Sympathy • [Overview Appreciation] •  The audience will care about the Main Character, but it will not identify with him • Sympathy describes the relationship of the audience to a Main Character whom it cares about yet does not identify with. To identify with the Main Character, empathy is needed, but some story forms do not allow for empathy from either male or female audiences, and some exclude both at once. But sympathy can still be a strong emotion, and creating a storyform which will elicit sympathy can be a way to emphasize the intricacies in a story’s storytelling and Objective Story elements rather than its emotional side.

From the Dramatica Dictionary