No Sympathy in Literature.
By Author:
- Jacqueline Wilson's heroines usually have friends prone to this (and occasionally do it themselves). A blatant example is The Girls Series heroine, Ellie. Throughout the series, Ellie has to bail out best friends Nadine and Magda when they pick up the Idiot Ball and run with it... and in gratitude, they're quick to abandon Ellie in favor of whichever boy they're pursuing at the time. However, when Ellie tells them she's thinking about going to her boyfriend's dance rather than to a concert with Nadine and Magda, they get very catty and accuse her of abandoning them, despite the fact that Ellie shows far more regard for their feelings when they do for hers. Occasionally, this can verge on (non-)Comedic Sociopathy, as when they accuse Ellie of overreacting when she finds a drunken Magda lip-locked with Russell, Ellie's boyfriend, at a party.
- Mercedes Lackey's work often has a particular flavor of cynicism to it. People who don't "deserve" help are regarded without compassion, and what "deserve" even means can be obtuse. Some of her characters, even ones who can display great compassion, are utterly indifferent to great suffering.
- In The Obsidian Trilogy, Kellen is helping the elves with their Shadowed Elf problem and is mystified at the elves being upset about their "cousins" (the result of captured elves being crossbred with goblins) and giving them the same rites they use for themselves. Multiple characters try to explain to him, including one who asks how he'd feel if his sister was evil, and Kellen just blinks and says she wouldn't be evil. There's also the issue of Shadowed Elf children. Kellen, a Friend to All Children normally, slaughters toddlers with a clear conscience and thinks it's foolish that killing "young" upsets the Elves even more. The Enemy engineered the Shadowed Elves to cause maximum distress to the regular Elves and so to Kellen thinking of them as tragic or as people at all is playing into enemy hands.
- In the Elemental Masters book Jolene, a whole valley and company town has serious poisoning from lead and other materials brought up by the mine, which leads to hard painful lives for the residents, and a high child mortality. The villain tells the main character that she could clean the valley and save the people living in it. She's briefly tempted but decides not to. Also, her Love Interest carves tombstones for children killed by the pollution in the valley and she thinks it's beautiful and well-paying work.
- Heralds of Valdemar has Tarma and Kethry, who are compelled by the magic sword Need to rescue desperate women. As a child Kethry was married against her will to a terrible old man, which you'd think would sensitize her, but when encountering another young woman unhappily married to an older man Kethry just considers her a spoiled creature. There's also the incident in A Tale of Heroes where a rapist "hero" is in for the Standard Hero Reward. Tarma and Kethry, having seen the woman he's to be married to and thinking she's vain and enjoys attention, say they don't know which one to pity and that the two deserve each other.
- In Brightly Burning, a terrible bully goes too far on the wrong victim, who has a Traumatic Superpower Awakening and kills him. Herald Pol, who's the father of a teenager himself and a kind Parental Substitute, sees that the bully's family is in mourning and sneers. It's tasteless to grieve a bad child - just as many Mercedes Lackey stories reject Even Evil Has Loved Ones, evil people can't be loved.
- Vanyel Ashkevron has Chronic Hero Syndrome and is endlessly self sacrificing and concerned with ethics, putting himself last again and again, even risking himself for non-Valdemarans and saying he couldn't be himself if he didn't. When Karse has a revolution and starts a pogrom against mages, Vanyel basically says "Good, they'll leave us alone for a while" and wants refugee mages who flee into Valdemar hurried out of it - Valdemar, which is held up as the most idealistic country in the setting. The countermeasures to magic that he sets up are also quite harsh and indiscriminate, designed to foster paranoia and even madness in mages. Experiencing them, Vanyel actually says to himself that he could almost feel sorry for an innocent mage. Almost. Vanyel, you're supposed to be above Van Helsing Hate Crimes!
- In the Mage Winds books, Herald Elspeth begins to feel like she's been Locked Out of the Loop and her decisions are being made for her. (She's partly right, but only partly). She takes their current plan Off the Rails entirely so she can feel like she's in control, jeopardizing an important mission in the process. By contrast, in the Mage Storms books, she sees Grand Duke Tremane being manhandled by the plot, including being put under two major magical coercions without his informed consent, and she never once considers breaking those coercions, or even saying that they were wrong. In fact, she seems to think he deserves them.
- Subverted to an extent in The Black Swan, where Odile von Rothbart never questions her father's conviction that the "flock" deserve their imprisonment until she starts to spend more time with them. Even then, she still thinks she is 'one of the good ones' until her father makes it clear that he thinks of her as no better than them — something he can use and steal magic from, not his loyal assistant or even his blood relative.
By Title:
- Beka Cooper: In the second book, Beka is jumped by a couple of thugs and almost beaten to death in payback for arresting their brother. She wakes up to a very angry Goodwin who promptly tears her a new one for always going out the front door of her lodgings, while the healer tells her to lay off. Beka agrees with Goodwin, since Dogs have to be Properly Paranoid if they want to do their jobs and survive. Tunstall thumps her for it later, but this time Goodwin tells him to back off since Beka's learned well enough.
- In A Brother's Price, men are rare and kept protected. When Ren, Eldest Whistler, and Captain Tern along with a company of soldiers come across one who was kidnapped and raped, and then died after his tongue was cut out, Ren is horrified. Whistler covers his body with her coat, furious, and then feels an intense fearful need to get back home and protect her brother. The Captain and the soldiers are largely unmoved. When Ren demands to know how anyone could do something like this, if you got pregnant from the act what would you tell your daughter, Captain Tern shrugs and says it's like how you never describe a visit to the cribs. Ren concludes that a woman needs to have had a loving father to really be horrified by this.
- The Caliphate series ends the secondary storyline on this note as Germany is strong-armed into becoming a Islamic state after its democracy is hijacked by radicals. The narrative's protagonist Gabrielle attempts to flee to the USA alongside her daughter (who was disfigured by thugs for not wearing a veil). Unfortunately, the American consulate turns them down in part because America has turned into a Christian theocratic empire and has cut ties with the European Union prior to this event. To twist the knife, the ambassador also chides her for not taking action in the first place and its their own fault they are in this current situation, abandoning her and her daughter in a hell for women.
- The Cat Who... Series: In book #12 (The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal), Dennis Hough's wife feels none whatsoever when she learns her husband (whom she was planning on divorcing) just killed himself out of grief over her rejecting him, and tells the police officer on the phone that she wants nothing to do with him, alive or dead.
- Part of what makes Willy Wonka a Jerk with a Heart of Gold is that when people don't heed his instructions and warnings he is not particularly sympathetic to their resultant plights, especially if they are compromising his factory's operations as a result. In the original novel, Mrs. Gloop is horrified to find him laughing hysterically after her son Augustus gets sent who-knows-where via the factory's pipe system. Still, if it's possible to save these fools (who are just plain jerks most of the time), he will put a rescue plan into action.
- One Chicken Soup for the Soul entry had a high school sophomore go on a date with a popular older student, and, owing to her inexperience, she accidentally bit him when she kissed him, to which he said was okay. However, the next night, some of the boy's female classmates appeared outside of her home, yelling obscenities at her, egging the house and writing on her garage door, "You kiss like a horse", in chocolate syrup no less, and yes, it didn't wash off. Finally, after more bullying from her classmates including calling her a whore and harassing phone calls, she confronts the boy about why he caused all this, who then replied to her, "Look, I don't know what your problem is, but it doesn't have anything to do with me" and left her with her ruined reputation.
- In The Divine Comedy, Virgil appeals to his acquaintance with Cato's dead wife to convince Cato to let him into Purgatory. Problem is, since his wife was damned, Cato has forsaken his unconditional love for his wife in favor of unmovable apathy and Virgil's appeal has no effect on him. The only reason Virgil doesn't get sent back to Hell is because God wills his journey and Cato complies. In general, the souls in Purgatorio and especially Paradiso are mandated by God to have no sympathy for the damned.
- Bernard Mac Laverty's Father and Son has a pretty breathtaking example of this. A recently bereaved father struggles to care for his son after the mother of the family dies. Said son repays him by running away for two years until he gets ill and has to be rescued by the father, who nurses him back to health. Rather than being grateful for the rescue, and the subsequent sacrifices his father had to make for him, the stupid little twit cuts him no slack, whining constantly about his father's lack of masculinity (since it's now dad who does the housework), drawing violence and illegal activities into his dad's house, and throwing a fit whenever his dad asks him where he's going when he leaves the house. All right, the son was going through his own mucked-up grieving process, and the theme of the short story was the isolation of grief and Poor Communication Kills, but you may be left feeling that the son deserved everything he got, especially when you consider that the father constantly tries to bridge the gap between them.
- The Grasshopper and the Ants: During a hard winter, a grasshopper comes up to some ants and asks them to spare a little food, since he's starving. They ask why he didn't store any food during the summer, and he answers that he was so busy singing that he didn't have the time. Their response varies Depending on the Writer, but one ending has them refuse to share their food with the grasshopper, since "if he spent the summer singing, then he can spend the winter dancing."
- The Iron Teeth web serial is full of bandits, mages and goblins who won't ever care for anyone other than themselves unless there is a good reason behind it. Blacknail, the goblin protagonist, has a twisted logic where he would never admit that others can be good for him even if he was just saved by them.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- In A Clash of Kings, Arya Stark overhears Elmer Frey complain about how he won't get to marry a princess. Having watched the ongoing war subject the realm to Rape, Pillage, and Burn, and having relatively recently seen her father be executed, Arya says she hopes his princess dies. She's totally unaware that she is the princess in question, not that he knows it either.
- A much darker example in A Dance with Dragons, where upon learning that three members of House Frey, one of whom was a child, went missing, many in Winterfell pretty much ignore it, with Wyman Manderly even saying it is a blessing, since the boy won't grow up to be a Frey. Justified on two counts - the Freys have become a Hated by All family for breaking Sacred Hospitality, which to some groups demands the total extermination of their family. Additionally, Wyman is heavily implied to have had all three of the missing Freys killed in an ambush and baked into pies that he fed to everyone in Winterfell because one of his sons died when the Freys violated Guest Right.
- This tends to crop up amongst various characters in The Twilight Saga.
- One oft-cited example in Eclipse (2007) is when Jacob forcibly kisses Bella, upsetting her enough that she punches him and breaks her hand in the process. She comes home visibly angry and with her injured hand, only for Jacob and Charlie (who was previously characterized as a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad) to basically exchange high-fives. Charlie does later show more sympathy, but it's still less than one would think a guy would have for his assaulted daughter.
- Another example would be the treatment of Leah throughout the series. Her first transformation into a wolf accidentally causes the death of her father, her fiancé leaves her for her cousin; as a member of her former fiancé's pack, she has to constantly hear his thoughts about how happy he is with her, and her other cousin Jacob is constantly pining over a girl who he clearly has no chance with. Leah is understandably a bit bitter about all of this. The rest of the pack generally treat Leah as a horrible shrew for being upset about these things, up to and including treating her like an idiot for not being able to put Sam behind her, but coddling Jacob for acting even more pathetic over a girl who was never his girlfriend.
- The world of the Marquis de Sade's infamous novel Justine (and indeed, his other works) is one where human decency doesn't seem to even exist. The high point of this tale is Justine recounting how at the age of twelve, she asked for shelter in a man's house and was told that she could only stay if she would have sex with him. Rather than acting like any normal person would in this situation, the person that Justine is telling this to screams at her for being a "parasite" who wanted something for nothing. And it does not get better for the poor girl.
- Millennium Series: Lisbeth Salander subscribes to the "Pay Evil unto Evil" school of Black-and-White Morality and is such a Determinator that other characters call her the Terminator. As such, she's unsympathetic towards those who don't take matters into their own hands. In the first book, after the discovery that Harriet Vanger faked her own death to escape a life of sexual abuse from her Serial Killer father and brother, which left the latter free to keep killing women, Mikael is very sympathetic, while Lisbeth is totally contemptuous, since she would simply have dealt with her abusers herself. (And has.) Though she gets slightly better over the course of the books, Lisbeth generally remains intolerant of any weakness, and it takes a lot to get her to pity someone.
- Under Suspicion (Series):
- In The Cinderella Murder, Laurie thinks that while she empathises with Nicole, she cannot fully sympathise with her when Nicole reveals she fled from Los Angeles after learning her boyfriend Martin was a paedophile and being given death threats to keep her quiet. While Laurie understands she was a scared and manipulated eighteen-year-old girl, she thinks that she was still mature enough to make her own decisions, that she was warned repeatedly by her best friend that Martin was no good but insisted on sticking by him, and that she abandoned the young girl she caught Martin abusing and never even tried to do something about it.
- In You Don't Own Me, neither Robert or Cynthia Bell show sympathy for their daughter-in-law's mental health struggles; Kendra says they had "no empathy" for her even when Martinnote he's a different Martin from the one mentioned above was alive and their attitude certainly hasn't improved now they suspect her of killing Martin. Cynthia is completely dismissive of Kendra's claim she had post-partum depression, questioning how "anyone could be depressed with two such beautiful children" and that she coped just fine as a stay-at-home mother. As a doctor, Robert takes it a bit more seriously than his wife, but says while "a little depression is one thing" he thinks Kendra "was completely out-of-her mind". Despite this, neither of them tried to help their daughter-in-law get support, instead being contemptuous and judgemental. It's also worth noting Kendra was simultaneously dealing with her mother dying in an accident and her husband's emotional abuse, but the Bells don't take this into account; they outright deny their son mistreated Kendra.
- Most women in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time are afflicted with this. Main hero Rand al'Thor is their typical Butt-Monkey: He has a never-healing wound that causes him pain every waking moment, he is in danger of going mad from the tainted magic he uses (and in fact may have already done so), and, oh yeah, he has the responsibility of Saving the World. But most women around him for some reason feel that the most sensible way to help him save the world is by making his life as miserable as possible, and doing such things as criticizing him for being rude while trying to stop everyone else from being idiots and prepare for the last battle already. Being a total pussy, Rand just accepts it. Possibly because practically all his male friends and allies give him shit if he does something like, for example, not kowtowing immediately to Aes Sedai demands for the very good reason that they are a bunch of manipulative Jerkasses in the midst of their own civil war, so it isn't as if he should know which ones advice to follow even were he so inclined.
- Rand's friend Mat Cauthon gets it even worse: his distress at being repeatedly raped at knifepoint is laughed off by the female characters as his just desserts because he can be a bit of a womanizer. One who would never dream of forcing himself on a woman and who never continues to pursue one who gives him a firm "no." Deserves rape. Apparently.
