I Completely Farking Hate You

Gideon the Ninth, Quips, and What it Means to Like Made-Up People

Do you have to like fictional characters?

It’s odd that we fixate so much on the likability of made-up people when so many beloved characters don’t come from a place of warmth within those writing them. Getting an audience to connect with the characters in a superhero movie is above all a corporate management problem, but a lot of people love Aquaman. Maybe all this sappy folderol about creators’ warm relationships with their own characters is bullshit?

After all, plenty of serious fiction writers—satirists, let’s say, or icy post-post-modernists like Remainder author Tom McCarthy—don’t “like” their characters. That they do not prioritize their affection for non-existent people is central to what they do. The old saw “you have to love your characters” is up there with “write what you know” in the pantheon of well-worn advice that everyone loves to try to subvert.

And yet, liking characters is the coin of the realm in publishing. When I was pitching my first novel (since shelved--partly because I stopped liking the characters), the nicer, more considered rejections from publishers usually came with a version of “couldn’t connect with this character.” “Connect” sounds slightly more dispassionate and diagnostic than “relate,” a term which AP English teachers try to shame out of teenagers. Nothing sounds worse than the truth: “I didn’t like this character.” Liking characters is for book clubs, which are both widely treated as embarrassing and also crucial to the publishing industry’s business model. In the end, these terms mean the same thing: We better like your main character, or else.

Gideon the Ninth, the 2019 debut novel by Kiwi fantasy writer Tamsyn Muir, addresses the likability problem in a way that’s somehow both familiar and disorienting. Here’s how Harrowhark Nonagesimus—the teenaged heir of a noble family of necromancers who rule over a grim planet populated by reanimated skeletons and morbid religious orders, on the edge of a vast and decaying space empire—responds to Gideon, the novel’s protagonist, when the latter wonders why Harrowhark keeps foiling her attempts to escape their worm-eaten home:

Gideon could only manage “Why?”

The girl’s expression was the same as it was on the day that Gideon had found her parents, dangling from the roof of their cell. It was blank and white and still.

“Because I completely fucking hate you,” said Harrowhark. “No offence.”

That “No offence” ends a chapter, so it’s meant to land hard—quip as dagger. There’s a lot of this kind of poppy contemporary banter in Gideon the Ninth. On a random page I just now flipped to, Gideon accuses Harrowhark of acting like “a butt-touched nun” and later tells her to “cut the bull.” The quippiness is one of the first things I noted about Gideon, and I wasn’t alone.

It’s a counterintuitive approach to characterizing teenagers in a magical space empire. None of the stentorian tones of a Dune or even the much more recent dark fantasy hit The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Yet Muir’s banter can also feel very familiar.

The first person I think of when I see heavy helpings of this kind of dialogue is Joss Whedon. Ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a cultural lodestar for Older Millennials and Younger Gen-Xers alike, the Whedonization of mass culture has led to some funny lines. It’s also led to a lot of quips that prop up otherwise wobbly writing like a cute gargoyle holding up a rusty gutter.

In 2020, every time a superhero movie or a AAA video game hits a forced plot beat that risks making even a sympathetic audience roll their eyes, the characters have to say something ironic and meta like, “So I guess that’s a thing.” Whedon won, and it sometimes feel like the highest aspiration any other narrative arts writer can have is to be a satrap in his vast cultural empire. This applies to novelists as much as anyone, since it’s never been clearer that books have to compete with all the other stories you might be following in any other medium.

Quippy banter, laden with ironic meta-commentary, was a useful tool for writers before Buffy, of course. And it still has many valid uses. For one thing, given that so many of us have learned to talk this way in real life from watching TV and movies, characters taking their cues from the Quip Industrial Complex can make them “relatable.” There’s a longer piece to be written about how we get our concept of what’s relatable in fiction less from real-world authenticity than from other made-up stories. Part of that paradox is that "relatable” almost never actually means that—it usually just means likable. In many cases, the most “realistic” or “believable”—and ultimately likable—thing your fictional characters can do is sound like fictional characters.

Initially, I wanted to interrogate Muir’s arguable journey down this path. But after I thought about it for a while, I started to get sappy. I remembered how hard it can be to live with characters in a novel for years. It may or may not be important to you that a reader like a character, depending on what you’re going for and how much you care about the approval of the publishing industry, but it becomes crucial that you like the character you’re pushing through the accumulated muck of hundreds of pages.

So I’ll go ahead and assume that the quippiness in Gideon made the whole thing more fun for Muir. (I also haven’t yet finished the book, which seems admirably original on the whole.) Some of the best writing advice is just as hackneyed-sounding as the shibboleths I listed earlier: If you’re having fun, your reader will usually have fun, too.

I’d rather think about fun than all that other shit, so that’s where this newsletter is landing: Have fun.

(Also I’d love to get some dialogue of our own going in the comments, whether on this topic or any other. So get in there if you have thoughts—I’ll do my best to respond!)

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Speaking of fun, I thought that might be the result if I actually covered a multi-strip arc from start to finish. So I’m going to try that and, like Calvin, we’ll see how far we get:

If you’re a true Calvin and Hobbes diehard, you know where this one is going. I’ll let Calvin reveal his destination in due time. It’s enough for now to know that he’s doing that most American of things: Declaring his independence.

I actually didn’t plan for any 4th of July serendipity when I sought this arc out, but this is a great time to note that Calvin has a distinctly American concept of liberty. Like so many of his countrymen, he’s obsessed with what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—freedom from the demands of other people and institutions and forces. This is the kind of freedom that says no one should be able to tell you to clean your room (or to, say, wear a mask). Berlin contrasted this with “positive liberty”—the freedom to access what you need in order to thrive, more or less—which is the kind of freedom which Americans are so famously bad at emphasizing.

Calvin doesn’t know about any of this, but he does use that telling Cold War term: “Totalitarianism.” This isn’t the place to dive deep into Carl Schmitt or Hannah Arendt, so suffice it to say that term was eventually used to lump together various left-wing and right-wing regimes of authority that challenged small-l liberal capitalism. Totalitarianism was that which unacceptably impinged on Americans’ cherished negative liberty. So in that sense, Calvin is actually right with his high-flown usage. He’s also about to be undermined in his convictions, as usual, which just might tell us something about Watterson’s own politics…

I’ve written way too much, either way, so we’ll pick this up next week.

Other fun things

—You may have heard about the Colorado woman who owns an open-carry-themed restaurant in aptly named Rifle, Colorado, and how she just defeated a longtime incumbent to win the GOP nomination to represent her congressional district. Here’s a trove of reporting on her from the local paper down in Grand Junction

—This is one of the best things ever written about Bill Simmons, probably the most influential sports commentator of the 21st Century

—If you’re looking for another newsletter to add to your roster, Twitter user Protestant Wind is doing something really interesting. I’ll let him describe it, but I like where it’s going

A poem

Hôjô Ujimasa’s famous samurai death poem