I told myself I’d write more for ImpishIdea this summer, but then life got in the way. For whatever reason everyone keeps telling me I can’t live in the local library, so I’ve got to find a new place to live, and that in turn has held a lot of my thinking time. Who’d have thunk it?
Because of that, I don’t know when/if I’ll get to that sporking of Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles that’s been suggested a couple of times. For starters, I’d actually need to buy a copy of Hounded.
So instead I’m going to complain about having the wrong protagonists.
For whatever reason, there are a lot of stories in which the protagonist isn’t actually the main character. It’s fairly common, actually. It sounds like a problem that shouldn’t happen, but it does. Let me explain with an example or two.
I’ve been reading/watching/playing a lot of fiction involving Greek mythology lately. A lot of it is great. But I’ve noticed that there’s a tendency to make the story about a conflict between the gods but make none of the gods the protagonist. It’s always some human hero, who bumbles around without fully understanding what’s going on in the mythological world. To be fair, sometimes an author can make it work, like in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, in which we see the hero and the Titans actually face off against each other. Additionally, despite the cosmic scale of the series’s plot, it still remains personal story about Percy fighting to save the people he loves.
But then you have things like the movie Immortals, meant to be a film retelling the story of Theseus that is also about preventing the Titans from escaping their prison. Except that Theseus doesn’t prevent jack squat, the Titans escape, and the entire thing would have been prevented if Zeus actually got off his golden cape to do stuff. There isn’t any reason Theseus is the hero, other than because Zeus and the movie say so. Other characters (the gods, mostly) are more interesting, more complex, and could do much more with the actual plot.
The obvious answer to this criticism is that having an immortal godlike protagonist is too boring, as there are no stakes and the character is too distant for the human audience to identify with. And while I agree that it is difficult to have a compelling protagonist who is a deity or godlike figure, it’s not impossible. I think Neil Gaiman did it pretty well in The Sandman. In the comic the title character, Morpheus, is an immortal being, but nonetheless he’s bound by certain rules and limitations. And while he’s not threatened by most of the human characters, he is surrounded by treacherous family members and angry mythological figures who certainly can hurt him.
But even moving out of fantasy stories with gods, this happens in other fiction as well. Do you guys remember back when I was sporking Angelopolis? Yeah, fun times all-around, I know. But one of the things that struck me re-reading the book is that Verlaine was a pretty piss-poor main character. Yes, the story was “about him” in the sense that he was one of the main players moving the plot forward. But who are all of the revelations in the story about, and who is the one person that the whole plot hinges on in the end of the novel? It’s not him. It’s Evangeline. She’s the one who finds out about her parentage being different than she thought, who found out that she was created for the sole purpose of being a weapon against evil. The plot is, by all accounts, about her, and so being the main character you’d think she’d be the protagonist, like in the first book. But she’s benched for most of the story so that Verlaine and the other characters can wander around Europe asking stupid questions. Verlaine himself doesn’t do much to move the story along; despite the text and other characters constantly singing his praises, he always has to be rescued and being told plot-relevant information. This story should not be about him. But Trussoni tried very much to make it so. So she makes him the protagonist, despite him not being the actual main character.
The much-maligned Assassin’s Creed: Unity had a similar issue. I’ve heard a lot of Assassin’s Creed fans and critics bemoan how boring the protagonist of that game was. But I don’t think that Arno Dorian (the protagonist) is a bad character, but again, the story isn’t about him. The whole plot hinges on his epic love story with Elise: juggling his willingness to help her take revenge on her father’s murders and his desire to keep her safe. It’s not a bad character motivation, but it makes for a poor protagonist, because the story isn’t about him. It’s about Elise, and how her quest to seek revenge plays out. It’s not that Arno shouldn’t be in the story, but it’s just not his story. If Arno had gotten a story in which he was actually the central character, he probably would have been received a lot better.
I’ll admit that heroic destinies, revenge plots, and prophesied heroes have been done to death, but one reason they’re used so often is because we know precisely who the story is about. It’s an easy way to make sure you don’t lose focus of who you’re supposed to care about. You probably could do successful subversions, in which the protagonist is not the main character in the epic quest, but rather the companion, best friend, or another party member. But that would work more effectively in satire or parody than a serious story idea: having a character who points out all the plot holes and tropes of their story, or how unrealistic it all is.
[I want to note that one can play around with the viewpoint character being different than the main character/protagonist being different. Sherlock Holmes is indisputably the main character and protagonist of his stories, but most of the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are narrated by Dr. John Watson instead. The narrator doesn’t have to be the protagonist/main character at all, though they often are.]
It isn’t just a matter of the protagonist being a likable character; it doesn’t matter how likable they are, or are supposed to be. If they’re not the central character of the story, the one on whom everything else hinges, then they’re not the main character. The protagonist and the main character should be the same, and that should be someone without whom there would be no story: a character who makes some of the decisions that move the plot forward. If your main characters are just reacting to what’s going on around them, and don’t do anything to advance the story, then you’ve got some work to do before they’re protagonists.
Dragonstorm on 3 July 2017, 23:05 said:
Good points, and it’s making me rethink some of what I’ve been writing recently. I’m glad you posted this!
Anonymous on 5 July 2017, 03:02 said:
What if the protagonist is specifically there to observe and play up the ability of the main character? Ala Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is a much more effective main character if we don’t know what he’s thinking.
Juracan on 5 July 2017, 10:37 said:
@Dragonstorm:
Glad I could be helpful!
@Anon:
I touch on this a bit, but I don’t really consider Watson to be the main character or protagonist in most of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He’s the narrator, but almost always Holmes is the one who leads the plot, whom the story centers around, and who the stories are actually about. I think the narrator being separate than the main character and protagonist can work very well when applied correctly.
TMary on 14 November 2017, 03:58 said:
That made me snort. XD Still – I suspect you’re joking, but for your sake I hope that was a joke…
Grah, I hate it when I encounter that in books/movies/TV shows/what-have-you, where the “hero” doesn’t actually do anything, and yet we’re expected to follow them around and watch them do it. (It also makes me paranoid about my own writing, because I fear I have a tendency to do that. :S)
Which is a real shame, because Theseus’s story is actually really exciting and good and I’d love to see a movie made out of Theseus’s adventures – the dude needs more attention!
Weirdly enough, this actually reminded me of one of my own stories, wherein I started out thinking that my main character was an everyman of a carpenter who ended up kidnapped by pirates, but it turned out as I went along that I couldn’t get much of a plot out of him, and once I started following the pirate captain I discovered that the story was actually about her, and once I’d worked that out the plot came thick and fast. It kind of sounds like Trussoni started out thinking the story was about Verlaine, and failed to notice that it was about Evangeline so she could either switch the main viewpoint to her, or else rewrite the story to focus more on Verlaine. What’s weird about it, though, is that she had already (as I gathered from your sporking) set Evangeline up as the main character, so why the switch? It really doesn’t make any sense.
It’s like the difference between Harry Potter and Ron Weasley – yeah, Ron gets a lot of screentime and he’s hugely important to the plot, but let’s face it: If the first book was “Ron Weasley and [how he got knocked out by a giant chess piece just before Harry Potter saved] the Sorceror’s Stone”, it wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. I think the rule of thumb here is whoever is doing the most in your story is your protagonist. They needn’t necessarily be your viewpoint character, but they are your protagonist, and you need to alter the story so that we can see what they’re up to.
There is a double-edged sword here, however, in that authors can use one of these tropes to get very lazy; since, after all, their hero is “the Chosen One”, they are obviously the one the story is about, and therefore, there is no need to have them actually do anything that would advance the plot or have them grow as characters, which, I think, is partly while the Chosen One trope is so reviled.
Anyway, great article :) I do have one thing to add, though: What about stories where there seem to be multiple main characters? This is kind of more common in a lot of old-fashioned children’s books (like written before the sixties, at least, or else with authors born before the sixties): Chronicles of Narnia, Charlotte’s Web, and Which Witch all have stories where, though you can definitely point to a few characters more important than any others, and at least one character people are going to think of before any other, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who the main character is. I think Arriman the Awful, Belladonna, and Terence Mugg all have pretty equal screentime, character arcs, and plot-crucial moments in Which Witch, Charlotte’s Web is as much about Charlotte saving Wilbur as it is about Wilbur himself, and in Chronicles of Narnia, the only main character who stays throughout seems to be Narnia itself, and Aslan.
I don’t honestly know where I was going with that, I just felt it would be an interesting thing to bring up. A thought I had at three in the morning XD I did enjoy this article, and thank you for posting it! It’s given me stuff to think about in my own writing :)
Juracan on 14 November 2017, 22:33 said:
No, actually. I had to find a new place to live on short notice. I did find some place though so it’s all okay.
He does! I think there’s something very appealing about the story of the Minotaur, which is why it amazes me that it hasn’t been filmed. Immortals only loosely adapts it in that there’s a hero named Theseus and there’s a mazelike catacombs in which he fights a man with a bull’s head (and the bull’s head is a piece of headgear rather than an actual head). It’s a n enjoyable movie in some ways but as a story of Greek myth it is severely lacking. It’s also not very good.
It doesn’t make sense. Like you said, Evangeline is the main character of the first book. There’s a bit in the back of the paperback where Trussoni explains why she wanted to switch to Verlaine, but it doesn’t work. Part of it is also that so many characters keep telling each other and the audience that Verlaine is such a capable badass and he’s…not. Like, at all. If he did live up to all the hype then maybe he’d be a better character, but because he doesn’t, and has to be saved all the time, Verlaine’s just a lame unlikable substitute.
…a lot more efficient than most of my article, I think. I am jealous.
True, and I think there’s a degree of moderation that needs to be applied. I don’t think the “Chosen One” plot is necessary, or even necessarily very good, and I understand that people are tired of it. But in my book it’s a lot better to have a Chosen One plot than a protagonist who isn’t your main character.
I think that’s a whole ‘nother ballgame, by virtue of the fact that Chronicles of Narnia tells the story of a lot of people? Like obviously the Pevensies are the protagonists of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe while the other books use different protagonists. It’s a case by case basis in that, because it’s an anthology series that tell the big parts of the history of a world.
Now like a single book, or a series that follows the same group of characters over the books, you can still have multiple protagonists, and it can be done well, but I tend to advise against it. It’s difficult for most writers to juggle that many main characters, and more often than not it becomes a jumbled mess and many character motivations and actions get lost in the mix.
TL;DR—It can be done, but unless you’re a really good writer it’ll be difficult.
ALSO this story about the pirate captain? Sounds pretty darn awesome!
TMary on 15 November 2017, 07:03 said:
Oh, dang. Sorry that happened to you, dude, and glad it worked out okay in the end. :)
It – there’s never been a movie about the story of the Minotaur?! That’s gotta be one of the most famous Greek myths there is! How has this never…I mean, if I stop and think about it, I realize that I’ve never heard of a movie version, but I guess I always subconsciously assumed that there was one out there, somewhere. It’s the Minotaur!
Hoo boy, yeah, I actually just read someone else’s review – or rather, rambling, unfinished, hate-filled notes – on Immortals just today. She…did not like it, and if everything she said was true, I don’t think I’d like it either (especially what they did with the Minotaur, criminy).
But yeah, aside even from that, Theseus’s adventures, with the various foes he encounters and defeats, are all just pretty awesome, and I would love to see a decent adaptation of those some time. I like Heracles and Perseus and all, but they’ve gotten enough screentime, you know?
Oh boy, hyped-up main characters that don’t live up to the hype. >.< The trouble is that there’s a fine line between having characters who are capable, and characters who are superhuman and plow through every obstacle in their path – and no author wants that, either. So to even it out, you try to get them captured and beaten up a few times, you know, let the audience see that they might be good at what they do, but they’re not invincible, and also try to win a little sympathy for them…but take it too far and they look like wimps whom everyone idolizes for no apparent reason.
Ha ha, thank you XD I thought your article was quite efficient and got its point across nicely, for what it’s worth :)
I think you’re right there, and I think it’s still possible to get a lot of subversions and twists out of a Chosen One story, or even just play it straight and still have a good story (I don’t mind Chosen One stories quite as much as some people, I’ll admit, though I do see their flaws and their prevalence). But it has to be done well, and it is becoming kind of an Undead Horse Trope at this point.
Good point! (I had to explain this to my dad a while back, when my mom and my little sister were going to read The Chronicles together – we have them all in one volume – and he was insisting that they should read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe first, because that was the one that was published first, and I was explaining that no, they really shouldn’t, because it doesn’t come first chronologically, and he was like, “But aren’t the kids the heroes? And don’t you want to follow their story?” And I was like “…Yes…and no.”)
…I’m fracked. XD But yeah, I get what you’re saying. I’d also say that very often, you don’t need that many protagonists. I mean, yeah, you want a reasonable number of characters, but protagonists? And viewpoint characters? Oftentimes, the story can be told just fine from one or at the most two, and jumping viewpoints is really just a way to have fun and experiment. Which is fine for you, but not for your audience.
Oh my gosh, thank you! :D It’s very much a work in progress (mainly because it’s a far more adult, complex story than I’ve ever come up with in my life and I’m nineteen and have never actually published a novel before, so I want to give it a little time to grow with me rather than putting all my energy into it and releasing it as my first thing), but I do have a distinct plot and distinct characters and I know what I want to do with it, which is nice. It jumped on me last Halloween when I dressed as a pirate and now it won’t let go of me, lol. Thank you for noticing it! :)
Juracan on 17 November 2017, 17:34 said:
I don’t think there’s been one, to my knowledge. It’s possible it exists, but if it does it never got widespread attention.
I should also explain with a disclaimer that this is part of a me problem though: I’m terrible with names, so when the author throws too many at me, especially when I’m supposed to keep up with their viewpoints, I get lost and I easily forget why I’m supposed to care about half these people. That might be why I’m more against it than a lot of other readers.