But again I feel you've missed my point. Compare: you see a bad soap opera on TV, with one particularly bad character who's ludicrously Mary Sue and is shoehorned into most of what happens. Reaction? Probably apathy, boredom, maybe mild irritation. Channel changed, move on, show forgotten and deleted from memory. This is not your reaction to Cait. Something has made it personal, emotional.
In a typical context, a story with an unlikable character inspires at worst mild annoyance, and more typically apathy. This is not your reaction to Cait. Something else is at play. As has been explained and agreed upon, that thing is your personal feelings about Savin, which are extended to Cait by association in combination with distaste for the character. I've already announced said this in a previous post, which has not been deleted.
Summary
There are other external contexts (story, world, game(s)) with strong associated emotional reactions that could contribute to a strong emotional reaction to a character.
Why the reaction?
I think everyone here has established pretty well what potential reasons there are for Cait being poorly implemented as a character. Based on these two posts, you feel that nobody has accurately identified why they have such a strong negative reaction to a poorly implemented character.
I will provide a class of the potential reasons for having an emotional reaction to a character: An already established emotional reaction towards an
external context that drives the response to the character.
This external context could be:
- The writer (as you have suggested).
- The story.
- The world.
- Any number of other things people could like or hate about the game CoC2 or its prequel. Could be collectively referred to as "the game".
Soap Opera Analogy
I don't think your soap opera analogy works here. Most people would just ignore a bad soap opera with a bad character, you are correct. The reason for that is that its a low cost investment situation. At worst, it would take most people a short amount of time to identify that the bad soap opera isn't worth their time. They have no expectation that it will be good, and for the short amount of time they already see a bad plot/bad character/whatever. It is easy to infer the watcher will not enjoy the rest of the show, and so little time is spent invested.
Modified Soap Opera Analogy
Now, consider a person who loves a soap opera. They are a long time watcher, they know what to expect and enjoy the format. A new character is introduced that is bad. They take up screen time, have boring interactions with the watcher's favorite characters, and they don't improve the show. Are they going to change the channel? Maybe, but the show has a proven track record of being interesting, so it is possible the show's writers will see where they went wrong and get back on track. In this case, past expectations could lead to further investment and experiencing more of the bad character, which then leads to resentment of the character. Additionally, if the watcher changes the channel, they have now not been given a positive experience they were expecting.
There is no requirement for the watcher to hate the show writer. It is even possible that the watcher could still like the show writer. They just hate the character. This character has now taken control of what used to be a positive experience. They are justified in having a negative emotional reaction, and it would be expected that at least some of the watchers who feel this way would voice their opinion on a forum about the soap opera.
Soap Opera Analogy Issues
So, the issue with your soap opera premise is that you assume the people who dislike Cait in a vocal way don't like the rest of the game, and that Cait's poor implementation doesn't bring down the positive experience the player has. I feel others have done well to explain that they do like parts of the game, and that they feel Cait inserts herself in many situations she shouldn't be in.
Extra
It is also possible for a person to completely hate CoC2 and have a negative reaction to it because CoC2 is not in their opinion a good sequel for CoC.
