Your hero must be likable even if your hero has less than honorable intentions like the hero in “The Godfather.” We may not have to like your hero, but we do have to care about your hero.

In most movies, the hero is likable and pursuing a noble goal. Three ways to make your hero likable are:

* Make your hero unfairly treated
* Make your hero desire something we can all relate to
* Make your hero perform something unselfish

In “Avatar,” the hero is a parlayed soldier who gets teased for being in a wheelchair when he arrives on the alien planet. Right away, we can see he’s being unfairly treated. His goal is to earn enough money to get an operation that will give him back the use of his legs. Although we may not be paralyzed, we can all imagine what it might be like so we want to root for that goal. later on when the hero meets the aliens and starts trying to protect them do we see that he’s unselfish.

In “While You Were Sleeping,” the hero works in a tool booth and falls in love with a man she sees everyday at the train station. We can all relate to seeing someone we’d like to meet but don’t know how we ever will. The hero lives alone with her cat and wants love but has no future. Her neighbor keeps trying to set her p with his unappealing son, but even though she doesn’t want to go out with him, she’s still a nice person to him and everyone around her. In romantic comedies, we all want the love that the hero wants, so the hero in “While You Were Sleeping” is easy to root for.

Now look at the hero in “Cars,” the least critically acclaimed Pixar movie so far. Lightning McQueen starts out as an arrogant rookie race car so he’s not unfairly treated, he wants to win without listening to his pit crew, and he acts selfishly. Later, he changes and we can root for him, but initially, this hero is starting off on the wrong foot and making it hard for us to like him right away.

Now compare this to two other Pixar heroes in “Up” and “WALL-E.” In “Up, an old man has lost his wife, lives with his memories in a house that’s going to be condemned, and has no future. He’s clearly suffering from unfair treatment, has a goal of finding meaning in his life again, and acted unselfishly by trying to plan a vacation for his wife that she always wanted, but she dies before he can take her. The hero in “Up” is an underdog that we want to root for him.

In “WALL-E,” WALL-E is alone on a planet full of garbage. That by itself is unfair but he wants to find love, which we can relate to. He also treats his only friend, a cockroach, with friendship so he’s unselfish. Combine these three characteristics and WALL-E is an underdog hero we can root for.

Even Al Pacino in “The Godfather” starts off as a sympathetic character, but then we watch as he slowly sinks into becoming the godfather himself. Yet he doesn’t become evil right away but makes a small series of decisions designed to protect his family. Eventually, all of these decisions lead him to becoming the next godfather, but he actually did it out of love to save his family.

In your own story, make your hero likable. Watch a bad movie and it could be bad because the hero just wasn’t likable from the start. If you don’t get the audience to root for your hero, your story is facing an uphill climb right from the start. Make it easy on yourself. Crete an underdog hero being unfairly treated, desiring a goal we can all relate to, and acting unselfishly. That’s the type of hero people want to see win.