Walter White. Amy Dunne. Tyrion at his worst. The Jackal from Red Rising, who I have no business rooting for and root for anyway.
You have your own list. And you know the feeling on it: the small private embarrassment of being on someone's side while some other part of you files an objection. You keep turning the page on their side anyway.
That gap, between what you approve of and what you can't stop watching, is one of fiction's most dependable pleasures. I want to pull it apart, because I think what grips you there says something honest about the stories you actually want, as opposed to the ones you say you want.
Understanding is a trap
The first thing one of these characters does is let you follow the reasoning. Following is a different act from agreeing, and following is enough.
Walter White is the case everyone reaches for. For 5 seasons the show hands you his logic in real time. He's doing it for his family, for the diagnosis, for the humiliations stacked up over a wasted career. You track every step. Then at the very end he tells Skyler the truth: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really, I was alive."
The whole show turns out to have been a slow reveal that the explanation you were handed was never the real one.
Patricia Highsmith did the same thing in print more than 50 years before Walter White, and she did it colder. You spend The Talented Mr. Ripley inside Tom Ripley's head while he works out that he's going to kill a man he envies, and Highsmith hands you every step of the reasoning as he takes it. Nothing is withheld from you.
The trouble is that you keep turning pages with something that feels a lot like hope.
Then she wrote 4 more books about him and let him get away with all of it. No arrest, no reckoning. Readers have been uneasy about that since 1955, which is roughly the point.
Comprehension creates complicity. Once you understand why someone crossed a line, you've already walked partway across it with them, and you can't un-understand it afterward.
Small wants are the dangerous ones
Amy Dunne in Gone Girl wants one thing. To win a marriage. That's the entire scope of it, no empires, no doomsday.
And because you're locked in her head, watching a first-class mind aim itself at a target that petty and that personal, the menace turns intimate. You can't file her under supervillain. Her wants are recognizable. It's the lengths that are monstrous.
Cersei Lannister wants the same size of thing. A witch told her when she was a girl that she would watch all 3 of her children die, and she has spent her adult life trying to prove that witch wrong.
The want is small enough to fit in a kitchen, and hardly anyone would hold it against her. Martin makes you wait until the fourth book before he lets you hear her think it.
She's also terrible at it, and that's what makes her frightening. She sees the plot that isn't there, misses the one that is, and every disaster comes from a woman doing her honest best for her children.
A threat to the whole world lets you keep a comfortable distance, since nobody reading is really weighing whether to end civilization. When what stands to be lost belongs to one person, a marriage, a grudge, a brother, a debt, the distance goes. You have wanted things that specifically, though never to that degree, and you still know the shape of the wanting. The recognition is the hook.
Every step was defensible
This is the one that works quietest. Each individual choice makes sense in the moment. Just this once. Just to fix this one thing. Just until the danger passes. Just what anyone would have done. Every step is understandable in its own context, and that is the whole con. By the time you look up and measure the distance traveled, you're standing deep in territory you'd have refused at the door.
The Jackal runs partly on this and partly on something colder. He's never wrong about tactics. His cruelty is always the efficient move given what he's after, and madmen don't reason that cleanly, so you never get to wave him off as one. He keeps his grip by staying correct.
The one who breaks the pattern
Tyrion Lannister gets filed under morally grey, and he's a different animal. He reads dark mostly because he's surrounded by people so much worse that his ordinary flaws look like shadows by comparison. Drop him into a gentler story and he's close to a decent man with a sharp tongue.
The books push on that harder than the television version ever did. Martin gives Tyrion his own chapters, hundreds of pages of them, so you get his reasoning in his own voice while his family grinds him down.
And what Martin does with him after the third book has no screen equivalent. The show kept him likable. The books let him rot for a while, and you're in there for it.
Same man, filed two different ways, depending on how much of his head you were handed. That's worth noticing, because it sorts the list.
Some of these are dangerous minds you've been maneuvered into liking. Others just look dark against a dark background. From the inside the pleasure feels identical, and knowing which one you're holding changes what you should be watching for.
When it doesn't take
The usual failure is a writer who keeps the reasoning back. You get told a character is complicated, you get shown the results, and you never get handed the thinking that produced them. Nothing to follow, so nothing to be complicit in.
What's left is a person doing bad things at a distance, and readers put those books down.
The second failure runs the opposite direction. Give a character reasoning that's always correct and the danger drains out of him. He turns into a fantasy you're enjoying.
The Jackal escapes that because he's only ever right about method. What he wants stays monstrous, and the books never let you forget who pays for him getting it. Take that away and you have competence, which is pleasant and forgettable.
And sometimes the writing is fine and you just refuse. Plenty of readers meet Walter White, decide inside 2 episodes that they're not going anywhere with him, and never come back. A story that asks you to spend 5 seasons inside a man you find repellent is asking for something you're allowed to decline.
What it says about you
You want to understand more than you want to approve. That's what the reliability of this effect suggests, and it's a little uncomfortable to sit with. You will follow comprehensible wanting almost anywhere, including into rooms you'd swear you would never enter.
That might be the most useful thing fiction does. A story that lets you inhabit a mind you'd condemn from the outside expands what you're able to understand, safely, on the page, at nobody's cost. The character you shouldn't like is showing you the reach of your own sympathy, and testing where it ought to stop.
Which is a strange thing to owe a villain, and worth owing anyway.
One thing
There's nothing to sell you this week. If you want more of this, a free account at charlieforet.com opens the free stories, and it's how I let people know when the next one is coming.
