unrelatable
by uzwi
Losers. Saps. People who don’t want anything much. Frail people, fragile people. Motiveless people (unless they’re evil). Broken people. People who won’t heal. People who can’t heal. Passive people. Disordered people. People who can’t stop themselves being bullied. People whose bullies don’t come to harm in the final chapter. People whose weaknesses of character aren’t balanced by corresponding opposite characteristics, or who are not redeemed by acceptable chains of events. Unacceptable chains of events. People who are too much this or that. People who won’t reason. People who are too rational. People whose puzzlement never lifts. People whose actions “don’t teach us anything about ourselves”. People I can’t identify with. People who walk away from their own narrative. People who are swept away by events (unless they’re subsidiary characters). Events that are too like reality to be interesting. Events that are too like reality to be true. Events that don’t seem familiar enough, even though they are set in a galaxy far away or in the very far future or in a civilisation of alien beings who look like plastic ducks but are in reality vortices of pure vacuum energy with goals utterly dissimilar to your own. Behaviour you really can’t understand. Sequences that don’t complete. Ideas that don’t ring true. Lack of verisimilitude. Lack of telos (see “dissimilar to your own”). Lack of common sense. Lack of a sense that this story is our story. Genuinely unpredictable events. Genuinely meaningless events. Anything obviously unacceptable that’s also funny. The obviously unacceptable insufficiently critiqued by the text. Directionlessness. Langour. The quality of being a rabbit in a headlight. The quality of being in a Tom Waits song. People the trajectory of whose lives is that of a series of Levy Flights cut short by unpredictable death. People who find the time to be alienated. People who find the time to be miserable. People who find the time to find time. People for whose idle hands the Devil found work. People who clearly haven’t got lives to live & families to bring up. People who should know better. People whose motives aren’t clear. People who should know everything the reader knows or they are clearly too stupid to live. People who aren’t sensible enough to act rationally in a deteriorating situation as if somehow they can’t see themselves doing the wrong thing. People whose ugliness is not within reasonable bounds or which has no hidden glamour. People whose anxiety is not within reasonable bounds or which has no hidden glamour. Doubt which has no hidden glamour. Doubt which has no outcome. A pistol which appears in act one but remains unfired at the end of act three. Bad people who aren’t on your side. People who are good one minute bad the next. Anything that might offend the reader’s politics. Anything that might offend the diametrically opposed politics of another reader. Irredeemable behaviour. Irredeemable circumstances. Unfathomable circumstances. Unfixable disasters. The actual end of the world, with no survivors. People who aren’t feisty. People who don’t know how to swim against the tide. People who never learn to kick ass. People who stay poor without a sick note from the narrative. People who stay poor without a sick note from the reader. People whose diseases aren’t, after all, going to be cured. People who don’t make a heroic effort. People who stay unhappy. People who don’t act as if they’re the centre of the universe.
This ran originally as “The List”, in 2011; but I think the category title, “things to avoid in popular fiction”, is more appropriate. Play “Chimes of Freedom” while reading. Or just read Jean Genet instead. Here at the Ambiente Hotel our promise to you the customer is “Never Knowingly Relatable”.
the m john harrison blog 
I like this. Thank you.
Will.
Hi Will, ta.
I loved The Absent Therapist. It shows just what can be done. So thank you, too.
A true inclusivity. Love it. A fiction that tells you it’s alright to feel on the outside of something. Which is the only place worth being inside.
It’s bizarre that these are ‘unrelatable,’ since in my experience most consumers of popular fiction (myself firmly included) slot quite smoothly into many of these descriptions. Perhaps the problem is that they are all too relatable.
Not so much unrelatable as unmarketable. People talk as if fiction was thing in itself, mostly it’s longform scrips for serotonin available in a variety of fonts.