u/New-Number-7810

You are Santa Claus. Saint Nicholas. Kris Kringle. Your job is to give out billions of presents ever year on Christmas. You have a whole time who needs to help you.

Jolly Twinkle was your right-hand man for the past three centuries. He could do it all. He was clever, cunning, charming, industrious, and trustworthy. He'd take a bullet for you! You know because he did, and now he's dead.

Anyway, you need to choose a second-in-command. Four options stand out:

• Mostrel Twizzlethunp: An elderly, grey elf, who is skilled at managing resources. He'll keep books balanced. He's great with money and effeciency. But he's resistant to new technological advancements. He thinks electricity is cursed, for example. His political alignment is feudalism.
• Coggs Ironbellows: A dwarf. He's a skilled inventor, able to easily adopt new technologies and push them to their limits. He's not "move fast and break things" but rather "move fast and make unbreakable things". However, he's not a people-person. Those under his authority tend to find him difficult to work with, and deeply unpopular. Work morale will surely go down with him in charge.
• Candy Sours: A young up-in-coming elf who thinks the world owes her. She wants authority for the sake of having it, and to lord it over others. However, the elves are afraid of her, so with her as a second you can bleed them dry and never have to worry about strikes or lawsuits.
• Cheesy Wreaths: An elf who is extremely popular. Everyone loves him after a conversation with him, and he's the life of every party. This means he's able to get funding from others. His attitude is work hard, play hard, and when he asks his elves to do a triple shift they know he'll be on the assembly line right alongside him. The only problem is that he has a pixie stick addiction, and benders leave him out of commission for days or sometimes weeks at a time, at random. It could be early January, it could be Christmas day, there's no telling when he'll be out of it.

So, who do you choose?

There are plenty of cases in fiction where the protagonist has a love interest whom the writers clearly intend for the audience to sympathize with, but who ends up being deeply unpopular or otherwise hotly debated within the fandom. Sometimes, even if a love interest isn’t hated, they can be seen as superfluous.

What do you think are some good things to keep in mind for writing a love interest that the audience overall likes?