The Mythcreant Podcast 477 – Giving Protagonists a Way to Contribute
Tension comes from problems that the characters have to solve, and if a character is important, they should contribute to solving the problem in question. But how will they contribute, exactly? This question can be difficult to answer, especially if you have a bunch of characters with different power levels on team good. Fortunately, we’ve got a few suggestions for you!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: …Oren…
Chris: …and…
Bunny: …Bunny.
Chris: Okay, quick. We all need to make sure we are contributing to this podcast, or the post author might decide we’re superfluous and erase our existence.
Bunny: Oh, no!
Chris: Oren, what’s your contribution?
Oren: I have one joke that I make all the time, and it’s the same joke, and it was really funny the first time, so it’ll probably be funny the next 500 times.
Chris: I see nothing wrong with this. Bunny?
Bunny: I’m the pretty lady who walks around and shows you the car you can win on the game show.
Chris: Ohh, very good.
Oren: That is very useful.
Chris: So, for me, is providing the intro enough? Am I done now?
Oren: You served a purpose early in the story, so that should work for the rest of it, right? You can just hang around for the rest of the story and not worry about anything.
Chris: Yeah. Or just, like, engage in active listening, just to remind people that I am still here. I haven’t disappeared, I swear. But I won’t actually provide any information, or offer any tips.
Bunny: We could just imagine you leaning forward and nodding intently. [Oren laughs]
Chris: Yeah, with the same body language every time, because we’ve got to change it up.
Bunny: It’s like when you’re playing a video game and the animation begins to loop, but it’s active, don’t worry.
Oren: Oh, it’s a podcast idle animation? [general laughter]
Bunny: Yeah. It comes with a track that goes, “Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah.”
Chris: [laughing] This time, we’re talking about how to give protagonists a way to contribute. Basically, the reason why is because you need every character to make a difference. So, from a plot perspective, you should not be able to cut a character out and have nothing change, right? That’s bad. They’re just not gonna feel like they belong there. They’re going to feel extra and useless.
And then, also, contributing helps make your secondary protagonist in particular more likable. When they help the main character, they really do come across better. Whereas if you have a side character that is constantly creating trouble for the main character, maybe they’re just always getting into trouble and the main character always has to bail them out, and they’re never actually helping anything, they get really annoying.
Oren: Why would you personally attack animal companions everywhere, Chris? [laughter]
Bunny: Like the lady showing the cars, they can just be cute, right?
Chris: If they’re cute, and they’re not contributing, but they’re also not hindering…. but animal companions, you also don’t really have to develop them or invest in them that much, like they’re not there. [laughing] Which is a low…I think we can usually do better than that, but I’ve seen worse. The other nice thing about getting your protagonist to contribute is that it just helps distribute the candy among Team Good, or Team Evil–in some cases, stories, generally not narrated stories, film stories, will have a Team Evil. I’m thinking about like the beach episode, which I know Oren hates the beach episode of Avatar, the Last Airbender.
Oren: I don’t love it. It’s not my favorite. [Oren and Chris laugh]
Bunny: Refresh my memory?
Chris: So this is when we have an episode where Zuko and Azula…they all hang out on the beach.
Bunny: They brood.
Chris: Yeah. In some situations, if you have a Team Evil with charismatic characters, it may be helpful to also make sure they’re all contributing, just because anybody who does not contribute, they feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick. They feel like they’re not being treated as well by the story, they’re getting more spinach, that kind of thing. And yeah, it can create resentment against the characters who are doing all the contributions, and make people sympathize with a character that never gets to contribute, or, again, make somebody annoyed with the person who doesn’t contribute, because they’re weighing everybody down and never helping.
Oren: If you introduce a team of characters, different people in the audience are gonna like different members of the team. And if those team members just become useless, then it sucks to watch, or read. This is a special topic to me, because it was one of the first times when I was a kid when I, like, distinctly noticed and identified a problem that was making me enjoy a story less.
Because I used to watch a lot of Cartoon Network anime when I was a kid, and I always noticed that Dragon Ball Z introduced this big group of characters, and then over the course of the show, a bunch of them just stopped mattering. But they were still there, like they never left. They just hung around and didn’t do anything, and I hated it, so much. Because naturally every character I picked as my favorite would end up being one that became useless.
Bunny: And the rest is history…
Oren: I could not catch a break. I was so upset. Okay, fine. This new guy, he’s got a sword and he’s also a Saiyin, so he’s gotta stay important for the whole show, right? No, he doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not Goku. Oh God, please stop. I hate you all.
Bunny: And thus, a critic was born. [Oren laughs]
Chris: It also helps to distinguish between the characters and remember the characters. I’m thinking of The Bad Batch, which is a Star Wars cartoon, where in the beginning, the character Echo just doesn’t do anything. And the problem is that there’s a repetitive skillset between him and Tech. They’re both like tech people. And so it’s clear that the writers just don’t know how to help give him contributions. And so he just fades into the background like he’s not there. And he’s much less memorable, as a result. And we don’t really get to know him. We don’t remember what his personality is like, because we don’t ever hear him talking as much, and that kind of thing. How a character contributes can definitely help distinguish them in the group.
Oren: And–spoilers for the second season of Bad Batch–but that’s the reason why he leaves for a while, and then they kill Tech at the end of the season. Because now, when Echo’s not around, we don’t have to deal with this problem of he and Tech competing for the same content, because he’s off doing something else. And then Tech is the obvious choice to die, because it’s tragic, we like him, but we also have a replacement ready. We still have a tech character, someone who does tech problems. So when Tech dies, the team doesn’t lose anything that we need to make the story work, which is what would happen if we lost any of the other characters.
Bunny: Yeah, except for he was the only one who had just a hint of romance. I’m like, why…
Oren: I’m not saying I liked his death…
Bunny: …and why did you bait me with a romance? And then… [laughing]
Oren: I’m just saying that’s the reason they picked him to die, because they had a replacement ready. [laughing]
Bunny: Is there any story that you think didn’t have enough team members?
Oren: Didn’t have enough team members? Hmm.
Bunny: Yeah. There’s probably a lot of stories where you’re like, “that team member was unnecessary,” but was there one where you felt they were lacking?
Oren: Supernatural.
Bunny: [laughing]
Oren: Supernatural, it definitely became noticeable after a while that they would recruit allies, and then those allies would just leave, and sometimes they would kill them off, and then sometimes they wouldn’t. And it just got to feel strange, after a while? It just, it seems like they should know more people by now.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that–Supernatural had like 15 seasons, right? And so we’ve got these two brothers, and I think the problem is that after a while, they just end up rehashing their issues, or they become such different people in order to keep their interactions fresh. It’s like, how much interpersonal drama can you do with just two people over 15 seasons, you know? [laughing]
Oren: I watched a mere seven seasons, and…
Bunny: [dramatic outraged voice] Fake fan!
Oren: You could already see they were at a point where they were just switching off between Sam and Dean of which one would have the arc of going too far this season. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Who is it? Is Sam going too far this season, or is it Dean who’s going too far this season? Because they’re always doing that arc.
Chris: So potentially if you had, like, a novel series, and you liked a lot of interpersonal stuff, two characters might not be enough, and you would probably have room to bring in other skills, another person, that kind of thing.
If you have one person, a story could definitely work with one person, like The Martian, for instance. But sometimes the second person is really helpful in creating some contrast, making some foils of each other, and bringing somebody to life. Yeah, there are instances, but it’s much more likely to go towards the other end.
Oren: There are a few stories that I can think of where the team doesn’t really feel complete until they add a certain character. But I’m not sure that’s an issue of there not being enough of them. Like with Avatar, honestly, watching the first season of Avatar now is a little bit of a chore, because Toph’s not there, and I love Toph so much that she really completes the group. So having her not there feels like something is missing.
Chris: But that might be because–you might not have noticed the first time you watched.
Oren: If Toph had never been there, or if I had never gotten to the second season, I doubt I would’ve felt like there weren’t enough characters in Avatar.
Bunny: I feel like bringing up Toph also raises an important thing with characters, which is that they need to not just contribute different things, but also feel like different people. Which should go without saying, but Toph is memorable, not only because she’s the earthbending master, but she’s got, like, an attitude, and she’s got a different appearance, which, some teams don’t manage that.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a character who overlaps with another character, you have to really have a lot of that to go around. If you’re gonna have multiple fighters on your team, you need to have a lot of fighting.
Chris: I think a really good example of that is actually how many information gathering characters you have in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because, you wouldn’t think that would be important, but anytime you have a monster of the week episode, usually part of that is figuring out, “Okay, what is this new monster we just encountered? How do we defeat that monster?” And so there is research, or information gathering, that has to basically be done for most episodes. And so a bunch, a whole bunch of the characters, they just do it in different ways, and that makes them more distinctive. Like, Giles looks at books. Whereas Buffy, she also gathers information, but she does it by scouting, and therefore going directly into danger, because she’s also a fighting character. Spike networks, right? He knows all the demons…
Bunny: …he has on LinkedIn. [Oren laughs]
Chris: So he talks to them, and then, some people have psychic powers, science, there’s a whole bunch of different ways, but it’s all about finding clues and information. And because the show has so much of that, they have room for a whole bunch of characters that do that, in different ways. Whereas, if you have a story that’s lots of fights and doesn’t have much conversation, you might only have room for one social character.
Oren: Yeah. And then when it comes to, like, aesthetic, or personality, or attitude, I don’t think you really want characters that double up on that unless you’re specifically trying to contrast them. If you have two goths on the team, you would probably wanna show what makes them different kinds of goths, as opposed to just having them both be goths, because then it would feel like they’re cramping each other’s style.
Bunny: Yeah, and it also–style, attitude, appearance, those sorts of things can’t be the only thing making them different. Otherwise you’ve just got, like, “fighter, but this one’s wearing a different hat”.
Chris: Going back to Bad Batch, let’s say we have Tech and Echo. If they had lots of conflicts involving technology, and then they, for instance, made Tech so that he, like, makes things or repairs things, and Echo does all of the hacking, does all the software, and Tech does all the hardware, or something, that could have worked. And I think the issue was that the show didn’t have enough need of a technology character to fill two roles.
Bunny: Yeah, subspecialties help.
Oren: And it becomes easier with similar roles, again, if you are putting them into some kind of contrasting or competitive situation. Like in Lord of the Rings, Aragorn and Boromir work decently because even though they have very similar roles and contributions to give, they are somewhat antagonistic towards each other. Boromir, at least, is not super into Aragorn until the end, spoilers. And Gimli and Legolas don’t really become super prominent until the second book when they start, like, getting into competitions to see who can kill the most Orcs, right? Like in the first book, they’re both just kind of there. They’re hanging around, they’ll be there eventually.
Chris: If you need more things for characters to do, oftentimes the kind of support roles are easy to overlook, but you can make them relevant. So that includes healing, repairing people’s equipment, getting people fed, or logistics things, like mapping the area, being a guide. All those kinds of things that support all of the other characters in a team.
Bunny: Think about making an RPG party. You’ve got the sneaky one, you’ve got the fighty one, you’ve got the magic one.
Chris: Yeah. Don’t forget the social one. In some stories, social is like the equivalent of fighting. Where there are lots of social conflicts, and actually, Game of Thrones, for all its fights, it’s surprisingly like this, right? There are tons of social conflicts in Game of Thrones, and lots of different social characters who engage in social conflicts in different ways. So Cersei is always, like, leveraging her power against other people, where Margaery is always using charm to get people on her side.
Oren: Yeah, so that’s what I call a shared task type situation, where there is a thing that your characters engage in so often that you can have multiple characters who do that thing and not have them step on each other. So in Game of Thrones, you can easily have multiple political characters. Now, of course, in Game of Thrones, they’re often on different sides. But even if some of them are on the same side, there is so much political drama in Game of Thrones that you can have multiple characters on the same team doing that, and it’s not so much of a problem.
With support characters, the two things to look out for are, one, make sure to show that their support actually matters, and show how and why it does. Because in theory, the character Holly in Lockwood & Co. is a support character, but her support doesn’t matter. Like the story just doesn’t know how to show why it matters. And so she’s just around for most of the story.
Chris: I do think that one of the things to think about that, is, do you need the character to stay in one place, or move, go into danger, right? Because Lockwood & Co. is very much a story that really focuses on the characters going into danger. And it does have scenes where they’re at their, like, home base, but a lot of the important stuff actually happens at danger. And so, the problem with Holly just doing her support stuff is it leaves her at home base, and she doesn’t travel with them for all of those dangerous scenes. So sometimes it’s something that you need to think about. Okay, if Holly’s providing support, how does she provide it? Is there a kind of essential support she needs to provide while they are out at a haunted house getting rid of some ghosts that might fit the urgency of the situation? Maybe some of the support keeps people safe in those emergency situations, and she has a reason to be there. And then you can see how she helps in an emergency, and that makes a difference.
Oren: And you also wanna make sure you don’t add a support character when you’re planning to do a bunch of stories that depend on the support not working. And I’m not only talking about Troi from The Next Generation, but I am definitely talking about Troi from The Next Generation. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Because so many Next Generation plots depend on protagonists having, like, serious mental health problems that they don’t get any support for. Which is weird, that’s not how we think of The Next Generation, but there are a surprising number of plots where that’s the case. And so as a result, Troi cannot help them, because if she helped them, then their problem would be resolved, and then we wouldn’t have a plot anymore.
Chris: I can think of at least two episodes where Troi literally goes to Captain Picard and tells Picard that he has to do it, instead of her. This person needs, you know, this boy from this super patriarchal planet needs, like, a man to tell him, give him directions. He won’t listen to me. Or, I think there was another one with Data. Data won’t admit that he’s having emotional problems because he doesn’t have emotions, but he is, and he needs you to do it, Picard, or something. [laughing] And it’s just, it’s sad, because it’s like, why don’t we let Troi do her job? But you wouldn’t have an interesting variety of internal conflicts, if Troi always fixed it by just sitting down and doing her job.
Oren: Yeah. And when they really want someone to talk to a more nurturing support character in TNG, they almost always use Guinan. And, like, I get it. I like Whoopi Goldberg, too. So I’m not even mad that they wanna use Guinan for that role, but, like, you have a main character whose job this is…why. [laughter] You wanna be careful with that one. [Oren laughs]
Chris: If you do have a big team, and okay, sometimes this happens, where, you’ve done the thing, you’ve added too many characters, right? And now you’re like in book two [laughter] and it’s hard to get rid of them, and you’re trying to figure out how to make the best of it. In general, we try to keep characters together, but for really big, important conflicts, like big fights or battles, or something like that, splitting characters up does really help.
I’ll give them a task, something like, one group distracts people–the enemy–while the other one attacks something or steals something. One group sneaks in somewhere, unlocks it to let the others in. One group, maybe, if they’re doing a con, dresses up as security, while the other ones act like they’re thieves, that kind of thing. So, if you have lots of people, and you have to find a way for them all to contribute during big conflicts, it can be helpful to think of a strategy that requires more than one role that’s happening simultaneously, and then split them into smaller groups. And then once they’re in the smaller groups, you may need to think about, okay, they’re sneaking in somewhere. Let’s give it a lock that has to be picked, for our lock picking character, and then let’s give us a guard that we have to talk our way past for the social character, to split it into multiple stages, or something like that.
Oren: What you have to do then, is you have to plan a plot that is robust enough to require a bunch of people.
Bunny: A plot? I don’t know…
Oren: Yeah, you have to bring plot into your characters, and you’ve got characters in my plot. Oh no!
Bunny: What is it driven by though? [everyone laughing]
Chris: Well, that’s how you make a character-driven story, you just add more characters! [laughter]
Oren: Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left! But like the Temeraire books, for example, have a lot of characters, and there’s a funny thing where they graduate the extras on the dragon crew to named main character status over time, so you end up with more and more of them. And it does a pretty good job, because that’s like an epic war story, so there’s a lot that needs to be done.
A story that doesn’t do as well is Shadowshaper, which, I like Shadowshaper, it’s good, but it does have a problem where the main conflict is that the protagonist needs to beat an evil wizard in a magic fight. And there just isn’t really much for the other characters to do, but there are a lot of other characters.
Chris: Yeah, I’ve sometimes seen these stories where it feels like what the writer really wants to do–I think in that case of Shadowshaper, it felt like the author really wanted to highlight the value of the community, which involves bringing in lots of characters, but then he didn’t have enough for all of those characters to do. And so they just…
Oren: You need a community action! What does it take a community to solve? Right? That’s the question you need to be asking yourself at that point.
Bunny: Raising a child. [Oren laughs]
Chris: Another tricky situation is if you have a super humble character in a group of heroes. Which sometimes we like those dynamics, and this is like the Frodo character, who is, “Oh, I’ve fallen in with all of these great heroes, but I’m just a normal farm boy.” [laughing] Whatever you have. How do you let that character, especially if this character is your main character, how do you give that person something to do?
I have a post for this, but obviously, Lord the Rings does it by giving Frodo a special, basically magical role, where Frodo is the best person to carry this ring. Other people can’t seem to handle it, so Frodo does it. So you can do something like that. Any magical ability that is special really helps. Of course, that makes your character less humble, so you may not want that.
Those support tasks, again, we were talking about the fact that you do have to find ways that they matter. But I think of it this way, one, let’s say your support character is cooking for people. When might cooking really be crucial? Maybe in situations where everybody gets poisoned. Or maybe in situations where it’s actually that food is starting to get scarce, and you have to get creative. Or if they’re cleaning, maybe they find something that was lost, or repair something that everybody assumed couldn’t be repaired, or what have you. So those support tasks, they’re a little bit trickier to work with, but you can make them work, and it still leaves your character feeling humble, even if they make a big difference.
And then you can also–again, this is ad hoc–what you really want the most is a skill that can reliably give them a way to contribute, for every character, ongoing. So if you have to depend on how you arrange the specific events in the plot to make them matter, that’s gonna be really hard because yeah, you can do it one or two times. It’s gonna get exhausting and logistically impossible if you rely on it all the time, but for a couple times, you could have, you know, nobody else is there, right? Your humble character has gone off by themself to go fetch some water. They run into an antagonist, for instance. That kind of thing. It’s just, you can’t rely on that all the time, and which is why it’s really important to give characters the right skillset so that you have a reliable way of letting them contribute.
Oren: Yeah, and that’s why so many humble characters have an arc where they, like, get more skilled, or learn how to use their powers, or something.
Chris: Right. That’s also just good wish fulfillment.
Oren: It is. [laughter] You can also use a social connection as a way to make a character prominent when they otherwise wouldn’t be. This is like a common one, is that the character inherits something.
Bunny: Ah, a nepotism character.
Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. Because now they’re responsible for it, whether they wanted it or not. “Congratulations, you are the king.” “Well, I don’t know how to be king.” “Well, deal with it,” or, “Congratulations, you’ve inherited this spooky ghost property,” or something. Now, the trick with that one is to not then surround them with friends who know how to handle the situation. Which is the thing I see authors do sometimes where they’re like, I know, I’ll make my main character a fish outta water who inherited like an evil spy business. And then I’ll give them like a bunch of spy friends who will just tell them what to do.
Bunny: Yeah. The main character has to be in that position. Even if they’re a fish out of water for story purposes, they need to seem like they should be there.
Oren: And if you have them, if the more experienced characters are people they can’t trust, then you can solve that problem, right? It’s just, if you give them like a random connection that makes them important, but then have a much more capable character who they can rely on, then they never have to do anything for themselves.
Chris: Strategizing is probably one of the skills that is most associated with your main character. Not always. There are some exceptions, like in Avatar, the Last Airbender, Aang isn’t really the strategist, but he’s important because he’s the Avatar, and so everybody trusts him, and puts a responsibility on him anyway, and that frees up Sokka to do the strategizing. But in most stories, your main character is like the idea person. And what really makes a difference is them coming up with plans and making decisions, and that can easily go away if you surround them with characters who are just a lot more experienced. It becomes harder to be, like, okay, how come my main character can come up with a good idea or a solution for this?
Oren: Yeah, that was the problem with The Northman, where he was supposed to team up with this lady, and she was supposed to use brains, and he was supposed to use brawn, but he was also the brains, ’cause he’s the main character, and the main character is usually the one coming up with the ideas. So she just was also in the movie.
Chris: That was super irritating. I think probably what they should have done in that situation is had her come up with plans, him start to follow the plan, and then something goes wrong. And then he has to do the improvising, when something goes wrong.
Oren: Yeah, that…I think that would’ve been better than what they did. [Oren and then Chris laugh] You can also make this easier for yourself if you create a setting that has prescribed niches that give characters specific skills that you know are gonna be important because that’s how you’re setting up the story. This is your basic Star Trek scenario, where everyone’s got a job, and because those jobs are all on the ship, they matter, presumably. You just need to know, make sure you know what those jobs are. Like, no one actually knows what Ops does in Star Trek. It’s just the other guy, who isn’t steering the ship.
Bunny: They op, come on.
Oren: Yeah, they op. [Chris laughs] The only ops character who ever does anything is Data, because he’s also an android, and so he’s super overpowered. But if you look at the other Star Trek shows, the ops character is just hanging out. And sometimes he has a Russian accent, so that’s fun, I guess. [Bunny laughs softly]
Chris: At the same time, we still need, if they’re part of the main cast, when there’s an actual something that goes wrong in the Enterprise–they also still need to be involved in that. It doesn’t help if they, for instance, have a routine thing they do on the ship, like they’re the janitor, and there was no role for the janitor to play when something goes wrong. You can be vague what the ops person does. I think the ops person is just like whatever miscellaneous thing that we could use somebody for.
But we have a way, you know, there’s a pilot, for instance, and there’s a way in many of the conflicts where there’s some tricky piloting somebody has to do, because they’re sneaking a shuttle onto a planet, or what have you. And you have the chief engineer, and there’s again, in a lot of conflicts, there’s damage to the ship, in which case the chief engineer becomes really important. And having…the first officer one is probably the trickiest one to make work. It only works if they, again, have an away mission. So they have one person commanding the ship, and one commanding the away mission. The problem was with TNG, they always wanted Picard, after a while, to be in the middle of the action, and so Riker didn’t end up going onto as many away missions as he should have.
Oren: Yeah, that’s why most of the Star Trek shows give the first officer another job. Because otherwise, they’re just the emergency backup captain, and that’s just not much to hang your hat on. And Riker absolutely has that problem. There are a lot of episodes where Riker just has nothing to do because Picard is there. And, I mean, Chakotay has it so much worse in Voyager. Because he’s got nothing, and Janeway does all the captain-y stuff, and there’s nothing for Chakotay to do. But if you look at the original series, Spock is also the science officer, in Deep Space Nine, Kira is also the Bajoran officer, so she does all the Bajoran politics stuff. And in Enterprise, as much as I hate to praise Enterprise, T’Pol is the science officer again, so you don’t have to worry about that. Although Enterprise then has it so they give us a specific cool pilot guy who has been in space before, and has all this experience, and then they have Archer do all the piloting stuff.
Chris: They basically take all the piloting away from their actual pilot so that they can make their asshole captain do more cool things. Instead of their, like, one Black character.
Oren: Yeah, that was bad. I did not like that.
Chris: It was really bad.
Oren: All right, so with that sufficiently big “oof”, I think it is time to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you feel we contributed to the character roles in your story, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants
Oren: Perhaps we at least contributed an “oof”. [general laughter] Before we go, I want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. And it should go without saying, that all of these people contribute to Mythcreants being here to annoy you in podcast form. [laughter] So we will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself,” by Jonathan Coulton.