The Suckrificial Lamb

Two weeks ago, I posted about my undying hatred for Ted Mosby, the main character/narrator of How I Met Your Mother. While I stand by every word of that post, I feel that a certain amount of clarification needs to be made: yes, he's pretentious and insufferable and I want to kill him with fire every time he scrunches up his mouth in that fucking smug smile he has, but his overwhelming shittiness actually serves a greater purpose:

Ted Mosby is HIMYM's Suckrificial Lamb.

For those of you who don't know what that term means (possibly because I just made it up), let me explain. If you've ever read "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, you should be familiar with the concept of human sacrifice as a means to secure the greater good of the community. Long story short, some poor bitch gets stoned to death (spoiler alert) so the town can have a good harvest, and then everyone who's still alive does a little happy dance. (See also: The Wicker Man.) In short, one person's sacrifice – whether willing or not – can ensure the stability of a town and its livelihood, though some people claim that killing Nicolas Cage won't bring back your goddamn honey.

In any case, the same principle can apply to fiction. Every story needs to have a certain amount of Suck, which is another highly technical term I just made up to refer to all the negative aspects of said story. Suck isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – it can be used to create character flaws and conflict and generally make the story more interesting, but it can also manifest itself in bad writing and other things which will alienate your audience. So, let's say (for the sake of argument) that you're writing a story, and you've just created a bunch of characters who are all just a little too awesome. There are three possible courses of action:

Option 1: Do nothing. Everyone stays improbably awesome and nothing bad ever happens to them. This is problematic because it's completely unbelievable and also boring as hell. The work drowns in Unintentional Suck.

Option 2: Distribute some Intentional Suck evenly between the cast members. This can result in more human, well-rounded characters, but it's difficult to do really well: not enough Suck and you have the same problem as Option 1; too much Suck and none of your characters are likeable. Tread carefully.

Option 3: Dump the majority of your Intentional Suck on one or two characters and let everyone else stay awesome. The character in question will be almost universally hated, but the others will seem that much better by comparison. Congratulations, you've just created a Suckrificial Lamb!

These types of characters are easily identifiable if you listen for the following conversational pattern: “I really enjoy [movie/show/book X], but [character Y] can [go to hell / eat a bag of dicks / get sodomized to death by rabid howler monkeys]. But everything else about it is great!”

A Brief Field Guide to Suckrificial Lambs

True Blood: Imagine everything bad that could happen to one person. Now imagine reacting to all that stuff in the worst possible way, usually by telling your friends and family to go fuck themselves. Throw in a drinking problem, an upper lip that never stops quivering, and a compulsion to bring up slavery every five seconds, and you've made yourself a heaping plate of Tara Thornton! Bon appetit. (Sookie and Bill tie for second place. I'm getting really sick of their shit.)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel: I'm more or less convinced that Joss Whedon emerged fully formed from his father's head, because the way that Dawn and Connor are written makes me think that he never actually experienced life as a teenager. Both shows are overflowing with drama of one sort or another, but sweet zombie Jesus those two take the cake for their whiny, obnoxious behavior.

Mad Men: In a show populated almost exclusively by awful human beings, Pete Campbell manages to be the one character that I can almost never bring myself to sympathize with. Interestingly enough, he's played by the same actor who played Connor on Angel. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: Hank motherfucking Pym. I mean, he's already loaded with Suck because one of his main powers is actually talking to ants, but then he decides that the only way to make himself less useful is to become a pacifist and actively sabotage his teammates while they're trying to apprehend some dangerous supervillains. Oh, and then he builds a super-intelligent robot who almost murders them all. Way to go, jackass.

You get the idea.

So, yeah. Ted Mosby... I hate you with a burning passion, but your suckrifice makes the rest of the How I Met Your Mother that much better. I would shake your hand, but I'm afraid your Suck might be contagious.