feeling sorry for someone...

[JX Valentine]

Having her respond by challenging the other girl is a better reaction, but I don't think I'd feel sorry for Ariana for doing it. It'd just be within her character. Not sure if this would be a clear enough example, but it'd be like feeling sorry for Ash because he's friendly or for Bill because he's intelligent. Ariana is proud, self-confident, and assertive, so she would respond by attempting to prove the other girl wrong.

Remember, another part of making readers feel sorry for a character is answering the question of why we should feel sorry for them. That's done by establishing a lot of lead-up to the moment where Ariana snaps or challenges someone, and it's why just focusing on one moment where a character faces a problem and lashes out doesn't always work. That's another reason why that fic where Palkia is hoping Cresselia gets hurt doesn't work, actually: because although we're told Cresselia bullied Palkia a lot, we're not really given a sense of how horrible life was for Palkia during that time. If we were given a lot of snippets and scenes in which Cresselia and others pushed Palkia around and in which Palkia couldn't respond, it'd be easier to feel sorry for Palkia because we'd get to see how frequently she got pushed around. That would have given us more time to develop emotions for the character and to root for them. Sure, responding to bullying by writing a lengthy essay about how you wish your bully will get hurt is still inappropriate, but at least we'd understand why it came about a little better if we were given plenty of scenes of the bullying taking place.

Tl;dr, I probably wouldn't feel sorry for Ariana if all I got was a scene of her challenging a girl after a few insults, even if those insults were pretty serious. It's seeing (through actual scenes) a ton of abuse leading up to that moment that would make me feel sorry for her and root for her.

 

[jireh the provider]

I always find a touch of insanity to work. If the character is driven to his/her actions by emotional issues or an outside force, the audience realizes that it doesn't have control of the situation. The character being dominated by his/her emotions is a great way to elicit pity.

A really simplistic example would be that Tom screams at Amy because she made a joke that gets under his skin. Amy didn't know it would hurt him, so the audience feels bad for her getting yelled at. Tom has a reason to be mad at her, because it is a weakness of his own, which also draws some pity depending on how deeply the joke hurt him.

Or, a married couple could get into a fight because of pressures from jobs, and both say really hurtful things. Readers will feel bad that their marriage is falling apart, even though they both yelled at each other.

There are lots of ways to evoke pity, you just have to find one that fits the situation.

I agree with this one. This is the importance of Character flaws. Using it on certain parts of the story you're making, you must let their flaws dominate their sense of control. Once the action is done, hen they realize their istake. A simple way of evoking sympathy or Epiphany

 

[はるひ]

A lot of the time, the reason why people get uncomfortable with the way you portray women isn't so much what they're doing but the how and why. For example, in this case, it's fine to have Ariana get upset, sure, but she's not the type of person who would cry about it. At the same time, having her punch Proton out would be unreasonable because not that many stable people, even when put under a lot of pressure, resort to that much physical violence.

At the same time, he called her a dumb ***** that was a liar.

Also if she didn't punch him, would that change things to the point where she's thinking clearly? She still yells at the two guys and demands respect etc. And would you kinda feel sorry for her like you want to give her a hug etc?

 

[Kaiserin]

At the same time, he called her a dumb ***** that was a liar.

Also if she didn't punch him, would that change things to the point where she's thinking clearly? She still yells at the two guys and demands respect etc. And would you kinda feel sorry for her like you want to give her a hug etc?

To some extent, yes, but the crying about it still takes away from what you're trying to achieve because it's not consistent with what someone like Ariana would do in the aftermath of someone insulting her. It still makes her seem overly-emotional and a little too addled by mood swings.

...Which brings me to one of my biggest questions concerning this. Why are you so concerned with the audience pitying her, which is what I keep reading this as? There's a lot of ways for people to connect with characters, and I just don't think pity for a character like her who is not meant to be especially pitiable (and probably wouldn't want to be!) is really far off the mark to begin with. Perhaps trying to depict her as somehow more just or in a frustrating situation the audience would want her to come out on top of would be better, but "feeling sorry" for her is just not something I'd want to do for a character like Ariana... not without a buttload of development and story behind it, anyway.

 

[はるひ]

.........but she didn't cry......

Anyway, I think what I was really trying to do is to get the reader to connect with her. Understand why she would do such a thing to someone. I mean if someone's intelligence was insulted like that, they would get upset. Well this is what I am trying to do.

 

[Skiyomi]

Look, I'm kinda coming into this out of nowhere since I haven't read the oneshot that you're talking about in this thread but I just wanted to comment on something in general here... in writing, well, we all know that part of the name of the game is getting your readers to feel some kind of emotion. But here's the thing... people in general don't like to be emotionally manipulated. So, as a reader, if I really feel like the writer is working hard to make me feel sad about a character (particularly if I don't think the situation warrants such dramatics) then I'll disconnect with the character even further.

If you want to show a conflict between Ariana and someone else and you want to show that she's in some way effected by this, you don't need to use broad strokes like having her break down or physically assault someone. In fact, she should probably be giving as good as she gets most of the time, at least from my perspective. If all she's dealing with for insults is generic stuff like "lying *****" and whatnot, then she should be able to easily craft witty comebacks to deal with the situation. If an insult from her opponent actually goes beyond basic name-calling and actually extends to something that she's sensitive about (because that's where the real payload is to the situation. Just having her react to garden-variety name-calling isn't particularly worthwhile) then you can show that it effects her in small ways. She narrows her eyebrows or absentmindedly clenches a fist or takes just a moment longer to give a scathing reply than she would normally have. Then the reader can see that the comments do hurt her. But we don't see her as any weaker because of it. We see that she can overcome.

And, I don't know, because I'm not going to claim to be an expert on Ariana's character or anything. But I generally find an "I demand respect!" line to be more in line with toadies who shouldn't necessarily get respect. So Ariana shouldn't ask for respect--she should do things that make her respected.

 

[JX Valentine]

At the same time, he called her a dumb ***** that was a liar.

Weeeellll...! Given Ariana's character, she'd probably take that as a compliment. Well, except the "dumb" part, but that might just prompt a sarcastic remark served with a smug grin (given that she's prone to sarcastic and smug comments in canon).

That being said, self-confident, headstrong women like Ariana really don't break down over mild name-calling from people with anger management issues -- which is what Ariana would be doing when Proton (the person with anger management issues in this case) calls her a lying ***** (the mild insult) -- unless there's a very, very good reason behind it. And by "very, very good reason," I mean things like "this happened no fewer than 100 times, coming from practically everyone she knew" or "the people she thought were her best friends are the ones who said it" or something along those lines. If it's just some jerk who's a self-proclaimed jerk (like Proton) calling her a lying *****, there's really no reason why she would take it seriously if she had any sense of self-confidence.

Also if she didn't punch him, would that change things to the point where she's thinking clearly?

Depends on how you do it. If she's yelling "omg you guys are so meeeean," then no. If she just makes a snide and well-thought-out comeback, then yes.

She still yells at the two guys and demands respect etc. And would you kinda feel sorry for her like you want to give her a hug etc?

Not... really? Like Skiyomi said, it's difficult to take a character seriously when they outright demand to be respected. There's a difference between commanding respect and demanding it. Commanding respect would mean that you just have a powerful and charismatic aura around you, so people just naturally respect you. Demanding respect means you actually tell people that they have to respect you. If you have a character working hard to be respected -- or even if the entire story is about how one should be respecting them -- then it's difficult to connect with that character because it sounds forced. If you have a character who's just naturally charismatic and just does things that would be considered awesome instead of proclaiming that they're awesome, then that's easier to take seriously.

That and if I see a character who's yelling at others and telling them off for not respecting her, that doesn't make me want to give them a hug. That just makes me write them off as being a bully themselves because they're using force to get people to do what they want them to do. So it ends up doing the exact opposite of making me want to hug them: it makes me dislike the character.

Other than that, I really would like to say a big "this" to Skiyomi's post. Even the first line sums up a lot of the issue here: people don't like to be forced to feel a certain way about a subject. So the only way to coax them into responding how you want them to respond is by showing instead of telling -- as in, creating a situation with an in-depth backstory (that's shown to us, not simply told to us briefly) that gives us a reason to think this character has ever been helpless, ostracized (that is, made into an outcast), or otherwise worthy of being pitied. It's not just a scene in the present that will make us pity a character; it's also what leads up to that moment.

 

[Pkmn Breeder Jack]

I've recently finished the most recent book in A Song of Ice and Fire. The series is outstanding, and one of the things I've learned from Martin's writing is that you can make a reader feel sorry for anyone, even the characters you absolutely hate. This is something Martin does often. Not to give anything away, but he writes his story in such a way that I found myself feeling sympathy for characters I wanted to die in a fire only chapters ago. So how does he do this?

First, characters have to be 3-D. If you take a plank of wood, stab it, beat it, disfigure it, yell terrible things at it, and then set it on fire, I'm not really going to care. But if you have a character with a past, hopes and dreams for the future, desires and needs, fears, behavioral quirks, etc, it's much easier for a reader to connect.

One way I found to evoke sympathy from a reader is to make things unfair. Fairness is not always objective, but most people have a sense of what someone deserves. If a young girl works for an hour building a pretty sand castle on the beach, but some kids with a soccer ball knock it over before the girl's mom can take a picture, then most people will feel sorry for the girl because it isn't fair that her work was destroyed. When things don't go the way they should, people get upset, and that's when they can feel sorry for someone.

Another way that works well with villains as well as heroes is punishment greater than the crime. A swift execution for a vicious murderer may seem like justice, but if that character is deprived of food and water, then has the skin of his fingers and toes flayed off, one could then feel sympathy. This goes back to fairness. It may seem fair to execute a criminal, but torture can evoke pity. Torture doesn't always have to be physical though. Humiliation, punishing innocents instead, and other things can be used to create the sense that things aren't fair.

That's my advice. Take a real character and deprive them of something they should be entitled to.