Not *All* My Favourite Fictional Characters Are Jerkwads

… but mostly, yeah, they still are.

Also, I need to define “jerkwad,” because by the rules of storytelling, pretty much every fictional character in whom I have an interest is a jerkwad to someone. There’s an antagonist, and no matter how good our hero or heroine, sometimes sh*t gets real, you know? Doing something that’s bad for someone you think deserves it for what you feel is a good reason isn’t being a jerkwad, it’s being normal.

But the fictional characters I like best tend to be jerkwads of a different sort.

When I say that Sherlock Holmes is a jerkwad, I mean that he needlessly and deliberately hurts the people he cares about. There are reasonable alternatives to his actions that he chose not to take (please, like Mycroft couldn’t have got a secure message to Watson after Reichenbach); he knows darn well his actions will or have caused pain (he can see Watson calling out for him from his hiding spot); and he really loves the person he hurts (“I am lost without my Boswell”). All these things make him a jerkwad of the highest calibre. Similarly…

JERKWAD: Tony Stark/Iron Man (as played by Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man and The Avengers — yeah, I’ve read a few of the comics, but honestly, it’s the movie version who intrigues me).

I suspect that what I like about Iron Man has a heckuva lot to do with Downey’s performance of the character, because as far as I can tell, the improvised one-liners, brilliant delivery, and casual deadpan snark are 100% RDJ.

Anyway, Tony Stark totally falls into my “jerkwad” category. He obviously cares about his friend Rhodes and his capable-yet-somehow-damsel-in-distress factotum Pepper Potts — in fact, as played in the movie, he obviously cares about all the people he meets, since at heart he’s just a big old softie, but he purposely does stuff that hurts them.

He insults them to their faces. He ignores their needs. He does things that hurt them psychologically, like keep secrets, work on his own, and stomp all over their feelings by being a hedonistic man-whore. He baits Bruce Banner about being the Hulk and fights with Thor. None of these things are necessary — Tony could just as easily have gotten what he wanted without crawling under everyone’s skin. But he does it because he can’t stand not being the centre of attention.

JERKWADS: Doctors Greg House, James Wilson, and Lisa Cuddy (of the television show House M.D.)

I have to list these together because what I actually care about is the relationship between the three of them, which is why I haven’t watched the show since the beginning of season seven and why the series finale has been barely a blip on my radar. (Except that now I can indulge in fanfic without worrying whether canon is going to make it obsolete. Ha ha ha!)

It’s pretty easy to see how House is a jerkwad — if you can’t, then you haven’t watched the show (or else you’ve watched it so much that you’re willing to argue that the occasional grand good gestures House does for Wilson and the others outweigh his total a$$holery all the rest of the time. And you’re wrong). But Cuddy? Wilson? you might well ask.

Well, yeah. Wilson is a pathological enabler. He knows what he’s doing is bad; he knows supporting House in the short term will hurt him in the long term (and/or hurt other people that Wilson cares about, like Cuddy). But he does it anyway. And he goes all “bros before hos” even though he and Cuddy are like, bff, and House is so totally in the wrong.

Meanwhile, Cuddy is written so spasmodically that it’s sometimes hard to pin down any of her character traits except having large breasts. But overall, she’s not above doing mean things to House (like spiteful pranks) or Wilson (like throwing his needs, well, under the bus to make House’s needs her priority) when the non-jerkwad thing to do would be to walk away or be there for her friend.

JERKWADS: Benedick and Beatrice (of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing)

Romeo and Juliet? Please. The iconic Elizabethan couple who capture my interest are these two bickerers who steal the show from Hero and Claudio. Both getting too far on in the years to see themselves as on the market, they succumb to each other’s charms only when their friends trick each into thinking the other has made the first move.

Until then, they do their best to wound each other with verbal sallies. They even immediately deny their love for one another as soon as they find out their friends’ deception. However, the speed with which they become a couple once they think they can do so without risking rejection suggests that they care about each other pretty deeply already, even if it’s “no more than reason.”

And come on, a dozen “Wherefore art thou Romeo”s can’t compare with the D’awwww factor of “Peace! I will stop your mouth.”

NON-JERKWAD and FORMER JERKWAD: Alicia Florrick and Kalinda Sharma (of the television show The Good Wife)

Alicia is a brilliantly written and brilliantly played character, and here’s how you know it: she’s more wronged than wronging, she has high moral standards that she consistently keeps (or consistently and honestly evaluates herself for not keeping), and one of her top priorities is not hurting other people who don’t deserve it. And yet, despite my masochistic tastes in fiction, I love her so much.

As my friend JB’s insight helped me to see, Alicia is maybe my only favourite character ever I’d want to be like — not in the sense of, oh, this woman gets to say bamf things and do cool stuff and I wanna be an awesome lawyer too. Yes, it’s fun to daydream about “being like” Superman or Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes or all those other characters whose self-insert appeal isn’t who they are but what they are. But I’d like to be like Alicia in real life not because it would be fun or because I want attention, but because she’s an admirable person who does her best to be responsible, competent, and good.

She’s calm and efficient. She’s got a sense of humour (for instance, “This is going in my copy of Eat, Pray, Love.”) but doesn’t let it get in the way of friendships, parenting, or getting the job done. She reverses her position when others’ arguments make her suspect she might be in the wrong (for instance, she reconsiders her response to her daughter about religion after their discussion in season 2). And what’s more, all of this is exciting to watch.

I classify Kalinda as a former jerkwad, because her backstory shows us that she hurt people she cared about through her emotionally careless actions, and even though she’d started to move away from that, she wasn’t able to step up and repent for it until she got caught. But the show also lets us see that she’s changed. She doesn’t want to be like that anymore, and she’s taking steps (as of the end of season two) to be a different woman, even if she’s irreparably messed up the relationship that inspired her to take this new approach.

I guess the question I have to ask myself at the end of this addendum to my catalogue of favourites is: do I like to tell stories about jerkwads as much as I like to read, hear, and watch them?

So far, I’d have to go with a tentative “yes”: I can’t think of a story of mine that doesn’t have at least one prominent jerkwad character, although it’s not always the main character, and sometimes the character in question is a jerkwad only from the perspective of my viewpoint protagonist.

But that’s because jerkwads are so much fun — they’re like setting your story in a steampunk-y version of the Victorian era. All the emotional plotlines suddenly becomes ten times more powerful because restrictions build tension, whether those restrictions are the misunderstood popular portrayals of nineteenth-century conservative mentalities or the psychological walls a character has built up for him- or herself. As reader and writer, I live for the catharsis of the Jericho moment when all those walls come tumbling down.