In a workshop I attended recently, several people criticized an author’s work because they didn’t approve of the way the protagonist behaved. They thought the character was morally deficient.
First, this wasn’t good critiquing. It’s not the critiquer’s job to make moral judgements about another author’s characters. A novel full of paragons of virtue would be a snoozefest. Readers are bored by perfect characters, who are derided as “Mary Sues.”
In fact, author Lincoln Michel made the argument recently that protagonist-narrators should never be morally upright, perfect people. Instead they should be weird and strange, because perfection is boring.
He feels that contemporary American literature has seen a decrease in the weirdness, freakiness, and nastiness of characters, and that makes for boring reading.
Also, characters need arcs, and they can’t grow and change if they don’t have any flaws that need changing.
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
Thank you! I had never heard of ‘autofiction’ until this post, but it perfectly describes some of the fiction I hate the most – and it’s almost always in the first person pov: I did, I thought, I’m so cool….
The characters I dislike so intensely are almost always male, and they’re like a cross between James Bond and Han Solo [Star Wars]. The character is forever making inappropriate quips in the middle of a do-or-die scene, and it’s obvious that it’s the /author/ who sees himself in these terms. Or perhaps the MC is the character the author would like to be. Either way, the MC is obnoxious.
Now I have a name for it. 😦
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I confess to having a crush on more than one of my characters. 🙂 Hugs.
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Variety is the spice of life, Teagan? 😂🤣😂😻😻
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I like my characters. My protagonists aren’t weird, freaky, or nasty, but they have flaws and bad behaviors, and my heroine is on a growth path, coming to terms with her inner struggles.
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