Readers can feel when they’re being manipulated, and they don’t like it. Make a character too pure, and watch readers revolt. An example of this is the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. As Oscar Wilde supposedly said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing” – not what Dickens was going for, I suspect.
Sophisticated readers know when an author is trying to force them to like or dislike a character, and they tend to push back. Dickens made Little Nell so utterly pure that her death became a symbol, not of innocence and childhood sacrifice in an uncaring industrial age (as I assume he intended) but of overly sentimental writing.
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