What makes the character portrayal attractive?

The stereotypical character portrayal in media has existed for a very long time. The female was described with negative feminine characteristics and always waiting for the rescue. The minority character even hardly appeared on the screen in history. However, more and more counter-stereotype characters have recently appeared in the mainstream, for instance, the female superhero Captain Marvel (Boden & Fleck, 2019) or the colored character representations in the House of the Dragon (Sapochnik et al., 2022). The previous study showed that the audience engaged with the non-stereotypical characters more than the stereotypical characters (Żerebecki et al., 2022). However, the role of the diversity of character portrayal was not clear. Therefore, the study elaborates on the research question: to what extent does the media character’s diversity affect audience engagement and character meaningfulness? To answer the question, an online survey with an experimental design was applied with the question of perceived gendered personality traits, recognizability, perceived similarity, parasocial relationships, character realism, and character meaningfulness. Four main characters from the film Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) were selected as the stimulus material, which include male, female, lesbian and gay characters. The result showed that the female characters have more masculine personality traits than male characters, which indicated that the stereotypical female representation of over-affiliated males was disappearing. Moreover, the audiences tend to develop parasocial relationships with the characters portrayed with positive masculine and feminine characteristics. However, it also showed that although the audience does not prefer the negative portrayal of gendered traits, the negative personality traits still make the character realistic and encourage the audience to think. In addition, the study found that the portrayal of LGBTQ characters still stays at the stereotypical stage, especially for gay characters. Audiences show more acceptance of lesbian than gay characters. Furthermore, the result supported that the recognizability consists of more aspects of familiarity to help the audience find the actual similarity with the characters.