4 It’s complicated: our relationship with complex characters

Enjoying villainous characters is common among the population (Hall, 2019), and you will have heard our crime authors are very aware that their audiences really enjoy their villainous creations. Of course, villains are not unambiguously bad, instead, as you will have heard the authors allude to, they tend to be complex characters who behave in morally questionable ways, rather than being out and out evil characters.

Konjin and Hoorn (2005) drew from the disciplines of art, aesthetics and psychology when they developed a ‘Perceiving and experiencing fictional characters’ theory which is a useful framework when considering why we might find ourselves simultaneously drawn to, yet morally critical of, the same character. Their framework suggests that our desire for involvement with characters and our desire to keep a distance from them is not on a binary continuum. In other words, it is not the case that you are either involved (you wish to invest in the character) or you are distant (you wish to avoid the character). Instead, they argue our wish for involvement with, and for distance from, characters run in parallel as experiences and that both involvement and avoidance together explain our appreciation of fictional characters. In short there can be an enjoyable tension between the desire to approach and avoid.

Interestingly, Konjin and Hoorn suggested that in comparing characters to ourselves, both involvement and distance are informed by: aesthetics (ugly vs beautiful); how realistic the character seems; and ethics (bad vs good) alongside. What was particularly interesting in their findings was that characters that were presented as more complex, with some positive and some negative elements (for example someone ethically bad, but beautiful and realistic) were more likeable than characters who were unilaterally good or bad. Konjin and Hoorn’s concept of involvement (measured by items such as ‘I want to be friends with the fictional character’) also captures the concept of identification, which you will look at in the next section (Black et al., 2019).