http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/v...ctuation-KratosYes, it's me posting another Extra Punctuation article. This one instead tackling the idea of protagonists in stories and pointing out two very important things.
The first of which is the complain about the need to make a character seem "relatable" or someone we can project on. All too often (more often in commercial rather than fanworks but I have seen a few exceptions) the central protagonist ends up being the most boring of the lot. They might be a stick in the mud or maybe they're just meant to remind us of the lowest common denominator who'll be watching the show, but in the end they're only like that (unless the author deliberately wanted a point to make) because they want us to be able to imagine ourselves in that character's shoes.
And this is a bit of a problem. As Yahtzee points out, in stories with ensemble casts, this can mean that the hero ends up becoming the most dull member of the group. It's a problem that Cyclops has had to deal with in X-Men when he's been in the hands of incompetent writers. Now in some cases, it does work when the point of the show (again) is to deliberately and intentionally to displace a normal person in a weird situation, like with Fry in Futurama. In other cases (like far, FAR too many harem comedies) it falls horribly flat and I'm bored to tears watching a spineless loser get involved with stupid antics with girls which are supposedly funny for reasons I can't understand.
So I say to everyone here to not be afraid to write a character we can't replace with ourselves. Have them be quirky or extremely serious but see to it they're as interesting as everyone they're around.
The other important thing to do is understand character arcs. Yahtzee provided Kratos from God of War as an example: in the first game he has some genuine motivations and we find out about his character and why he does what he does, and at the end of the game his character arc is finished. And yet in the second and third games the only way they felt they could work with the story was having Kratos keep getting betrayed and keep going on quests for revenge. To be fair, the writers for the games have still done a fairly good job coming up with justifications and excuses, but at the same time things became almost routine. To have a character go through the motions of what they did before when they don't have the same motivations or equivalent motivations can only work for so long. It's okay to let a protagonist go once you've taken their story to the natural conclusion and work with a new one.
That's not to say anticlimactically kill the old one off or never speak of them again is a good idea, but if you're going to continue using a character, make sure you don't screw up with them and make sure you come up with a different and at the same time appropriate character arc for them.
Two common pitfalls when making a protagonist, Again, this is something meant for videogames but it applies here too
May 5 2010, 5:33 PM
