Friday, April 27, 2012

Follow Friday - There Are Fifty-Eight Spaces in the Game Hexxagon


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Book That Thing! and Little Read Riding Hood.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Have you had a character that disappointed you? One that you fell in love with and then “broke up” with later on in either the series or a stand-alone book? Tell us about him or her.

Hmm. This is a tough question. I usually either like a character right off the bat or I really don't. The other thing that makes this a tough question is that I haven't read very many series in which one character is the central feature. For example, I've read James Bond, but I figured out right off the bat that he was kind of a dim sexiest jerk, so I didn't fall in love with the character only to be disappointed later. I do get annoyed when a character has wild swings in their personality in order to make some story element or another work. If you are writing a story and you need a character to behave in a manner entirely contrary to the personality you've developed for them in order to make a story line work, then you should either change the storyline or lay the groundwork for the personality traits needed to make the story work. One example would be the character of Arthur in Bernard Cornwell's Winter King series who acts wildly out of character in Enemy of God in order to make the story of Tristan and Isoulde work. Through most of the series Arthur is a maverick, bending or breaking rules to achieve his goals. But when he is dealing with King Mark and Tristan, Arthur suddenly becomes a stickler for the letter of the law for no real apparent reason other than if he didn't the story wouldn't end as a tragedy. This sort of left-turn in a character's persona always annoys me. On the other hand, Arthur got over that and went back to being his more established character, but this just makes the entire subplot in question seem false and artificial.


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6 comments:

  1. Hmm I haven't read anything you mentioned, but I do know what it's like to break up with a character! Great answer :)

    Here's my FF!

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  2. I'm the same! LOL. I either love them right away or not.

    I'm a new gfc follower. :)
    http://notjustnonsense.blogspot.com.br/2012/04/ff-feature-and-follow-20.html

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  3. I haven't read any of the books that you mentioned, but I agree with you -- I either like a character right away or don't it. New Follower.
    Gabby @ The Ya Pixie
    My FF--
    http://theyapixie.blogspot.com/2012/04/follow-my-blog-friday.html

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  4. @Jessica (Peace Love Books): I generally recommend Cornwell's historical fiction and quasi-historical fiction - among other things he has written the Sharp series set in the Napoleonic Wars and the Grail Quest series set during the Hundred Years War. The books I referenced in this post are from his Winter King series, which is Cornwell's version of the King Arthur myth retold as if it were historical fiction.

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  5. @Kah Cherub: I usually like or dislike characters pretty quickly, and unless they take wild swings in their personality I continue to like them. I guess I just may not read books with characters that are inconsistent that don't have other larger problems.

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  6. @Gabby: I think that it may be that I tend to like or dislike authors more than I like or dislike any particular character, and since I tend to drop a series quickly if I don't like the author's style, I don't often end up following a character who could turn from enjoyable to repellent - unless the change was something that made sense in the context of the book.

    ReplyDelete