30 Days of Women: Day 3

[kirin85]

Day Three: A female character you hated but grew to love

Mrs Coulter (His Dark Materials)

There’s no image for this one because all I could find was pictures from the film (which I haven’t seen and don’t really want to, tbqh) and fanart.

[N.B. This contains spoilers]

There actually aren’t many fictional characters that I can honestly say I hate. There are two main reasons for this: 1) I usually can’t be bothered to hate people who don’t exist and 2) things like ship wars and character-bashing actually annoy me more than any fictional character I’ve encountered so far. When I do hate characters, it’s also usually for one of three reasons: 1) I consider him/her to be badly written, 2) s/he has character traits I find very annoying in real people or 3) s/he is basically a really horrible person. For the first two books of His Dark Materials, I considered Mrs Coulter to be a 3) with a dash of 2). I honestly couldn’t stand her. Characters who are both True Believers ™ and massive hypocrites usually really annoy me and the fact that she was okay with literally ripping children’s souls away from them – provided it wasn’t her own child, of course – didn’t do much to improve my opinion of her. Also, her daemon creeped me out for the first two books. No, really. Imagine that monkey just watching you all the time. Creepy. :( If you told me I’d end up really liking her by the end of The Amber Spyglass I’d have probably laughed at you.

So, you can probably guess what happened next. ;) Although there are some aspects of Mrs Coulter’s character development that I think could have been handled better, I was surprised by just how much I ended up liking her by the end of the series.  I think what made Mrs Coulter’s character work for me is that when I first heard she was Lyra’s mother it sounded bizarre because they seemed so different, yet by the end of the series… you could really see how alike they actually were in some respects. In some ways, she’s a lot like an older, darker version of Lyra: she’s got the same spunk, cleverness and reckless nature that Lyra has but she also has a twisted, sadistic streak that Lyra lacks and does things she would never even consider. She does genuinely love Lyra but because she’s so messed up she doesn’t always express said love in what you would call a healthy manner. Even when she finally does the right thing, you can’t be entirely sure that she does it for the “right” reasons – but that’s part of what makes her character so fascinating, imho.

Love her or loathe her, I think she’s definitely one of His Dark Materials’ most memorable characters.