
And I'm often fascinated by those characters, when I feel like I should pay more attention to, you know, basically any other characters. And I'm not sure how much I'm falling for the wish-fulfilment illusion and/or "hate everyone else but like *you*" thing, and how much I'm interested in the (apparent) complexity of the character, and how much I'm just interested in a way that shouldn't be worrying.
So you want to be a serial killer
The protagonist is a teenage boy, who's parents work in a mortuary, who is obsessed with serial killers, and has all the hallmarks of serial killers, and knows he's at risk for sliding into that behaviour, but is also determined to prevent himself.
He forms emotional connections to people, but usually weakly, or as an obsession. He is usually smooth socially and good company whatever he is like on the inside. He has tendencies toward arson and killing animals and people, while (so far) managing to avoid fulfilling them.
He assembles a detailed list of "how he should behave" and follows that in lieu of having normal instincts.
Now we get to something I more specifically empathise with. I don't have any of the "this is worrying" symptoms. But I recognise the "learning how to be nice to people by rote". It's not that I *don't* have empathy with people, but it often seems to come strongly or not at all, somewhat unrelated to when it feels like it *should* naturally come. And I don't know if other people do naturally have empathy on cue, or if they find it more natural to intuit how to behave empathetically when they're not viscerally experiencing the emotions right then. (In retrospect, the second now sounds obvious.)
Cas and Rio, Russel's Attic
Cas is the heroine, except in an urban fantasy about bullets and mathematics instead of bullets and vampires. Rio as a character is like Edward in very many ways, who serves as the bad-ass even in comparison to the bad-ass protagonist. Except that he very explicitly is very very serial-killer-y, except that he has chosen to adhere to a strict morality based on his religious upbringing in place of having a more "intuitive" morality. But his tendency to be a serial killer is managed, not cured: he chooses to murder people like warlords and gangsters who are doing a lot of harm, and this seems to fulfil his need, but if he didn't do that he'd need to be committed. And the book presents this as a bad compromise, not a laudable outcome.
And he has *some* connection to other humans, but not a lot. In some ways, it's like the author read some of the genius-arsehole characters and did something similar, but didn't do the hoops most authors instinctively do to not make it too disturbing. There's a short story where Rio takes care of an abandoned puppy, and it's cute in that he *does* but very disturbing in that he constantly has the growing urge to mutilate it.
Whereas Cas is disconnected from other humans in a very different way. I don't think she's coded as autistic but she has several skills, traits and problems that are common in people who are. Her tendency is treat interacting with people as complicated and pointless, even though she clearly benefits from human connections when she and they have the patience and willingness to forge them. I'm kind of disturbed at the implicit contrast between her and Rio.
One thing that stood out, although it only slowly became clear, was that she was basically on top of her life as long as she had a clear immediate goal, but went off the rails actually really really badly as soon as she didn't. And she just learned to function around those constraints, except when her friends pushed her try to consider something in a more longterm way (which usually is bad in the short term)
ETA: And Bothari, I guess, but the narrative didn't dwell as much on *being* him.