Get Your Characters Invested, Keep Your Readers Invested

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This is something that was brought to my attention through beta reading and having my most recent story beta read. If you want the audience to connect with your characters and be emotionally invested in the story, the characters themselves have to be emotionally invested in the situation in which they find themselves. If the story lacks this emotional component the story falls flat and your characters feel robotic. 
We’ve all heard the expression, ‘show don’t tell’ so you might be thinking that this gets communicated by the characters’ actions; and you’d be right, it does. However, not only by their actions but by showing how they feel about the actions they’re taking. This is particularly true in situations where characters have to behave in a way that is different from what their heart or instincts would lead them to do. You communicate that dichotomy by showing their internal conflict. 
For example, say that you’re writing a scene in which a bomb is about to go off and your MC has to leave their friend who is chained to the bomb, behind. They’re going to do it, that’s not a question, but do they do so in a selfish act of cowardly self-preservation? Or does or does it break them inside but it has to be done anyway? The brave, conflicted character would most likely hesitate, and by taking the 1 or 2 lines of text it would take to show them hesitating, you communicate that they do care and they do hate this. Let’s see it in action: 
1. There was nothing they could do. Jimmy was chained to the bomb, and the post the chains were wrapped around was way too thick to break. Bill couldn’t disarm it, he couldn’t unchain Jimmy, there was no way out. 
“Bill, you have to get out of here! Go!” 
At Jimmy’s words, Bill took off running out of the building, as far as he could get. In the distance, he heard Jimmy yelling after him, but he didn’t look back. 

2.  There was nothing they could do. Jimmy was chained to the bomb, and the post the chains were wrapped around was way too thick to break. Bill couldn’t disarm it, he couldn’t unchain Jimmy, there was no way out.
 “Bill, you have to get out of here! Go!” 
Bill shook his head. “Are you crazy? I’m not leaving you!” 
“You have to! Otherwise, we’ll both die, what good would that do?” 
Bill didn’t move, gritting his teeth in concentration, he knew Jimmy was right but the thought of leaving him made his stomach to back-flips, there had to be another way, but he couldn’t see it, and they were officially out of time.
He stood up and ran as fast as he could, not daring to look back. 

See the difference?

I see this problem quite a bit in fan-fiction and my best guess for why is that since the intended audience is already familiar with most, if not all of the main characters, many authors think this emotional content can just be assumed or imagined by the readers and therefore this isn’t an issue. However, it’s actually worse than it is in original fiction, especially when the plot puts the characters in a situation that would very obviously be emotional for them, the more devoid of emotional context the writing is in the face of a plot that demands an emotional reaction, the more out of character the main characters feel to the readers who know them well. 

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