What makes people care about a protagonist?

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athenastar17
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#16 Post by athenastar17 »

HaruhianSakurai wrote:I'm gonna say this because I've noticed it in my characters, underneath the persona of your character that they consciously show to others, is a developed trait.
At least one characteristic most people will find admirable, that secretly defines and controls the actions subconsciously of the protagonist. Willingness to do what's morally right when push comes to shove is a popular one.
Emotionally distressing back-stories will help the reader become attached.
Hope this helps! ^-^
Nailed it, Haruhian.... The one trait is a GREAT idea, especially when it's surprising, and/or conflicts with the character's "visible" personality that they usually wear. Like, a strong sense of justice in a character that tends to be a snarky jerk most of the time...that's a really engaging main character - and fun for the player, because most of the time you get to insult people and get away with it, but when it comes down to it, you also get to play hero. :)

One thing I would say is try not to make their backstory TOO emotionally distressing. Many of those are overused and will make your character seem trite or cookie-cutter. Example...while it might be tempting to make your main character an orphan to garner sympathy and get the parental figures out of the way of the character's choices (parents killed by the bad guy, or killed in a way that caused them to develop a phobia of a similar situation...etc...there are many variations.) ...this is used a LOT. A better selection might be "Your parents are working abroad and they left you here by yourself." (Persona 4) This can be skewed in a way that makes the parents seem uncaring, or in a way that says "it's okay, I'm used to it, no big deal" and move on (making the MC appear emotionally strong or detached), or in a way in which your parents loved you and didn't want to do this but had no choice, or as a "heroic sacrifice" or "take one for the team" on the part of the main character to help his parents, or...the best route in my opinion, and the one that was actually used...it can be left ambiguous. The mystery and ambiguity leads your player to wonder about the MC's past and pay attention to him because they want to know the answers to these questions. There are plenty of other "emotional distresses" along these lines that can be substituted for common, more striking literary childhood traumas, and are more believable and interesting.

(My other pet peeve is abusive dad.... Abusive mom is a bit more interesting, but still. Come up with something else, or at least give the "evil" parent some motivation beyond "s/he's a drunken jerkface.")

The other pitfall is giving the main character too MANY traumatic childhood events. A character who was mugged on three separate occasions by three different people who had no relation to each other... (I actually had a friend write that character once, except the trauma was worse than just "mugged") ...that's going to sound pretty unrealistic and start to lead your player to believe that your character must have been asking for it somehow...and that is the OPPOSITE of what you want! Does it happen in real life to good people? Yes. But truth is stranger than fiction, and in this case, it sounds ridiculous.
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#17 Post by tigerkidde »

I think the underdog approach is one style usually does it for me.

Without spoiling it beyond this description, Spider-Man 2 (Raimi) makes me reaaally root for Peter Parker / Spider-Man. But in Spider-Man 3, I stopped feeling for him even before the second fight sequence.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#18 Post by Lishy »

tigerkidde wrote:I think the underdog approach is one style usually does it for me.

Without spoiling it beyond this description, Spider-Man 2 (Raimi) makes me reaaally root for Peter Parker / Spider-Man. But in Spider-Man 3, I stopped feeling for him even before the second fight sequence.
Never saw spider-man! :(

Put it in a spoilerbox, please?
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#19 Post by MarineScripter »

Well that's a good question. I think protagonists are best when they have a strong personality. People also tend to like the protagonist more if they are in trouble or fighting against something. Of course, there are some real jerkface protags out there, but unless well done, the viewer will often dislike them. (As I have). I care if they have good character development and some remnants of moral scruples. I haven't liked too many in my time, but the ones I did vary but all have strong development.
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#20 Post by emeytroi »

To be honest, I found that the most interesting characters were the ones that had a fault. They weren't perfect which is realistic because no one in the world is perfect. To be honest, I loved the characters that were real jerks in the beginning but slowly changed into better people as the story moves forward. As MarineScripter said, character development is a big yes.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#21 Post by spicaduciel »

I think that a good protagonist must have weaknesses, but also strengths.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#22 Post by Pyrephox »

spicaduciel wrote:I think that a good protagonist must have weaknesses, but also strengths.
That's an important point. I'm not a big fan of a protagonist who's just a complete schlub, always awkward, always venial or cowardly, always tripping over themselves, etc. There needs to be a reason why THIS is the main character, beyond simple plot convenience.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#23 Post by ImmaDeker »

AshenhartKrie wrote:Don't make them perfect. Give them flaws, give them HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE, DEBILITATING flaws, it makes them interesting. (V_V) Make them relatable. Also make them interesting. People don't like boring characters who are nice and kind to everyone. NOBODY LIKES MARY SUES!!!
That's disingenuous. It depends on the context of the story.

"Mary Sue" is a completely outdated, half baked concept that comes from fanfiction culture and is only useful if someone has no real frame of reference beyond fanfiction. It's one of those ideas that makes amateur discussions about writing fiction a repetitive, cliche-ridden circlejerk. "Well you gotta have a flawed protagonist! You don't want MARY SUES!"

You want to know a fantastic protagonist who is nice to everyone? Gentarou Kisaragi of Kamen Rider Fourze. While I usually loathe modern tokusatsu for various reasons, a lot of what makes Fourze so endearing (besides its incredible supporting cast) is the fact that Gentarou is genuinely the single nicest person you could possibly meet. The stories are woven around the fact he just wants to be everyone's pal and how he deals with the fact people are a lot more complicated than he is. He's a nice simple guy, whose humility allows him to both be endearingly friendly and pure but also doesn't let him dominate the story if another character needs focus. Gentarou would come fairly close to what you'd call a Mary Sue (which I don't believe actually exists) but the stories are woven around the PEOPLE he encounters and how he affects them. When the emotional arc is focused on a recurring character who feels like she's a freakish alien and just wants to be shown the moon, where she thinks she belongs, how can you possibly dislike a protagonist who would actually take her there?

And I think there's a lot of dooky in the idea that your story should NEVER EVER EVER have simple protagonists with no flaws. What if you were on the writing staff of Space Ghost and Dino Boy and you were required to reliably churn out several pulpy superhero stories to hit your episode order...and each episode is only about six minutes? I love that cartoon because of all the clever little writing tricks it does to keep things so streamlined and easy to understand in six meager minutes while introducing a new antagonist in just about every short. They didn't always succeed, but there were nice little subtle that let them differentiate all their villainous characters...which made Space Ghost all the more interesting by proxy as he faced his foes. I am down for any hero who wants to conquer the fabled GLASS CITY OF GLASSTOR!

You couldn't reliably follow certain advice given in this thread depending on your situation. If you're tasked on a sitcom that loves the status quo, does hacking out a story to that specifications make you a bad writer? If you're ghostwriting one of those Hardy Boys or Nancy Drews (or, back in the day, some old pulp hero doing feats of daring-do) and your protagonists show no real growth, depth, or flaw, how bad is that at the end of the day? If your purpose is to present a sequence of events meant to entertain and then be discarded, is there anything really wrong with that kind of entertainment and the protagonists therein who don't possess any huge gaping flaws and just want to resolve the story's problem? Where's the harm in just watching a hero beat the bad guys?

I feel like the concept of a Mary Sue is intellectually dishonest. As if, in this day and age in the advent of things like post-modernism or writing with (at times painfully) ironic awareness of fictional trends, you couldn't make an interesting character out of someone who is unbelievably perfect. When I wrote a series of Power Rangers fan-scripts with two friends who I think are way smarter than me, one of my episodes dealt with a "Mary Sue" character we included and the fact she loved the bad boy because he was the only one who could actually get mad at her and dislike her. That she didn't FEEL human because of how perfect she genuinely was. And her ultimate impulse to be equally nice to everyone ended up robbing her of her goal. None of this is even particularly clever, it's just asking how that archetype feels about her life.

Telling someone to beware the dreaded Mary Sue is an archaic boogeyman that only exists as a concern for those who grew up on a writing culture spewed from fanfiction ideology (and you should never, ever, ever learn from fanfic. Ever.*). As harsh as this post may sound, which wasn't my intention, chopping at one's nails and being terrified of writing a Mary Sue is the sign of underdeveloped sensibilities as a writer. It proposes that there're certain things that're objectively wrong about writing, and that's...wrong. If you go back far enough, the idea of not doing events of your story in order is wrong. If you pick the right time period, TV shows having bad endings is wrong. In our obsessive nerd culture that prides the construction of internally consistent "universes" of stories, old myth or Greek plays are wrong for their gaps and inconsistencies with the world they played in.

Nothing about writing is ultimately wrong. Whether or not a story is truly BAD is up to the individual person, as what the person wants out of a story could very well be not what the story ever promised to give. There are things you can do poorly (awkwardly write a sentence, poorly construct a paragraph, have wonky structure, etc.), but in a clearly, competently written story there's no such thing as characterization that's wrong or worse than the other. There're just certain characterizations or levels of depth you PREFER, which is entirely different.

How do you make a protagonist interesting? What's your story trying to do? Does it want to make me cry, make me happy, or make me question things? Fit him or her to whatever it is you want to ultimately do and I think it'll be gravy.

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Despite my fan-script example, I don't feel like a hypocrite for saying this because actually formatting them to the constraint and restrictions of the real show/a television script aligns it more in the realm of a spec script, which is NOT the same thing as fanfiction.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#24 Post by Applegate »

I rather agree with ImmaDeker here: I've always hated the "Mary Sue" description of characters, as it is perfectly possible to create an anti-Mary Sue and still have a terrible character. I have a tendency to analyse anime as I watch it and Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun comes to mind.

There may be spoilers so I'm spoilering this bit.
In the first episode, the main character tells us about herself. (Of course, you should show instead of tell, but.) She's studious and anti-social and all that jazz.

She's roped into delivering papers to a boy that's absent by her teacher. His first reaction on seeing her is to jump out of a window, then attack her later on. Over the course of the episode you learn that he is excessively nice to his friends, devoted to the girl, unbelievably strong and the smartest student in school. A true "Mary Sue" character, perfect in every way... except for one trait. He is incredibly prone to violence.
The above example is what happens when you try to go against the "Mary Sue" stuff: You give an excessively negative trait to an otherwise perfect character. It is like purposefully sculpting a perfect representation of something and then purposefully adding imperfections because it's inacceptable for that something to be perfect.

That's just not how you make it more real, though. What did get me to watch to the end of the episode (I think the anime is rather terrible), is one scene.
In this scene, the girl asks the boy why he refuses to go to school. To which his answer is the following:

"I'm afraid. People might be afraid of me and run away from me, and I'll be left all alone."
That single expression of being human made the character infinitely better to me. Rather than add imperfections to characters for the sake of not making them perfect, try to give them traits that are human and that we can relate to.

You could have the "perfect student" who is a total mess at home as his negative trait. I just relate much more to the "perfect student" who tries desperately hard to be as perfect as can be because his father used to hit him any time he made a mistake.

Characters are never nice "because they happen to be". No man is nice because "that's just how he is". Someone who's always had everyone be nice to them may be nice to others, but that's because they don't know any better. But that nice person could also be nice because everyone around them was vicious and they resolved not to be that sort of person. Perhaps they have a mental handicap and really can't sympathise with others, but acts overly nice to mask that, afraid not to fit in.

Characters have reasons for their traits. Show those reasons and express them to the reader. That's the way to catch my adoration, and I hazard that more readers will be drawn to that.

Nature VS Nurture here, I know.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#25 Post by ImmaDeker »

The notion of a "Mary Sue" also doesn't really make sense in proper context. The original Mary Sue was an author insertion who is super cool in a fictional universe. Or a parody of that, anyway. She was specifically designed as a comment on trends inherent to fanfiction. The fact that character's name got corrupted into something that people now apply to all writing ever is awful. It's like how TV Tropes analyzes every single work of fiction through how Joss Whedon wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When a thing designed for a specific purpose expands in a creative culture with no regulation, it essentially becomes a nonsensical concept that can't be properly applicable to anything.

It's why internet culture sounds like a complete idiot when it talks about doing things creatively and it's usually why fans and creators have drastically different outlooks on things. Aspiring creatives who are big fans of things gravitate toward concepts (or corruptions of concepts) internal to their own fan culture or upbringing without any particular frame of reference and it shows.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#26 Post by dramspringfeald »

ImmaDeker wrote:The notion of a "Mary Sue" also doesn't really make sense in proper context. The original Mary Sue was an author insertion who is super cool in a fictional universe. Or a parody of that, anyway. She was specifically designed as a comment on trends inherent to fanfiction. The fact that character's name got corrupted into something that people now apply to all writing ever is awful. It's like how TV Tropes analyzes every single work of fiction through how Joss Whedon wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When a thing designed for a specific purpose expands in a creative culture with no regulation, it essentially becomes a nonsensical concept that can't be properly applicable to anything.

It's why internet culture sounds like a complete idiot when it talks about doing things creatively and it's usually why fans and creators have drastically different outlooks on things. Aspiring creatives who are big fans of things gravitate toward concepts (or corruptions of concepts) internal to their own fan culture or upbringing without any particular frame of reference and it shows.
You're confusing creativity and compatibility.

Coming up with a unique character is fine and all but they tend to be bland and tasteless and they usually end up as Merry Sue's. "This character is so awesome because she's like a god who knows everything and can kick anyone's butt and can't be defeated." They are called Merry Sues because PEOPLE like to inject their lives into them like some creepy puppet-zombie. Why? Because that character is them "but you know with a thing for sparkly vampires... and werewolves who go to school and want her because she is a walking talking sex goddess, and everyone who talks bad about her is beaten up and or killed"... because back at home The author was a fat, loner who watched too much Buffy and wanted Spike to bone her in high school. (Look it up)

Using a formula like D&D or Tropes will yield a decent character that just needs a little molding before they are released. That when done the character has rules set up, Their own characteristics and as long as the writer is careful will not become a sock puppet. Here are a few "uncreative" fanboys who used the uncreative way of doing things...

Stan Lee has said in his Character Book that he looks at established characters and changes the name, the costume, adds powers and releases them back into his stories as new characters.

George Lucas based Indiana Jones off the old Adventure comics from the 1930's he use to read. Just changed the names and birth dates and has one of the most influential characters in history.

Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Used established characters (Zorro and others) to shape The Bat Man, More so they have him watching it in his character back stories. They used the old 1920's crime novels mixed with a bit of drama as a backdrop and moved on.

Captain Kirk is Really a updated 1960's Space version of Buck Rogers. While Luke Skywalker is simply a bitched up version of the same character. think I'm kidding WHO in and of himself is a retelling of Rip Van Winkle

You spoke against tropes. The same thing used and named in their Commentaries by Jon Favreau // Kevin Smith // Rob Marshall // Gore Verbinski // James Cameron // and MANY others including Joss himself simply because you don't like how formulaic it is doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

Sorry to tell ya but the A+B+C+D = story approach is the ONLY form of creative writing to have survived all this time and probably will till the end of days. Also known as the Greek Method. Well I think it is at least, it so many names now. The formula is as fallows "Hero is made" - "Hero refuses the call" - "Hero looses everything" - "Hero returns to kick some ass" - "Hero becomes the Hero."

Examples
Luke Skywalker is found by R2 - Luke refuses to leave - Family removed from picture also his hand - Luke trains to become Jedi and defeats his father, the Empire and - Saves the galaxy far, far away.

Neo is found by 'the white rabbit' - Neo Ignores the deal and goes back to work - Neo looses everything and is about to lose his love - Neo becomes the ONE and - Defeats the matrix saving humanity.

Other notables are Lord of the rings, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, BATMAN, Avatar, Superman, The Avengers, Rango, About 95% of all media, the list goes on. I know it sucks the whole 'creativity' thing out of a project but that's how things are. Think of the Formula as a tool and use it to build a story.

===

As for the whole protagonist thing. Make us a Hero YOU identify with, then Wreck him. Make us feel bad for him, then have him lift himself up and take the day.
just be careful with the Wrecking because too much will make them a masochist (Vash - Trigun) and too little will make him seem like we were cheated.

Hope this helps.
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#27 Post by ImmaDeker »

dramspringfeald wrote: You spoke against tropes.
No, I didn't. You didn't read my post properly. I spoke against the website TV Tropes, not the usage of tropes or archetypes when writing fiction. Your entire post is telling me things that I literally did not, at any given point, show any problem with.

TV Tropes is a terrible site because it started as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite and decided that every single work of fiction could be properly analyzed specifically through how Whedon wrote Buffy. In Buffy, a character is usually a riff on some sort of horror concept, but "inverted/subverted/whatever". That's Buffy. That works. But even if you ignore the major TV Tropes flaw of "every single thing that has ever occurred in a story is actually a fictional trend" and the fact that this concept is inherently stupid and relies on overanalytical semantics, it's just flat out ridiculous to put EVERYTHING through the prism of Whedon's writing philosophy for Buffy. Not even Whedon's other work can be dissected the same way that Buffy can. Firefly can't. TV Tropes thinks it can, but it can't. When you actually move out of the realm of genre fiction, all TV Tropes is capable of doing is pointing out that stuff happens and that this is a website of a collection of stuff.

You see someone who disagrees with how TV Tropes runs things and thinks "Wow, he disagrees with how popular fiction has been written for years!" No. I'm fully aware of archetypal writing and how most stories in genre fiction can be boiled down to Joseph Cambell. My problem with the specific website is that when it can't analyze something like Buffy it's just resorting to saying "stuff happens that happens in other stuff" with no real thoughtful analysis as to why. It gets to the point where after TV Tropes has exhausted genuine archetypes or motifs worth cataloguing, it starts grasping for straws because according to this website every tiny moment in any story is just a building block.

It's one thing to evoke archetypes. It's one thing to sit down and say you want to do a hero's journey by way of Buck Rogers, or you want to create a character like the Shadow but give him a sidekick named Robin. That's completely different from "I'm gonna use a story about this trope combined with these tropes and invert these tropes." With the former, you're thinking in ways to do something new with an old idea. With the latter, you're soullessly combining a bunch of old ideas in a catalog and assuming something new comes out of it. Batman isn't "The Shadow+MOAR TROPES XD", Batman is a hero in the tradition of the Shadow and Zorro exploring different types of stories. Star Wars isn't "Monomyth+MORE TROPES XD", it's the Joseph Cambell tradition fitted to the setting of a fantasy world in space.

These SOUND the same, but they're really not. TV Tropes's entire wheelhouse is about being able to absurdly recognize a trend in literally every single thing that has ever happened in fiction. When you evoke an archetype, you write that archetype from your perspective. "This is how I see Zorro." TV Tropes more or less promotes writing to the idea of adhering to tropes, not noticing specific tropes that inspire you. That's how you get crap like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aO9Gkc1gJg&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuAYqgb3wuI&feature=plcp

To write archetypal fiction, you see a trend/archetype/trope you like and put your spin on it. To write how TV Tropes analyzes things, you cobble together a bunch of stuff you recognize. Those are not the same thing.

And the thing is? Your post doesn't address anything I actually said. You instantly assumed that my disliking of TV Tropes and my assessment of it meant I disliked the notion of archetypal fiction or that I didn't notice the various similarities in millennia of heroic fiction. I think that says wonders that your mind instantly went to that just because I thought TV Tropes is terrible as a basis for analysis. As if thinking TV Tropes is fundamentally flawed means I'm ignorant or unlearned.

I'll say it again. TV Tropes saw how Joss Whedon wrote Buffy and thought inverting/subverting that one thing we recognize would work for everything ever. Which, no, it doesn't. Not all works are based around tweaking popular archetypes of pop culture or heroic/mythic fiction. Gummo isn't. Countless novels aren't. The problem with TV Tropes as a website is that, once it realizes its run out of recognizable archetypes it decides that every possible thing you could write down is a trope. To prove my point, I'm even looking at the "August Underground" page since it's one of my favorite films. They consider masturbating and hitting something with a baseball bat to be tropes of fiction. These are not tropes, these are things that happen. If TV Tropes considers everything to be a trope, then it cancels out its own purpose because this means nothing is actually worth pointing out. Because of how needlessly in-depth TV Tropes is, you don't even NEED it as a resource...because anything you write down is putting tropes together.

TV Tropes is literary analysis through the crooked lens of Whedonites and weeaboos having a large baby.
As for the whole protagonist thing. Make us a Hero YOU identify with, then Wreck him. Make us feel bad for him, then have him lift himself up and take the day.
just be careful with the Wrecking because too much will make them a masochist (Vash - Trigun) and too little will make him seem like we were cheated.
And to address my actual point: a protagonist is ultimately subjective, like anything else in writing. What you say is very true and applies to many stories, but what about stories that don't do that? To bring up August Underground again, the protagonists are all serial killers who slowly destroy themselves. I find them fascinating protagonists and am very engaged in their adventures, but they don't fit your parameters at all. By the logic of having a single criteria for how a protagonist is good, I shouldn't like their stories. But I do.

A protagonist should fit the story you want to tell. If you're writing some sort of genre story or a rousing action/adventure, it IS a good idea to have heroes that can be identified with and overcome adversity. If you're doing a story about three serial killers and exploring their dysfunctional surrogate family dynamics, however, I'd hardly say the quoted criteria should be given to them.

Whatever your story's goal is, the protagonist should fit that goal. Sometimes they don't always win.
Coming up with a unique character is fine and all but they tend to be bland and tasteless and they usually end up as Merry Sue's. "This character is so awesome because she's like a god who knows everything and can kick anyone's butt and can't be defeated." They are called Merry Sues because PEOPLE like to inject their lives into them like some creepy puppet-zombie. Why? Because that character is them "but you know with a thing for sparkly vampires... and werewolves who go to school and want her because she is a walking talking sex goddess, and everyone who talks bad about her is beaten up and or killed"... because back at home The author was a fat, loner who watched too much Buffy and wanted Spike to bone her in high school.
Yes, but that's still inherent to fanfiction. There is a mountain load of fiction, ranging from everything to The Divine Comedy to modern television shows like Seinfeld, Stella, or Jon Benjamin Has a Van, where the creatives involved are essentially writing themselves. Hell, The Sarah Silverman Program is literally about how its protagonist, based on its creator Sarah Silverman, is inconceivably correct about everything despite being mean-spirited and obnoxious. And it manages to be funny because of execution of the scripts, the delivery of the dialog, and the absurdity of the stories. Having an amazing supporting cast helps too.

The notion of a Mary Sue is an irrelevant, meaningless concept. If someone's self insert is dull and painful, it's because that person lacks creativity or skill. Their original characters would be equally terrible. In today's age of boundless creativity and experimentation, nothing should be forbidden. You can make anything good. I'm not confusing creativity with compatibility (mostly because your entire basis for that is a claim I...never made), I'm arguing that fiction should be allowed to do anything and there is no handbook for how certain things should be.

Going back to my contribution to the thread: whatever your story wants to do, the protagonist should be molded for that story. Not everything is genre fiction, but not everything is experimental either.

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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#28 Post by Greeny »

Yesterday, I found an old Dan Brown book I once read when I was younger. I decided it might help inspire me as a writer, what with Dan Brown being such a successful writer, so I thought I'd give it another read.

Five pages of reading about how beatiful and smart the protagonist is and how amazingly quirky but yet oh so intelligent her boyfriend is and how their relationship is oh so perfect later, I decided maybe I'd rather not take any cues from Dan Brown. Needless to say, I did not continue reading.
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#29 Post by Aines445 »

Well, at least when I play games I automaticly project myself into the story, considering myself as the protagonist. So for me, it depends on the protagonists actions.

For example, even in linear stories I project myself and if the protagonist does actions I don't like, it would mean I made actions that I don't like, making me not like the protagonist and not caring anymore.

The rest of the game can compensate for this. For example, if I don't care about the protagonist, but the characters and story are great, then I would love the game anyway. Its like how you don't care about the art being terrible if the rest is good.

For those "blank" protagonists, It really depends. Sometimes it's better if the protagonists have a personality, because you can project yourself into the story anyway, because you wouldn't be just really "blank" or have no emotion, to pretty much every reaction and sometimes the choices that are given to you aren't that good, making you not care anyway.

Basicly, for me, the choices you make WITH the protagonist in the game, because they become MY choices, and not the protagonist himself, make me care about the protagonist, and even if you dont care about the protagonist, the rest of the game can make up for this.

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Zylinder
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Re: What makes people care about a protagonist?

#30 Post by Zylinder »

I can't answer for everyone, so I'll answer only for me.

I care about characters that are written well. I know that's about as useful as a dollar bill for your parking meter, but it's true. Write it well, and I'll care for them. You don't really need sputzah or shiny gloss to make people like a character. In fact, setting out with the intention to make people like your character might be the worst way to go about it, because you're not writing a character the way it should be written. You're writing it the way you think people might like it.

I can tell you instead what makes me not care about characters, but that's subjective too. I hate whiners that sit around whining about how awful life's been to them, which is something I like to presume comes about because the author is trying too hard to make me care for them. They were kidnapped, orphaned, betrayed, raped, injured, nearly killed... So where is the donation box for this pity party again? Am I reading a book or a list of why I should sympathize with this character?

To extend a little on the Sue discussion, I think 'perfect characters' are perfectly okay. Instead of saying 'I should put flaws into this character', perhaps the better way to phrase it is, 'I should write them as humans'. Someone can be kind, smart, athletic, rich etc. - I'm sure there are real people out there who's all that too. The things that make me care is what makes them human: habits, quirks, likes, dislikes, personal principles. Don't let labels like genius/rich boy define the character. Think about how you might view a perfect person as their friend.

What it really should boil down to is, "Does this character like cheese?"

(A little side while we're on the topic... History =/= personality. Something that I keep seeing again and again in fiction, especially by amateur authors. It's fine if you want to write me this encyclopaedia entry about every person in X's family back to the Mayflower and everything that's happen to X since he was born... But who is he, really? History shouldn't be everything to a character. Shape them yes, but is that all they are? No.

Probably off-topic, but I felt the urge to whine/rant/nag)

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