Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish and is now run by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week she will post a new Top Ten list . Everyone is welcome to join.
This week's topic is:
Top 10 Things that Make me Love a Character!
1. Snarky: I LOVE when characters are snarky! They're some of my favorite characters.
2. Funny: Those that are are snarky are usually also funny, but not always, so I wanted to go ahead and add this one too.
3. Authenticity: I love it when it's clear a character is being themselves, and not what everyone wants them to be.
4. Humility: I like when characters know they're important, but still not full of themselves. It works if they know they're important, but when speaking of themselves, they still try to downplay their involvement. (Rick Riordan imprint I'm looking at you!)
5. Optimism: As someone who has once battled depression, it gets hard to continuously read books about characters who are continuously looking at the sad side of everything. It makes me want to regress to that spot as well and I can't afford to do that.
6.Empathy: I HATE characters that do things and have no regards for anyone else or their feelings. It makes me want to stop reading.
7. Hard-working: My mommy always told me if you can get it easily, it's probably not worth it. So any character that can get whatever they want, whenever they want, makes me not want to read it.
8. Mature (For their age group/story): I know this is rich coming from someone who reads mostly YA and MG, so that's why I said I wanted to make sure I explained. I don't mind if they're not mature, but those that aren't just aren't for me. Like I have YET to read a Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dork Diaries, or Captain Underpants book, but they are really popular. I recommend them to those that like funny, but they're not for me.
9. Brave: I like when characters face things that scare them originally, but they fight through their fear and then take care of business. It makes a difference in the people that read them too. I help to moderate online reviews during our summer reading program for the library system I work for, and one quote that kept coming up in a lot of the reviews from kids was: "they helped me see that not everything is scary and I can do scary things too!" That stuck with me.
10. Open-Minded: And lastly, I read a lot of differnt genres and a lotof YA, so one thing I've learned is all characters must be open-minded. If someone has a different idea than you, it's ok to know that they might have a good idea too and they should be taken into consideration. Again, it teaches the readers to be the same way as well.
What about you?
Do you like any of these characteristics for the characters you read about?
Anything you think I left off my list?
Let me know in the comments!