"I don't care what happens to these people."
A phrase coined by Dorothy Jones Heydt in a science-fiction based
Usenet group in 1991 to describe an
Audience Reaction to a work of fiction where the characters are so universally bland, unengaging or unlikable that the reader simply loses interest in their fate and, by extension, the work as a whole. This can happen with or without the presence of
more objective shortcomings, but the most interesting examples tend to be those where this is a critic's main complaint, single-handedly dragging an otherwise well-made story down to where it's almost completely unenjoyable.
Note that "not caring about" a character is not the same as "not liking" them — some character archetypes, such as the
Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, are driven by the notion that watching horrible things happen to people that deserve them can be entertaining. In other words, even if you
hate the character, you still
care about them enough (in some twisted way) to follow the story to see what happens to them. This trope comes into play when even that fails to arouse sufficient interest.
Many
Horror/monster/
Disaster Movies try to avoid this by
Developing Doomed Characters, only to make the audience hate the characters
more for getting in the way of
the slaughter they came there to see.
Also often stated with
added emphasis as "I don't
care what happens to these people".
See also
Darkness Induced Audience Apathy, where an excessively dark setting renders the protagonist's struggle so futile that the audience can't bring themselves to get invested in it even if the characters have some shred of likability.
Not to be confused with
Seven Dirty Words.
This is not a complaining platform. Please only add examples or specific reviews where this reaction is actually played out, not works about which you personally felt this way.
Examples:
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Film
- Moviebob on The Escapist makes this observation of the movie Monsters, noting that both leads are unsympathetic and flat characters.
- This review
of "Battleship" outright invokes this trope, nearly word for word.
- Steven Spielberg gave this as his reason for striving to attain Adaptation Distillation for Jaws — he found the characters in the book so unlikeable he wanted the shark to kill them all.
- Invoked in-universe in Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Whenever one of the selfish children does something Too Dumb to Live that will clearly lead to their downfall, Wonka's response is an almost bored, "Help. Police. Murder." Later followed by an equally bored, "Stop. No. Don't."
- Peter Bradshaw expresses this view of Lawless calling it "an empty exercise in macho-sentimental violence", describing the supposed heroes of the film as flat heroes and the villain as "a pantomime baddie".
- Roger Ebert gave George Romero's Day of the Dead one and a half stars in part because much of the movie consists of "unpleasant, violent, insane" or ridiculously noble characters shouting at each other. And while he doesn't utter the eight words out right, he does say that in Romero's previous movies "we cared about the characters."
Live Action TV
Literature
- Dorothy Heydt coined the words when reading Volume Two of The Wheel of Time, and also applied them to a Fionavar Tapestry book.
- Mark Twain's essay ''The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper":
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
- Slacktivist's page-by-page review of Left Behind often notes how the main characters are far less likable than the villain - who, of course, is the Antichrist.
- Made worse since the authors believe that You Can't Fight Fate in the real world, and wrote a story with two Author Avatar characters who also agree with the Biblical prophecies the authors believe in. As a result, they grumble a bit about the Antichrist, but don't do anything because everything is still part of God's plan. Even the characters themselves don't care what happens until Jesus comes back and kicks the Antichrist's ass.
- The reaction is best summed up in "No Heroes":
These are books without heroes because they are set in a world without heroism — without the possibility of heroism. A world of inexorable prophecies and inevitable doom.
Professional Wrestling
- Quite possibly the worst possible thing to happen to a pro wrestler outside of injuries is to get this sort of reaction. The entire point of wrestling is to get the crowds to cheer or boo you. Not getting either is almost considered to be worse than getting X-Pac Heat, and is practically guaranteed to put you on the fast track to getting fired.
- This is the general outcome of a heel vs. heel feud. Face vs. Face feuds(case in point, Austin/Rock heading into WM 19 and/or Cena/HBK heading into WM 23) can generally work on the fact that the crowd likes, to some extent or another, both participants and thus interest can be gained in seeing these two men/women, who respect each other immensely, square off in the ring. Heel/Heel feuds, meanwhile, pit two villains against one another. While this dynamic may work in literature, video games, or even film, to some extent, in wrestling, where the crowd controls a lot of the show, a match with two villains squaring off is more than likely going to drain interest in the show, considering that these are two characters the crowd hates.
Theatre
- The Musical of Musicals, a play that parodies various... well, musicals, registers this complaint about the works of Stephen Sondheim ("Unlikable people with lives that are hollow / It's all food for thought, but a bit hard to swallow...")
- Mother Courage And Her Children is another Brecht work that is deliberately populated almost entirely by unsympathetic characters (Kattin is the sole possible exception: she's mute and is victimized several times, but ultimately is killed during her futile effort to rouse sleeping villagers to the approach of the attacking army.) Even as each of her children are killed, the audience is discouraged from feeling any sympathy for Mother Courage; in fact, Brecht revised the ending following a production which he felt made Mother Courage too sympathetic to the audience.
Video Games
- Diabetus declares a variation in the Darkseed 2 Rongpurae, about the protagonist, Mike Dawson, who is suspected of murder.
slowbeef: To be honest, do you think he did it?
Diabetus: I would think no.
slowbeef: Who do you think did?
Diabetus: Well the problem is I don't really care.
Web Original
- Many a Caustic Critic have this mentality when they're supposed to fear for a character's life. Special mention goes to The Cinema Snob and Phelous, since they review exploitation and horror films, respectively, with Phelous spewing a lot of hate at the Hostel movies especially for this flaw.
- The Annotated Series has this as a staple of comedy, as the annotators often cite not caring for any of the protagonists and instead paying attention to characters that aren't intended as significant or sympathetic.
