Unlikeable

I'm getting a little teensy, tiny complex. It's Shana, the heroine from Serengeti Storm. People keep throwing around the phrase 'unlikeable' when they are talking about her. Now, at first, I was all worried about that. They hate my book! They will never read another book of mine! I have sabotaged my entire career! Oh noes!

Then, after a cathartic brownie nosh, I got to thinking...

I like Shana. I like her a lot. I respect her strength and determination. So how do you define likeable? I am able to like her... but I'm the minority, apparently. So is it majority rule? Or is likeability defined by societal virtues of womanhood - essentially that she be sweet and nurturing and kind and considerate... (and a doormat)... and barefoot and pregnant and... Okay, I'll just stop right there before I devolve into a feminist rant.

Shana has virtues... but they aren't typically feminine virtues. She's physically strong. She's mentally tough. She's independent, ambitious and driven. She is, above all else, a survivor. But none of those things are "nice girl" things. So does that make her unlikeable?

If you read Serengeti Storm and totally hated Shana, I'd be curious as to what about her particularly set you off. Yes, she's nasty to Caleb, but he has done his fair share of hurting her too.

Is gender the double standard? What if Shana were a guy? Would he be unlikeable or would he just be a "bad boy" with his sexified crankiness? (There's a thread at Dear Author talking about the male/female double standard in romance if you're interested.)

Also, I'm not entirely sure that I would be considered a "likeable" heroine if someone made me a character in a romance novel. I don't value "nice" above "competent", and sometimes that comes across as "bitchy". I do not have the milk of human kindness flowing in my veins. If anything, my veins have an excess of vitriol. Strength of character is more important to me than likeability and I have a notoriously flexible moral compass... which I guess is only a virtue in a heroine if she is bending the rules to save babies or puppies. Am I unlikeable? Or do we have different rules for real people & romance heroines? Must fictional heroines be paragons of virtue we seek to emulate?

My goal in creating Shana was to make her believable and realistic, perhaps even sympathetic, but not a paragon of anything. I knew her story was a little more intense than the first shifter novella, but I never realized I was going to be bombarded by comments with that one word haunting them all - unlikeable. (Perhaps it was stupid of me not to realize, but it's the truth.)

See, the heroines I find unlikeable are the ones who are poorly written. The ones who are ridiculously unrealistic. Or (and this is my biggest pet peeve) when a heroine is described one way by everyone who talks about her, but behaves a totally different way. Like when everyone talks about what a brilliant Rhodes scholar she is, but she can't even perform basic deductive reasoning. That bugs me.

I wasn't bothered when one reviewer called Lucy from The Ghost Shrink, the Accidental Gigolo & the Poltergeist Accountant "too stupid to live", because, well, she acts emotionally and impetuously. She's a reactive person and sometimes that results in a belated "what the frick were you thinking?" Yep, there are moments of ripe stupidity from her in that book, but honestly many of us have moments of ripe stupidity. (Which has caused Helen Kay Dimon to ask that the TSTL tag be put on notice.)

Maybe I'm only reacting to the term "unlikeable" because I keep seeing it popping up in conversations about romance novels lately. There's a thread here at Dear Author about unlikeable heroines and the readers who love them - but I honestly didn't find any of the heroines painted with the "unlikeable" brush in that article to actually be unlikeable. Because I liked them all. I would like us to stop equating strong, complex, difficult women with unlikeability. Could we do that please?

So tell me, how essential is heroine likeability to you? Would you rather have a heroine in a book be realistic or a paragon of womanly virtue? What virtues do you value in people? Are they different than the virtues you value in characters?