It’s tragic but true: adoring a character can tempt us to make choices that not only sabotage the plot but also turn readers against the very character we love. Say it isn’t so! But help is here. Let’s review ways to tame your character without making them any less cool.
What Do You Mean My Character Is Candied?
Storytellers who love their characters can become tempted to glorify those favorites. At Mythcreants, we call these glorifying story elements “candy.” Candy for a character commonly includes:
- Lots of powerful skills and abilities
- Admiration and compliments from other characters
- Unique and colorful physical traits like blue hair or glowing eyes
- Easy success whenever the character faces challenges
- Being chosen or otherwise special
- Emphasis on personal backstory
- Being proven right whenever there’s a disagreement
These things can be great in moderation; don’t panic just because your character has blue hair and is chosen. But if your character has at least three of these and they don’t have many flaws or weaknesses, that’s a big sign of a candy overdose.
Candied characters don’t always ruin stories. Foremost, candy is usually good for villains. If you’re worried you might love your villain too much, ask yourself if you’re allowing your hero to fully defeat them at the end. If instead of being arrested, your villain says their catch phrase and leaps off into the night to make mischief elsewhere, then you could have a problem. If you aren’t willing to see them brought down, rework the story so they’re your main character, then follow these directions.
Over-candied main characters can be popular with audiences who identify with them. The problem is that this is a pretty narrow audience, and the character will be less likable to everyone else. But if your main character is a ten-year-old girl and you’re writing a middle-grade story for girls, lots of candy might work okay. Kids generally like more candy than adults.
The worst-case scenario is when a side character gets too much candy. In that case, they’re likely to steal the spotlight from the main character and make the audience actively resent them. If you’re in this unfortunate position, consider whether you’d be happier with them as your main character. You’ll still need to avoid candying them to excess, but they’ll be less of a liability.
Feed Your Character Mild Spinach
Spinach is the opposite of candy. It cultivates audience sympathy and makes it feel like a character deserves rewards instead of like they deserve to have their ego popped. That means it’s the best way to fix the likability problems that come with too much candy. Spinach for a character commonly includes:
- Difficulty mastering important skills
- Disdain and condescension from other characters
- Unattractive physical traits
- Failure and mistakes when trying to solve conflicts
- Being insignificant and unremarkable
- Being proven wrong
If this list is making you cringe, there’s a couple tricks you should know. First, any type of spinach can help balance any type of candy. If your character has cool eyes, you don’t need to add an unattractive physical trait. Instead you can have them struggle to master a new spell.
Second, what matters is what is depicted in your story, not the inherent traits of your character. If you really want your character to be flawless, that might actually be okay as long as you prevent them from showing off. I’ve seen main characters get away with a lot of candy because they were put in social situations that delivered spinach.
However, don’t just throw in some random haters. You need a rock-solid reason why even reasonable people are underestimating your character. For instance, in The Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot is a security construct created by a corporation. Since security constructs are often used for violence, it’s understandable that other characters are often afraid of it.
Similarly, Hei from the first season of Darker Than Black is a badass agent who pretends to be the friendly and humble civilian Li. In every fight, he appears to be out of his depth, but he’s somehow never injured. Then he meets other characters in the show who only know him as Li. Knowing this likable undercover identity is fake doesn’t keep viewers from growing attached to him.
When using this tactic, it’s natural that you’ll want to let them just be cool later. If this is your main character and you save it for the last third of the story, that’s probably okay. People can enjoy candy for a main character as long as they become attached to the character first. If it’s a side character, you’ll need to tone it down. This isn’t their story, and your audience will resent it if they take over.
Defuse Insufferable Behavior
A common trait among candied characters is a tendency to break rules, subvert the system, make mischief, and generally show other people up. This plays to a power fantasy that people who identify with the character may like. Who doesn’t wanna be a cool rebel?
Being a rebel in and of itself isn’t bad. The problem is that this disregard for rules and convention is often aimed squarely at the rest of Team Good. Other heroes usually represent the typical good guys in a story, and as storytellers, subverting other stories just because we can is hard to resist.
But Team Good is, obviously, good. In most cases they’re nice people who are just trying to save the day. That means when a candied character refuses to listen to them, plays tricks on them, and makes trouble for them, that character will come across as a selfish jerk. That’s the fast road to a hated character.
If you like the mischievous rebel role for your beloved character, the easiest fix is simply to aim their antics at people who deserve it. In particular, an authority figure of lawful evil alignment works well with these types of characters. Maybe your character has to work for an evil corporation to get by, so they use mischief to make it look like they’re doing their job while actually sabotaging the company’s efforts. Corrupt bureaucrats, malicious monarchs, or anyone who’s both arrogant and powerful will do nicely.
Ensure Your Protagonist Struggles
Even if your over-candied character is likable, they can wreak havoc on a story by destroying all the tension. Tension is an essential source of entertainment, and every story should have it to some degree. For tension to operate, the audience has to be concerned that something bad could happen. If your character is so badass that they wipe the floor with every enemy, then the audience has nothing to be concerned about. Instead, they’ll probably get bored.
No matter how badass your main character is, ensure they have challenges worthy of them. Give them an evil twin if you have to. The more your protagonist struggles, the more exciting the conflict will be.
If you have a side character who solves problems with ease, then you have even more trouble on your hands. Your main character, whoever they are, has to not only struggle to solve problems but also determine the outcome of most conflicts through their success or failure. It’s hard to arrange that when they have a super powerful friend hanging out with them.
On the plus side, powerful side characters don’t have to be around all the time. They can go off on an important side mission, stay home to protect others while the main character is on a mission, or become sick or injured. In large battles, a powerful side character might hold off the main force while the main character does something that’s technically smaller but has more strategic importance.
Remove Candied Contrivances
Over-candied characters often come with awkward scenes and moments that have no purpose other than glorifying them. To you, they may be fun, but to your audience, they’re likely to feel contrived and indulgent. Again, candy is fun in moderation. You’re looking for something that feels out of place, out of character, or is emphasized beyond what it should be.
One of the most common contrivances for candied characters is backstory reveals. This means revealing what cool or dramatic things your character has done in the past, such as previously working for the enemy, the origin of their blood feud with their rival, or that they are also the infamous thief who stole the crown jewels. This will stand out because backstory reveals are usually just a waste of words. Here’s when they actually work:
- Your main character has some kind of amnesia, and the reveal has important information about their past that they didn’t know about.
- Your main character learns something about a side character’s past that impacts the plot dramatically and immediately, such as a reveal that the side character is a villain in disguise.
If your reveal doesn’t qualify as either of these, take it out.
Praise by other characters is another big one. People just don’t go around flattering each other all that often, so if you get several characters together just to talk about how awesome someone is, that won’t feel natural.
Last, if your candied character runs away, is injured, gets sick, dies, or appears to die and then all the other characters are super sad about it, you’re just delivering praise via another method. These events usually start either when another member of Team Good causes misfortune to the candied character or when the candied character makes a heroic stand to save everyone. If you have something like this, tone it down and distribute candy and spinach more evenly among Team Good.
When you’re having great fun with a character, it’s difficult to imagine how other people might see them. But you can still listen to what beta readers think of your characters and recognize common patterns. Once you’ve spotted one, fixing a candied character isn’t hard, just heartrending.
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Untamed/MDZS balances the candy for its protagonist(s) pretty well. The hero gets a LOT of candy in his first life and all of that is also his spinach, coming back to bite him in the ass until he dies alone. He’s intelligent and knows it? Now he thinks he can invent necromancy without being corrupted by it. He’s a fun party guy, always cracking witty jokes with 7 poetry references? He keeps doing that when he’s falling apart from PTSD so no one can help him. He pushes back against corrupt authority and is unwilling to compromise on his ideals? Now he has no allies because he has a reputation for being a provocateur, and who’s to say he’s actually standing for justice this time instead of acting out? He will sacrifice everything he has to save others? Now he has nothing left with which to save anyone. His grandmother is a powerful immortal deus ex machina? That also does not end well for him.
His love interest gets a lot of the same treatment. He (the love interest) is a stoic badass who never smiles or speaks more than necessary? The protagonist thinks the love interest hates him and therefore refuses his help. He’s renowned for being a lightbringer, emblem of justice? Everyone expects him to “do the right thing” and align himself against the protagonist.
We can certainly have our heroes succeed against an enemy force, but then they have to flee because re-enforcements have made the enemy force too strong. They hadn’t anticipated that in their planning.
“don’t panic just because your character has blue hair and is chosen.”
Yes, panic. Then ask yourself “What do I NEED the chosen one stuff for? Is it because my protagonist is so bland and useless that he could never inspire a rebellion/fight the dark lord/go to magic school unless he stepped into this pre-built role? What does the chosen one stuff add to my story? Does knowing the protagonist can’t lose somehow make the story better?
As the article points out, tension is essential, and if the character is the chosen one who’s destined to destroy the volcano god and be the bestest king evar, there is none.
Unless you twist the story in the end and it turns out that they weren’t the chosen one.
This could be fun. I can see a story where most of the story is about the plucky band of heroes helping the Chosen One, only to have the CO killed off as part of the climax. The Big Reveal would be that they just needed someone expendable to act as a CO, giving the Big Bad something to focus on instead of the real threat. It’d be tricky to pull off, but it would be amazing if someone did it!
The trick is going to be setting it up so that 1) upon first reading it seems like it’s coming out of left field, and 2) once it happens you notice all the things in the story that make it clear that this was always the plan. Tolkien sort of did this with Aragorn, though Tolkien never emphasized that aspect of the story.
I tried something similar to this in a D&D game. I was a vampire, and the rest of the party didn’t know it. The idea was that I’d be revealed after the alleged boss fight. I did some things that annoyed the party, like setting off a major damage spell with flagrant disregard for friendly fire and being more than happy to send party members to their deaths to disarm traps. They were pretty upset with me–until the DM and I explained what the plan was. Unfortunately the session ended before we could get to the big reveal, and we REALLY needed to smooth some ruffled feathers. (Normally I am obsessive about not hurting my party, so folks were confused.)
That’s why prophecies must be vague and prone to be interpreted in a number of ways. Just take Delphi’s oracle as an example.
Maybe your chosen one is the only one who has a chance to defeat the Dark Lord, but the prophecy doesn’t specify that they will succeed. Or they could have one special ability that makes them the only one able to confront the Dark Lord (like the only one to be able to enter the Dark Lord’s domain), but doesn’t help them in the battle after that. That may still be too much candy, but it doesn’t destroy tension.
Chosen ones are so weird. Looking at how prophecies worked in cultures with actual divinatory traditions (Classical Greece especially, Scandinavia to an extent), prophecy never reveals anything good, and anyone marked by it as ‘special’ (Paris or Oedipus) is marked as a danger to society.
Honestly, it’s not hard to see why the chosen one trope is such a staple. Most teenagers, college kids, or everymen (three popular protagonist demographics) won’t have the skills to defeat the dark lord if experienced military generals can’t do that already. A little leg-up can help.
(And even stories that start with experienced protagonists frequently resort to contrived tropes to justify why only the hero can beat the villain. That’s how we get tropes like incompetent authorities and hypercompetent Hollywood heroes.)
Don’t get me wrong, authors should still avoid/minimize the chosen one trope as much as necessary due to how ultra-cliché it is. But IMO, one should understand a cliché before breaking it. That’s why stories that subvert or deconstruct the chosen one trope are pretty popular.
Not all chosen one stories are bad, for example, one series I read portrayed the prophecy in question as vague with multiple ways to interpret with the smart characters advising the “chosen one” on how to phrase things so that the prophecy was always fulfilled. The prophet in question often was portrayed as a smart man who was more using his position to advise. If x, y, or z happen you should probably do A B and C and things should be okay but if you are stupid and don’t do any of those things bad things will happen, obviously.
I am a bit confused what you mean by ‘emphasis on personal backstory’ don’t all main characters have this just by being in the story? Even side characters can have an important backstory and thus why they are in the plot at all.
I also think candied side characters can play a good role by having less social power, and not having events be about them. Jeeves comes to mind, as does Sam Weller, who while almost always being correct, have limited means to make their points rather than being a safety net for the main character when things go south.
Not all main characters have backstory of any particular importance. This is relative, so the more history a character has and the more it’s emphasized, particularly if this emphasis is not necessary for the story at hand, the more likely it’s a sign of candy. But like the other items on the list, this is simply one sign that a character could be candied, it does not guarantee candy.
The section on mild spinach immediately brought to mind Eragon in Eldest for me as an example of that exact tactic not working. Or maybe more accurately, of faking that tactic. In Eldest, Eragon ticks practically every item on that list, but it still doesn’t make him any more sympathetic, because it’s all highly contrived and backhanded.
The main plot of Eldest is a training arc for Eragon, because the series didn’t stop sticking plot point for plot point to the original Star Wars trilogy until the third book became a string of barely-connected side quest turn ins, so book two meant he had to go meet Yoda. Eragon spends most of it struggling to make progress in his studies, being routinely bested in the sparring ring, looked down upon by a rival, surrounded by people more powerful and able than him, and disfigured by a scar he got at the end of the first book.
HOWEVER.
The narration makes it abundantly clear that the only reason Eragon is struggling with any of this is because the scar is crippling him with debilitating, angst-able agony. He would totally be beating his rival if the scar weren’t stopping him, and said rival is an over the top sneering bully caricature and the only person who expresses any negativity toward Eragon at all. All the people around him are only better than him because they’re elves, who are an entire race whose diet consists solely of narrative candy, and praise his scar because he got it killing a powerful villain.
All of these problems are then instantly resolved when his scar is magically healed, revealing that they were never spinach in the first place. They were just sour candy.
I remember being especially incensed about this resolution because up until then Paolini seemed to be developing a clear growth arc for Eragon. The scar’s pain only ever flared up when Eragon was experiencing strong anger or aggression and was otherwise essentially fine. This presented the solution that Eragon would need to learn to let go of his anger and fight with peace in his heart. A little obvious, perhaps, but a perfectly serviceable arc and bit of character growth.
Instead, a magic dragon ghost just heals him and gives him a power boost and makeover for good measure. No growth, no development, just an entire candy bowl poured down his throat at once that allows him to go whup his rival’s butt, convert him and all the other candy elves into his fanclub, master his teacher’s super magic, and go defeat an entire army by himself in the span of, like, the last sixth of the book.
So I guess the take away from all this is that sour candy is still candy.
>sour candy
That’s a great phrase
If that’s not a part of the Mythcreants Lexicon, it should be
Yeah, we’ve previously called it “fake spinach” (https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-characters-with-fake-spinach/) but I like “sour candy” too.
This is a very good point. Eragon never had to actually work to overcome his struggles, and is in fact the Designated Hero for the entire series, no matter the horrible things he does, so any struggles just seem contrived to actually provide a modicum of plot for the book.
Could you write an article about well-written characters/character development? regardless of if book or tv show? I would like to read about your faves and what you think made it so good :)
Or have you already done it?
I’ve got this one: https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-surprisingly-successful-characters-and-why-they-work/
That’s for impressive characters. There are lots of characters that work well but don’t stand out in the way these do. Let me know if there’s something more specific you’d like to see.
I started this article thinking about a character I’ve really liked writing, and thought “No, she’s not that candied, right?” And then that list completely called out her blue hair lol. I mean, she’s proven wrong a lot of times, so I think she’s not the WORST, but… this article was great, thanks so much for it!