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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Same for me. But 'boring/annoying' falls outside of my own definition of "caring". I'm perfectly capable of finding characters to be interesting and likable without caring a bit for their welfare or plight.
So like "connecting," I suspect we all might have different notions about what "caring about characters" entails. You, for instance, seem to use "care about" in a way that I would use "find interesting."
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Yes, there are some definitional problems here even with something apparently simple like "annoying". Is a character badly written and so annoying in an arguably objective (or at least in-the-real-world) sense, or is a character well written and so annoying in a subjective (fictional-world) sense. Feeling annoyance in the latter, I would argue, is an emotional response to the story.
I accept that recognising a character as likeable is not the same as caring whether they live or die in the book. But what about excitement? Do you merely recognise that the book might raise feelings of excitement in some people, or do you feel the excitement as a book reaches its climax? If the latter then you are responding emotionally to the story. In which case we're talking about different levels of emotional involvement rather than none ... which is what I expected really. Most of this sort of stuff is a spectrum rather than on vs off.