Elsewhere on the web, there was a discussion going on about whether readers of popular fiction would tolerate an unlikeable main character, and I stuck my oar in – well, a whole galley’s worth of oars actually. I thought I would try to summarize some of my opinions here:

• People sometimes have a tendency to conflate “unlikable” with “less than virtuous” when talking about main characters, usually authors who have just written a morally challenged protagonist and think that they’re doing something unique or clever. No. Lots and lots of protagonists are not candidates for canonization.
• On a related note, you can possibly get away with a co-protagonist being a much more unpleasant character than a solo protagonist. In the discussion I mentioned above, people referenced Edmund and Eustace from the Narnia books, and other people pointed out that those boys had pleasanter co-protagonists alongside them. I would go so far as to say that Lucy Pevensie is the actual main character of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and her brother Edmund is more of a redeemable antagonist.
• There is also an extremely stupid bit of received wisdom, responsible for about half the most annoying protagonists in modern film, that in order to leave a protagonist “room to grow” you have to start them off as fairly negative, unpleasant, and incompetent characters. Not true. Luke Skywalker, for instance, starts off as someone who is reasonably skillful at piloting, firearms, and maintaining machinery. He’s also a decent guy whose main character failing is a tendency to whine about his situation occasionally. It’s just that he keeps finding situations that require him to use all his decency and all his competences, and then dig deeper and find more of all of the above. I am not particularly a fan of Empire Strikes Back, but the bit in the wampa cave where Luke desperately reaches out with the Force towards his light saber with a hungry beast rampaging around beneath him is a good summary of what the character is dealing with throughout the original trilogy.
• On a related note, a charismatic actor can “sell” a personality who wouldn’t be particularly appealing in print. I will watch Emma adaptations all day long (except Clueless), but I find Emma Woodhouse in print kind of a chore. As a little girl, I found myself liking Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars and Khan Noonian Singh in Wrath of Khan, and being puzzled by that, since they were such Very Bad Men. Later on, I found out that Peter Cushing and Ricardo Montalban were considered much nicer men than average for their line of work, and that explained a lot, including the fact that I had zero interest in the tie-in novel versions of Tarkin and Khan.
• You may or may not be able to mentally “borrow” from such actors for your characters. The author of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing was a woman who enjoyed spaghetti westerns and said she’d always visualized Lee Van Cleef as the title character. (When it was filmed, Burt Reynolds got the lead role.) On the other hand, I went through a Music Man phase in my late thirties or early forties, and absolutely could not get a Robert Preston style character onto the page.
• Broadly speaking, readers and moviegoers tend to value competence above morality in lead characters. This is why Fanny Price, physically weak, socially incompetent but morally highly competent, and stuck in a story that doesn’t illustrate her Informed Attribute of loving nature and books very much, is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine. Meanwhile Elizabeth Bennet – physically energetic and socially adroit, but also blinkered and judgmental, even occasionally mean spirited – is Austen’s most popular heroine. This is why the first Iron Man and Dr. Strange movies are among my favorites in the MCU: the protagonists were extremely good at what they did before becoming superheroes, and it’s a joy to watch Tony building his suit IN A CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS, or Stephen demonstrate the same icy calm in extracting a bullet from a patient that we normally associate with a gunslinger putting a bullet into someone.
• …But they only value competence above morality as long as certain lines aren’t crossed. Serial killer Dexter (in the books and tv series) only kills people worse than he is. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, one of the main differences between the Good and the Bad is that the former doesn’t slap women around. Audie Murphy’s character in Ride a Crooked Trail may be a thief, but he won’t kill people unprovoked, and he has a soft spot for dogs and small children. Cliche? Yes, but the cliche got cliched for a reason.
• Raymond Chandler’s comment about how his idea of a hero “might seduce a Duchess but never deflower a shopgirl” obliquely addresses where the line is drawn in our culture. A likable protagonist is generally one who may have moral failings but does not abuse what power he has. If he flirts with women, he flirts with women who have the power and status to say no easily, and understand what they’re getting into, not women who are naive or vulnerable. If he steals, he steals from rich people with armed guards, he doesn’t shake down the unarmed poor and middle class people who would be easier marks. If he kills, he kills people who are more dangerous than he is, he doesn’t take a hatchet to an old woman…
• If he does abuse what power he has, like Raskolnikov axe-murdering an old woman, or Ebenezer Scrooge bullying everyone in his path, you will need to engage the reader’s pity by putting him in a position of extreme vulnerability, or even on a downward trajectory of vulnerability. A Christmas Carol does this in a very neat and tidy fashion, with each Spirit putting the emotional thumbscrews to the main character in a different and more intense way. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s sense of guilt and fear of punishment makes that trajectory of vulnerability a much longer and messier process in a longer, messier book, and maybe I shouldn’t even have cited it as an example.
• Most cultures have historically perceived most women as being comparatively powerless, with a few exceptional women who gain status from wealth, experience, power inherited from male family members, religious sources of power, or unusual skill in “mannish” feats. The idea of treating all women as socially equal to all men is a comparatively recent idea, I think perhaps two or three hundred years old. For this reason, the power dynamics for a morally challenged female protagonist are perceived a bit differently from the power dynamics for a similar male protagonist. Tactics that would be seen as underhanded or “cheating” coming from a male protagonist, and need a lot of justifying, are often more easily excused when a female protagonist uses them. Or at least this used to be the case; I feel like I see more people today holding female characters to the same standards as the male ones than I used to.

I don’t know that I have a strong conclusion at the end of all this logorrhea, except that most of what makes an otherwise dubious protagonist likable consists of the following qualities in varying proportions: competence, charisma, vulnerability, and a refusal to abuse what power they have. (I should see if the Germans have a word for that last one). And of course, interesting things happening to them, but without those you don’t really have a book.