Audience sympathy for a character is a structural effect of genre and class ideology

Evidence

One of the series’ subversive achievements is to draw attention to the way that our sympathy and identification with a character are a structural effect; one that is created both by the demands of genre and by the class structure of wider society. We initially sympathise with Walt in part because we remember other put-upon dads in popular TV series — such as Bryan Cranston’s character in Malcolm in the Middle — and also because the media constantly invite us to identify with the “hard-working” lower-middle-class family man. Yet Breaking Bad shows that the difference between the “good”, “ordinary” man and a ruthless criminal is the thinnest of lines. There but for the grace of social security and the NHS go we. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 703

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: why anti-hero identification is manufactured by intertextual memory and class positioning rather than by moral virtue in the writing.
• XREF: connects to: Judging novels by sympathy toward Muslims misses how form determines ideological effect — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 17; The same emotional tactic succeeds or fails depending on audience empathy — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 248; Genre judgments about class nature require historical specification (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments #expands (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 422
• Judging novels by sympathy toward Muslims misses how form determines ideological effect #corroborates (0.82) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 17
• Genre boundaries historically encoded audience social divisions #expands (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 627
• Genre form refracts rather than directly reflects political ideology #corroborates (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 321
• Disgust as social evaluation displaces sympathy and solidarity as responses to injustice #complicates (0.80) — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 746
• Genre judgments about class nature require historical specification #qualifies (0.78)
• Disgust blocks sympathy and functions as a device of subordination #complicates (0.78)
• The same emotional tactic succeeds or fails depending on audience empathy #qualifies (0.75) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 248
• Reducing typical characters to class allegories is itself an idealist move #contradicts (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 390
• Casting can steer audience sympathy against the script’s intent #qualifies (0.72) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 330