If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard that heroes are more sympathetic when they’re underdogs, but what does that mean? Is any hero an underdog so long as the villain is stronger? Why does it even matter? This week, we’re talking about all things underdog: how they’re defined, what makes them so useful, and why being an underdog doesn’t automatically mean your protagonist is great. Plus, did you remember that Shape of Water had a plot outside of the sexy fish guy?
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Paloma. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi. Chris. Winkle and Bunny. [opening song]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast! I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: and…
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: How many of us do you think could fit under a dog? It’d have to be pretty big, right? Like a very large dog, like maybe a Great Dane?
Bunny: I could probably fit under a Great Dane, but I don’t know if there’d be much room for either of you.
Oren: Yeah, we have to get a couple of ’em in there. This is we’re, this is gonna be a little logistically challenging, but I think we can manage it.
Bunny: Underdogs.
Chris: Any case. This time we’re talking about depicting Underdog Heroes because underdogs are automatically heroes, of course.
Oren: Naturally.
Chris: Naturally.
Oren: That is a problem in various historical conflicts when people try to make entertaining narratives out of them because sometimes the underdog is not the good guy.
[Group laughter]
Oren: I’m not saying that the allies in World War II were great, but I am saying the access was worse and they were definitely the underdogs in that fight.
Bunny: But there is a reason why so many heroes are underdogs in stories. It works much, much better, makes the character relatable and often sympathetic, which aids attachment. It adds tension because then they have an uphill battle, so not making your hero an underdog can sometimes mean that you have a pretty boring story. So storytellers have a pretty strong incentive to make their heroes underdogs – not that needs to be exactly like that all the time. Sometimes it just depends on how you flavor it, but, generally, the villain has to be more powerful or whatever obstacles have to seem more powerful than the hero.
Chris: So we just need farm boys, right? It’s just all farm boys.
Bunny: Just all farm boys. That’s the solution. Just put a farm boy in every story.
Oren: So are we defining underdog fairly broadly, then? That was something I was thinking about. I was like, most heroes are less powerful than their antagonist, and if there’s no direct villain, then they are less powerful than whatever force they’re opposing. How broadly are we defining underdog?
Chris: I would personally say in this case, ’cause obviously we could define it really broadly. We’re talking about heroes where the author is doing something very specific in the beginning to set them up as less powerful than the people around them, even the other protagonists, generally. If they’re like outcasts, for instance, that would be one way or something where they have an unusual circumstance that is pretty unique to that character; whereas, for instance, an underdog that just has bigger obstacles might be a captain of the ship that has a whole crew and they’re facing a much bigger villain with a whole fleet. Technically, those are all underdogs, but we haven’t done anything that’s special to that if our captain is the main character, to make our captain seem unusually put upon or powerless. I think leaders are worth talking about because it is hard to make leaders an underdog, but not impossible.
Oren: Right. This is why Frodo is more of an underdog than Aragorn is, even though Aragorn is technically still fighting a much more powerful enemy, but Aragorn is also a badass and has experience and knows what he’s doing. Whereas Frodo is veryinexperienced and small and has even fewer abilities than Aragorn does, so it’s a spectrum of underdog, as it were.
Bunny: It does seem like the underdog heroes tend to have humble backgrounds where they don’t have very many means or much money, or they’re low in a society even by that society’s standard, and it seems like all odds are against them in a way that’s greater than just having fewer ships than the enemy.
Chris: Yeah, I think Frodo is interesting too, because in the context of the Shire, he is not an underdog, and the movies gloss over this, but in the books, he is basically an aristocrat.
Bunny: [giggles] Really?
Chris: The hobbit version of an aristocrat, yeah, and Sam is just his gardener, and there’s definitely a class difference between them, but of course the movie kind of gets rid of that, but then as soon as he leaves the shire. The idea is that he’s going with characters who are a lot more worldly and a lot more powerful, and now in that context he feels small.
Oren: But I think Bunny also had an important point about how, generally speaking, if you want a character to come across as an underdog, you’re gonna have them be from a less advantageous background, partly because that increases – makes the character more relatable for most of us. Most of us are not aristocrats.
Bunny: Or captains of space fleets, unfortunately.
Oren: So yeah, if an underdog ends up being a captain, it’s gonna be something like, uh, they scrounged and saved and bought a really junk ship that secretly turned out to be great anyway – don’t ask questions about that.
[group laughter]Bunny: Or they really had to fight hard to get into their captain school and really prove themselves in a way that the other kids didn’t or something.
Oren: Yeah, they had to walk uphill to Captain School both ways.
[group laughter]Bunny: I guess it’s a question partly of where the story starts because, if in that situation, I would think that they actually would not be a captain right away because by the time they become a captain, they’re not really an underdog anymore, but if that’s like book two, then you’ve already got attached to them in their underdog position where they were still scraping to put away money so that maybe someday they could be a captain in book one, for instance. Whereas if you want a character to start your story as a leader and still be an underdog, and I think the biggest reason to do this is – the trickiest thing with underdogs is giving them agency and letting ’em actually change things in the story. Whereas leaders are well positioned to actually make a difference and solve bigger problems, but I think that you need to make it so that their position of leader still seems precarious.
Oren: It can be precarious and you would also play up that being a leader is a responsibility and a burden. more than a cool thing that they have, but I’m not sure if that would help.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know if that makes them an underdog. It can be helped with sympathy if you do it well. I’ve, frankly, seen more than a few stories of ‘Oh, being this cool, powerful position is such a burden’. Yeah, that’s a showing versus telling problem. You’ve gotta show how it’s a burden not just talk endlessly about how it is a burden.
Chris: It’s hard being rich.
[group laughter]Bunny: You don’t understand the place where I usually get my nails done, just closed. I think the best thing you could do, honestly, is give them a position that nobody wants because it’s something that’s a complete disaster and as soon as it goes belly up, whoever’s leading it will take the fall.
Oren: Right! Like ‘Yield, you’ve been given a command – Yay! – It’s one of the tiny outposts in the middle of nowhere that no one cares about – Oh… – and hey, there’s super secret alien enemies that just happen to be out there. Have fun.’
Chris: They did that in Zootopia, too.
Bunny: So, I think Going Postal is a good example of this, right? Where Moist is given charge of the post office that has been defunct for like 40 years.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: It has two remaining employees that are still there, even though they haven’t gotten paid and it’s filled with undelivered mail, so it’s a complete disaster and it’s a position that nobody wants.
Oren: Plus his name is Moist, so that kind of makes him an underdog by default, I would argue.
[group laughter]Bunny: That’s a good point.
Chris: There are real situations in which, for instance, you have a company that’s failing and as a result, the board switches who the CEO is and finally give somebody, for instance, a woman or somebody who’s marginalized a chance at leadership, but now that person is expected to turn the company around, even though it’s the last white guy that got it in the position that it’s in now, and if it doesn’t get turned around, they take the blame. It’s like a real dynamic that happens.
Oren: The glass cliff that’s called, I love that term.
Chris: So that kind of situation, at that point, the leader is an underdog, even though they’re in a position of power, they’ve been set up to fail. If you have a character that you know is on the verge of getting fired for the right reasons, it can’t be because they’re undeserving.
Oren: It can’t just be ’cause they’re bad at their job.
Chris: I mean, Zootopia actually is a good example of this. Judy’s not really in a big position of power, but when she finally gets put on a case, her boss has been very unfair to her, and so he’s looking in it for an excuse to fire her.
Bunny: Yeah, he gives her like a day or two to solve this massive case.
Chris: But a bad example I think would be The Orville, because they try to make him an underdog, but it’s like completely his fault. Like he does not deserve this position. He does not deserve being Captain.
Oren: Chris, how can you say he doesn’t deserve to fail-up? Is that not every mediocre white man’s role? Is that not our birthright?
[Group laughter]Bunny: It’s the iron ladder that goes up the glass cliff.
Oren: You just keep making different materials and different things of height. I go, this is good. We keep this going.
Bunny: Yeah, it goes up above the glass cliff to the iron mountain. It’s so sturdy.
Chris: I think it’s also possible to put a character in a position of responsibility before they’re ready, but then you need a really good reason why they’re getting that position.
Oren: It shouldn’t feel like a reward. A lot of it depends on like the context of the story: ‘Hey, does this job actually seem hard and that really bad things are gonna happen to you and that maybe having it is worse than not having it, ’cause if so, you could be an underdog for getting it, but not if you’re Scott Lang getting made into Antman.’ That’s that. That’s just a job with all upsides, and so when the fact that he’s like, ‘Oh no, I’m not ready,’ Well, maybe you should let someone else do it then Scott.
Bunny: I do think one of the keys there is the presence of other people who should just be doing instead, like in Antman, where there’s clearly, but ‘oh, she can’t be a hero, she’s a woman who’s clearly way more qualified to do this.’, but if it’s a very necessary task and your hero is really, for some reason, the only person who can do it, then them having to do it before they’re ready…
Chris: I think Into the Spider-verse did a good job with this dynamic where Miles Morales is very clearly an underdog. He’s just a kid who randomly gets these powers and he is trying to get through school and he makes a fool out of himself at school by accident with his new powers – How embarrassing – then other people, other spider people show up and they’re all absurdly qualified, and we’re cheering for Miles. We’re like, ‘Miles, you must learn your powers,’ and they qualify him to be the one doing the heroism because everyone else is falling apart. I think it did good. It did a good job with that, where the hero is underqualified, but there is a genuine reason why they need to be the one to do a thing.
Oren: Yeah, there’re various spider stories are pretty good at that. Spider-Man does a, usually, pretty good job of seeming like an underdog as long as people stop like writing those, ‘Actually Spider-Man is the fifth strongest hero in the entire MCU,’. That’s a thing people like to do and no. No, it’s important that we not think about him that way or the story stops working.
Chris: Yeah, I really like the Into the Spider-verse depiction of Miles Morales and him being out of place at school. It’s just so perfect because again, so many people just pull these cartoonish bullies out of nowhere that come and just agro on the hero for no discerning reason and instantly start with violence in a very exaggerated depiction of what typical bullying looks like and it just feels very cheap and it feels like they’re not actually handling the issue responsibly, whereas I really think more skilled storytellers will take smaller issues and then make them feel like they matter. I think this is a great example because Miles Morales ends up going to a new school that his friends didn’t go to. They went to a different school, and so now he feels really out of place. It managed to bring that to life and make him feel like an underdog just because he feels different at the school and is not at home at the school without just being like, ‘Oh, I’m different because I have magical magic,’ and then every side character’s like, ‘Oh, the hero is so weird,’ and we haven’t actually shown anything that’s truly weird about the main character, except for maybe their cool magic, which nobody knows about.
Oren: One of the things about underdog heroes is that you have to be prepared to bridge this gap you’ve created between the underdog and whatever their opposition is, because sure, having a big gap makes the underdog more sympathetic, it makes it easier to relate to them. It builds tension. It’s good but, do you know how you’re gonna cross it? Because the reason it does all those things is because it looks like it’s gonna be hard to cross and if you aren’t, you can end up with something like The City We Became, where the bad guy is supposedly, basically, Cthulhu and the main characters are brand new and they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve only just gotten their powers. This seems like it’ll be really hard, but then every time Cthulhu attacks them, they spontaneously generate a new ability and beat Cthulhu. By the third time, it’s like, ‘Wow, I wonder if that’s gonna happen again – Oh, look, it did,’ because that story doesn’t have any insulation between the heroes and the villain.
And it’s a classic problem if all various urban fantasy TV shows have the same issue where the bad guys have nothing to do but show up and try to kill the hero. The hero can’t die, so they, the bad guys, run away and now they’re not scary anymore.
Chris: Yeah, this is why I think the farm boys ending up having to have a secret lineage tends to pop up so often, but that can like de-underdog them if you’re not careful, because if there’s a trial and they’re going to court and how will they pay the bills and suddenly they have all the money. They’re definitely not an underdog anymore, and this also isn’t much of a conflict anymore.
Oren: It’s very easy for that to feel contrived. In general, my take for the most reliable way to do this is to have the villain not immediately know who the hero is, so the hero is so insignificant that the villain does not even know their name at this point and that makes it much easier to give your hero time to get better until they’re actually ready to face the villain. The character of Sierra from Shadow Shapers does this really well – shoutout, that’s a novel, I’ll put that in the show notes – where she starts out with no magic at all and has been denied her magic ’cause thanks to the patriarchy, and she’s gotta learn really quick ’cause there’s an evil wizard on the loose. This makes her seem like a big underdog, makes her seem relatable, but the evil wizard isn’t going after her specifically, so she has some time to figure this stuff out. She doesn’t have to immediately beat him in the first chapter.
Chris: Yeah, giving your antagonist some other plan that does not involve killing the hero or, if you can manage it, giving them a good reason to kill the hero, but it has to be like a real intuitive reason, not a, ‘I wanna crush your spirit’. No reason is better than a bad reason, let’s put it that way. Or some other reason why the villain can’t just instantly smash them like a bug.
Bunny: Not knowing about them is a good way to do that. I was thinking of the Shape of Water. Where Eliza, is that her name? I think it is – is a disabled custodian in this government facility, people overlook her and so she has little or no social capital, and it takes a long time for the villain to realize that she’s even up to something.
Oren: I gotta admit, I had forgotten there was a villain in that movie.
Chris: There is a villain, but it’s mostly sexy Fishman.
Oren: I remember the Fishman romance. It is like ‘There was more to that movie than that’.
Chris: Yes, there was a whole external plot. There was a weird body horror with the fingers.
Oren: Ah!
Chris: I mean, I think another important thing about underdog heroes is again, how you manage allies that are more powerful than heroes, allies, mentors, secondary characters, because on one hand they can be really helpful in getting your underdog to a place where they can make a difference, right? That’s what the mentor is for, basically to give them skills, to give them equipment, whatever they need to actually participate in the story, but that can also turn around and be a problem if all of those characters are again, telling the underdog what to do. If they’re a hero, they have to figure things out for themselves, make their own choices. Taking care of all of the problems for them, which is something that we see repeatedly in many stories, especially when the hero is a young woman.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So, you need ways to allow them to help, but then just get them out of the way.
Oren: Yeah, I recommend killing them all the moment that they have fulfilled the use you needed for them in the plot. Just have them immediately self-destruct. Done. Solved that problem. Moving on.
[Group laughter]Chris: Acme, anvil falls from the sky. What it takes can depend on what kind of conflicts you have in your story. If everything is a fighting conflict, then you wouldn’t have a mentor who is just older or gets sick or injured and just not physically up to fighting. If you have social conflicts, you could have a situation where nobody trusts the mentor or powerful characters anymore, whereas you have a down to earth relatable hero that people might listen to. Sometimes you can have situations where the antagonist goes for your hero when they’re alone or the hero sees something that they need to intervene in when the other characters aren’t present, but generally you want some ongoing reason why they have a way to contribute and why they can make a difference and that they’re in the center of things, as opposed to having like your peasant character and then having your court politics and your peasant is still in their village and has no way to affect the court politics, which is a thing that sometimes happens in people’s manuscripts that has to be taken care of.
Oren: Yeah, that’s when you add another POV.
Bunny: Nooo, no, no.
Oren: Occasionally cut-back to your peasant character to assure us that the peasant is still the main character.
Chris: Oren, you gotta really resist the allure of the dark side. Okay.
Bunny: I don’t know, this might be a call for help.
Chris: No lightning, no four-stroke.
Oren: The call of the dark side is so much shorter. Well, I don’t even know if I would say easier, but definitely shorter. Definitely takes less consideration to figure out.
Bunny: So I was looking online to try to figure out how most people tend to define underdogs and who they consider to be underdogs, and I ran across quite a few characters that I don’t think are underdogs.
Oren: Oh yeah?
Bunny: Like Wade Watts from Ready Player One, like he’s got all of the aesthetics of an underdog. He’s poor and lives in a trailer or whatever, but the main conflict of the story, he is ridiculously overqualified for. He’s read or watched every eighties property ever and is always on top of the ball whenever there’s a challenge. He knows everything, so you can’t just be poor. I will say, the poverty, having read this years ago, before it was commonly mocked, I read this before, it was not cool. Part of the point of doing an underdog is to build sympathy for the main character and build that attachment, and I don’t necessarily think that just because they have the skills that they need to win the day. That makes them not an underdog because they still have that sympathy factor and some of that relatability, and a lot of times a character like this main character that attracts an audience will have both the candy and the spinach factors, right? They need some candy, they need some positive traits in order to justify why they’re the main character and bring a bright side. Bring a little bit of wish fulfillment so that it’s not just all doom and gloom. So, yes, it’s true that in the context of the virtual reality, he is definitely very capable and a lot of his downsides, his weaknesses, are negated. They do sometimes, switch back to the real world, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s not an underdog because a lot of the important things about underdogs, like building that sympathy, are definitely present in the book, even if you think it’s bad, this is still a technique it uses to engage readers.
Yeah. It’s also that he very quickly becomes rich when he wins the first challenge and then his home gets blown up, which sucks for him, I will admit, it does suck when your home gets blown up, but then he like moves to the big city where there’s no lag and buys expensive equipment and also a sex doll for some reason.
Oren: That’s fun times for everyone, but I would say that from, at least from my understanding of Ready Player One, I think that you are both right in that it is definitely setting him up as an underdog. We can question if it is doing that effectively. That sounds to me like it also wants to give him tons of candy and that kind of backfires in a lot of ways.
Bunny: But I would say that for most underdogs, the goal at some point in the story is for them to gain in status and get the cool things. The goal is for the audience to get attached to them as they’re an underdog and then want that thing, want that for them. Want them to level up, want them to get riches, so at some point they are going to not be so much of an underdog anymore usually, and maybe it happens early in Ready Player One, but at the same time, the setup Ready Player One uses is very similar to a lot of other stories that use underdogs.
Chris: Fair enough. Another one that came up was an Inigo Montoya.
Oren: From Princess Bride!
Chris: Hmm, he has a tragic backstory.
Bunny: But he seems to be a pretty equal swordsman to the guy he is trying to get revenge on.
Chris: We do establish that they’re working for, oh, what’s his face? Um, because he was an alcoholic and he was not doing well, and then he doesn’t have work. He goes and gets drunk again. So yeah, that one I would say at the very least, is subtle.
Oren: So in the movie, I have no idea what’s in the book. I’ve not read the book, but in the movie, at the beginning, he’s just an antagonist. I guess you could say he’s an underdog because Wesley is the best at everything.
Bunny: Underdog antagonists. Wow.
Chris: You can have underdog antagonists.
Oren: Yeah, that does happen, but also I don’t think it’s obvious how great Wesley is until after he’s beaten Montoya, and then at the end where they have to break it into the castle, a little bit but not really, ’cause by once they get in the door, it’s like, ‘Yeah, look, there’s a guy, a bunch of mooks,’ he takes care of him and now he’s gonna go fight a guy who we’ve never really established as being particularly good at sword fighting.
Bunny: Look, he has six fingers or something, and that means he’s got the good sword fighting gene.
Oren: He’s got that extra finger for really good pommel control.
Chris: I can identify ways he’s supposed to be sympathetic, but I feel like certainly if I were looking for, ‘Here’s some underdogs,’ I would not just pick him.
Bunny: Another one is Katniss, definitely, who I feel it’s similar to Wade and she’s actually very well equipped to win the Hunger Games.
Chris: Although one of the big plot points in the First Hunger Games book, yes, she’s definitely designed to have the right skillset, similar to Wade is, but we also make a big deal about money mattering and that they need sponsors. So yeah, I think that there’s definitely a balance between, we want a character to be an underdog, but they still do need a way to participate in the plot and succeed.
Oren: I think the Hunger Games does mess up a little bit in that it gives Katniss the right skills, but that it does not give its main antagonists for most of the Hunger Games, the privileged tributes, it does not give them the right skills. For some reason they’re all trained in close quarters combat as if that’s the main thing that matters in the Hunger Games, so I do think there is a little bit of that. This at least has a problem at the beginning where she’s trying to keep her family fed and also lives in a super oppressive regime, so that helps a bit, but yeah, the Hunger Games is definitely doing some sleight of hand of like ‘Just, I ignore the fact that this protagonist has exactly the skills necessary to win this game’.
Bunny: Yeah, I guess the thing that I’m associating with the underdog protagonist, which is maybe why Katniss and Wade both get to me a bit, is that I associate underdogs with needing to improve from their starting status, and neither of them really have to.
Oren: Katniss does have to improve her ability to fake a romance on camera.
[Group laughter]Bunny: That’s true. She does need to do that.
Oren: She’s really bad at that at the beginning, and she gets better by the end, so I think I love that journey for her.
Bunny: With cake camouflage guy.
Chris: I do think that is nice when we get to see a character improve and that could have definitely been something, I think, in Ready Player One, again, just the way the plot is set up where all of the important skills are knowing obscure trivia, I feel like that would’ve been a little bit hard, not that this is good. That would’ve been a little bit hard to bring Wade up to speed during the course of the story.
Bunny: Yeah, that could’ve made it worse actually.
Chris: Yeah, I think with Katniss Everdeen, I would probably keep her skills that are very useful, but then add additional skills that are just important for understanding the game and doing the right things out in the arena that she has to learn in addition, but yeah, I think Orin has a good point about what it’s supposed to be, is that there are career hunger games players, even though only one of ’em can live, but they’ve been prepared for this their entire life and so that is supposed to give them a huge advantage, and it’s not as big as we would expect considering.
Oren: And the Hunger Games definitely has it a little difficult, because the trick I would normally use to preserve an underdog protagonist are hard to make work in a big arena deathmatch, not impossible, but difficult because if the other tributes actually were good at the things that win, the Hunger Games, which are stealth, tracking, survival, stuff like that, Katniss would just be dead. It would be very hard to justify that she lives so long. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t do it. I can think of a few options, but we are running close to running out of time, so it might be a little late to get into those.
Bunny: Okay. Speed round. Two more. Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
Chris: Mmm, I’m gonna say no. She is a princess.
Bunny: She’s a princess.
Oren: She’s a princess, but her dad sucks.
Chris: Yeah, but I still feel like she gets to disobey him, and for the most part, the way that she, for instance, just doesn’t show up to the concert at the beginning of the movie, if we’re talking about the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, to me, that just speaks of a person who’s used to not having consequences for their actions. I’m gonna say no on that one.
Bunny: Now, Darrow from Red Rising.
Oren: Maybe for the first 20 pages, before he gets his super-training, right? And then he’s, before he becomes like a sup, a literal golden boy. Okay. Here’s the thing, Darrow should be an underdog, I think from a setup perspective. He is, because his house, even though this doesn’t make any sense, his house has way less stuff than every other house and his people don’t wanna obey him and stuff like that, even though he is personally really good and super skilled and good at everything. I think he could have been an underdog. The thing that makes Darrow not feel like an underdog is that he wins every challenge via a hidden plan turning point, which gives the impression that he can’t ever fail because anything that looks bad can just be revealed to actually be part of his plan the whole time.
Bunny: Sounds like he’s similar to Wade, right? There’s definitely, ‘I’m trying to evoke the underdog to give him sympathy in the beginning and get people to get attached to him’, but then really what we want is lots of candy for him.
Oren: Look, it’s hard to have underdogs win conflicts. Okay, I get it.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Bunny: Now what you need to do is make Darrow reference Monty Python.
Oren: Yeah, that would do it.
Chris: I think if we’re looking at underdogs comparing Ariel to Cinderella, right? Cinderella is definitely an underdog.
Bunny: Oh, they prototypical underdog.
Chris: The prototypical-underdog, exactly.
Oren: All right. Well, we are definitely out of time now. I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you would like us underdogs to become the overdogs, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: I think the overdogs are like a kind of levitating wolf, but before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast opening, closing theme The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.