Who Do You Root For?

Baby Girl and I settle in at night together. She does her homework in my bed, and lately, I have been resting. Because I am too tired to even read most nights, I have been watching re-runs on TV. Having gone through every Law & Order under the sun, I expanded my re-run viewing to include NCIS and Bones one or two nights a week. And then, we will watch this show.

Here's the thing about Baby Girl and me. Over the years, we have fine-tuned the pecking order of who we will root for on shows like American Idol, Amazing Race, or So You Think You Can Dance. We don't watch other reality shows (like Survivor). We generally don't like to see people being mean and many unscripted shows have an elements of having to be unkind to win. So we don't watch those. But on the talent contest-type shows, the order of who we root for generally is: Latinos, gays, nice/sweet parent-child or sibling pairs (such as on something like Amazing Race). If any of our first two choices offered are MEAN, then we go down the list with various sub-pecking-order "rules" we have somehow devised until we settle for someone to root for. (Compelling back story? We might be persuaded!) If the Latino person happens to be Mexican or Mexican-American, that trumps all. Always.

Baby Girl LOVES George Lopez. He now has a show on at 11:00 p.m. and she is ecstatic. She loves George because his humor is similar to Baby Girl's father and stories he tells of how he grew up, poor and Mexican. Baby Girl's dad can even perfect a Mexican accent a la George Lopez. It's like me slipping into a New York accent.

Demon Baby is reminded every day that some day he will be the first Mexican-American president of the United States. Of course, right now he says he wants to be the Tooth Fairy. Which DOES sound like a good gig. But perhaps president is in his future. Basically, I suppose like many people, who my kids root for is about the people you identify with, or the people who remind you of your friends and family. It's about pride. Now that Baby Girl is in Mean Middle School (nature of middle school, I am afraid) . . . she hears SO MUCH racism. Even Oldest Son has gotten sensitive about it. So she likes seeing Mexican-Americans who do well and "represent" for her identity. And whether athletes or various movie stars like to hear it or not, how they are depicted in the media does, indeed, make an impression on kids. Baby Girl has other role models, to be sure. Lots of them. But nonetheless, we root for people based on how we identify with them.

So it is with books. Most of the time, depending on genre, you are being asked, early on, to identify with the hero or heroine and to ROOT for them. I don't know a writer alive who doesn't, at times, walk a tricky line. "How smart alecky or bitchy or difficult or flawed can I make this character before readers are turned off and stop caring? Or actively DISLIKE the main character?" A show of hands, please?

We seem willing to forgive a lot of flaws--characters who drink too much or can't sustain relationships or gamble or sleep with someone who's inherently bad for them--IF their sense of humor or their smarts or their ability to save the world means we overlook the flaws and root for them anyway.

And so much of this all is subjective. Some of us, like Baby Girl, will choose to root for a character based on our own bias, or our own identity, or our own belief system, etc. If there are two mom characters and one is hippy-dippy and disorganized? Guess which one I am rooting for. NOT the Barbie mom. The OTHER one. The slightly nutty mom. In the end, most of the times readers are just going to give you so many words or pages to ensure we're rooting for who we are supposed to be rooting for. And betrayals of who we root for . . . readers aren't likely to tolerate.

So who do YOU root for? What kind of main character? As you create your own characters, are you aware of that likability factor? Of making sure your reader roots for who they are supposed to root for? Thoughts?