Note – this post contains spoilers on Charlaine Harris’s Dead in the Family and some of the earlier books as well.
I love a bit of weakness in a character. I think characters that are always strong, or always confident, or always right, or never over-react, don’t leave you with a lot to play with in terms of conflict (except for the conflict of everyone else hating them cause they’re just so god-damned perfect all the time).
When Astrid Cooper, in an interview that is scheduled to appear in Specusphere ezine later this year, mentioned that I wasn’t afraid of having weakness in my characters, I gave a little squee of delight that what I wanted to do had come across to a reader.
However, a book I read last night has been thinking more about weakness – can a character be too weak? Or can too much weakness at the wrong time ruin a character?
The book was the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel – Dead in the Family. I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as the first nine books, and in the end I realised my issue was with two characters going through moments of extreme weakness – Sookie and Eric.
I’ll try to do this without being too spoilery. Sookie at the beginning of the book is still recovering from the events in book nine, which were pretty bloody awful and traumatic and she’s have a hard time – she can’t relax, she’s jittery, she’s lost all her usual spunk. On the one hand, I think it’s great that Harris showed us such a realistic portrayal of getting over a traumatic event, rather than skipping this point and seeing Sookie back to her best again. On the other hand, it was hard to see Sookie suffering like this. I found the first couple of chapters really hard going, but then Sookie starts to pick up and by the end of the book she’s back to being her usual fiesty self and so I kinda was able to get over how hard the start had been.
But then Eric’s trauma begins. What happens to him wasn’t as big a deal as what Sookie had to recover from, and indeed his reaction to it is set up by the entire world that Harris has developed, particularly in regards vampire to vampire relationships. I totally believed that his initial reaction could be what was portrayed. However, Eric has throughout the series so far been the strong, in control one. When other vampires have fallen, Eric has not only survived but seemingly come out of it stronger. For me, Eric has been the uber-vampire.
So watching him fall, and then wallow and be unable to pick himself up again was really hard. Worst of all for me, he doesn’t manage to get himself going – someone else does it. By the end of the book, I wasn’t able to look at Eric the same way.
So, it had me thinking too much weakness isn’t good – yes, characters should be challenged, but you can’t let them fall too far and you need to give them the chance for redemption. Perhaps Eric will have that in the next book and all will be forgiven, but at the moment …
Then I wondered about the fact I’d come to forgive Sookie her great weakness but am having issues with Eric and I’m wondering if that’s because of where they came in the book. Sookie’s was right at the beginning, but we saw her work her way through and by the end, she was pretty much back to normal (not completely – events have changed her view on some things, but her personality was once again perky and fiesty and sassy and all the other ‘y’s).
Eric’s came part of the way through the book and by the end, he’d only just begun to get back that strength and control that is so much a part of who he is. Eric finished the book still damaged and maybe that’s what I don’t like. I don’t particularly need a HEA, but I’d like to have a sense that Eric’s going to be OK and at the moment, I don’t have that.
So maybe it’s not so much that too much weakness is an issue, but not having the corresponding amount of redemption from it is.