I recently watched this video, and it got me wondering about some some examples of this. What are some books (not necessarily YA) with characters that the author hates, and at most they're just BARELY trying to hide it? Bonus points if that character ended up becoming a fan favorite.
by mistersigma
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The only one that immediately comes to mind is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s frustration over being only known as the author of Sherlock Holmes. He was so afraid that his other writing would be overshadowed by the world’s love for Holmes that he tried to kill the character off.
Another example is Waldo Butters from The Dresden Files series. In an interview with the author, Jim Butcher, he said that he originally wrote Waldo with a plan to kill him off later in another book but decided against it when he became a fan-favorite ally to protagonist Harry Dresden. (But now I kinda wish Butcher did kill Waldo off because I find him mostly grating and a pretty flat character).
Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka hates Gregor
I found a book that was YA urban fantasy fiction that had been written by a high school English teacher in the Phoenix area. It had a great lead character and a great premise. The book apparently found its market and took off. He got a publisher and they published a second volume. That took off too and he quit his job and moved to Colorado. He wrote another and another and another.
All did well, and by then he was doing book tours and apparently having a great time with his fans both on tour and on the Q&A section of his blog. As he wrote more the ideas started to get…thin.
Volume 10 came out and he had turned the protagonist – who was a fun and charming character through all the previous volumes – into a monster. It seemed pretty obvious that he (the author) had run out of ideas and was just tired of this series, so he did the worst thing he could do to his hero.
Maybe he (the author) thought that he could repeat the magic, that lightning could strike twice. But I never went back to his website, never reread his books, will not buy any of his future books, and will not even repeat his name or the name of the series for this thread or website because I do not want to give him the publicity.
I’ll go you one better: a character who hates the author. The narrator/protagonist of *Antkind* keeps hacking away at the films of author Charlie Kaufmann, which soon leads to the character constantly falling down open manholes and being shot at. The narrator even runs away from the book at one point. Don’t ask how … But he does.
But to properly answer the question, in *The Motion of the Body Trough Space,* author Lionel Shriver seems to dislike every single one of her characters. It’s a fairly unpleasant read as a result.
Stephen King clearly disliked Annie Wilkes in *Misery* and Vera Smith in *The Dead Zone*, or Brady and Deborah Ann Hartsfield in *Mr Mercedes*. But he also wanted the reader to dislike them, so it kind of worked.