As much as you love your hero, maybe they shouldn’t succeed at absolutely everything they try. A little failure once in a while can add variety, not to mention tension and believability. But what should actually happen when your protagonist fails? How do you keep the story moving and prevent the audience from getting frustrated? We’ve got answers in this week’s episode – plus more description of time loops than you might expect.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.

[Intro Music]

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren

Chris: …and…

Wes: Wes.

Chris: Unfortunately, we’ve already failed to record this podcast several times, but it didn’t move anything forward. It didn’t really make a difference. We just had to try again. You know, you’ll never know or hear about it.

Oren: It was very frustrating, though, let me tell you that.

Wes: The emotional cues made it seem like we were accomplishing something though.

Chris: Just didn’t feel like anything we did made a difference.

Oren: But yet it seems like it should have, though. Cause we spent a lot of time on it.

Wes: A lot of time on it.

Oren: Maybe we could say we personally grew as people.

Wes: Because something has to happen if we waste that much time.

Chris: Maybe we got clues as to why we kept failing.

Oren: It was cause we kept forgetting to hit the record button and eventually we noticed.

Chris: Or maybe we were just on a time loop. When we had to do something very specific in our podcast before we were able to move on.

Wes: Like Sisyphus, we are bound to podcasting.

Chris: So this time we’re gonna talk about protagonist failures. Basically what happens when the protagonist fails something they try to do during the story. And there’s several storytelling concerns that generally pop up during failures. So we figured we’d give you some tips so you could avoid failing at failing. Cause if you can’t succeed at failing, what can you succeed at?

Oren: All right. I, for one thing, I’ve read Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, and I know that protagonists should never fail because that’s not a Chad thing to do, and apparently that’s what protagonists are supposed to be according to Save the Cat!.

Chris: Does he really say they’re never supposed to fail?

Wes: Wait, does he also call them Chads?

Oren: He does not, no. Those were some creative licenses. What he actually talks about…

Chris: I would believe it if you said it, because some of the things in there…

Oren: No, but the section he actually has that gives me the impression he doesn’t think protagonists should ever fail is that he has this whole thing about how the protagonist always needs to be in charge. And he means that literally, like the protagonist needs to be the highest ranking person around. Like he can’t be lower on the org chart than anybody else. And it just feels very like, my character must be the ultimate Gigachad at all times or I won’t feel good about it. Which is weird cause that’s definitely not a lot of the movies he’s describing. If I started naming the inconsistencies between the things he says you should do and the movies he says do them, we would be here literally all day.

Chris: Sounds like the other thing Snyder says, as far as “I have a vague idea of some storytelling concept, but I actually haven’t thought through how to give people advice on it. So I’m gonna do something that is, like, roughly correlated, but really just is missed.”

Oren: Yep. No, that there’s a lot of that in Snyder’s book. He occasionally can see that there is something going on, but he doesn’t really understand why, and so he ends up giving at best overly restrictive advice. The other thing that made me think of the Chad analogy is that he has this weird thing about primal motivations, which are basically all about sex, but he doesn’t say that most of the time. He phrases it as “continuing your DNA.”

Chris: Everything has to be primal.

Oren: Yeah, which is like the creepiest way to say that. So anyway, moving on from Save the Cat!, I have failed to not talk about Save the Cat! again. I keep trying to not do that and I have failed.

Chris: Every time in the time loop Oren does this, it’s, you know how every time loop has like specific events that you see repeated over and over again, so you know where you are in the time loop? Yeah. It’s Oren complaining about Save the Cat!, it’s one of our first events.

Okay, so why have failure? First question, why do we do this? Why can’t the protagonist just succeed at everything? And it’s not impossible to make a plot where the protagonist does succeed at what they try. It’s just harder in some ways.

Oren: Right, usually the reason just comes down to if your protagonist always succeeds at everything they try to do, it will seem too easy, and tension and satisfaction will suffer. And characters who always succeed usually have too much candy, which will also reduce attachment, at which point you’re basically just running on novelty and that’s only gonna work for so long. Assuming you had any to start with.

Wes: Yeah, I was, I’ve been thinking about when you said protagonists should never fail, and I was thinking about action movies and like certain actors who put it into their contracts that their characters cannot really fail. Like they can’t get beat up too hard, right? Cause it could ruin their status as actors and then they go and ruin their status themselves by things they say and do. But I’m thinking about those kinds of movies and it’s like, they don’t fail, but they’re just succeeding at things that don’t quite matter. And I wonder if that’s the same kind of thing.

Oren: Yeah. Usually when actors do stuff like that or when writers have a character that they just can’t bear to see actually fail, what they will usually do is those characters will still fail in some capacity, but it will be… any responsibility they had for the failure will be erased or heavily hidden. It’ll be like, okay, I was trying to rescue this guy from the prison, but I couldn’t because there were 5 million guys in the way and I could only fight 1 million of them.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: That sort of thing.

Chris: Yeah, there are ways. We can talk more. But yeah, there’s ways to have the protagonist fail, but still make them look tough. Or make them not just, there’s a difference between failure and the ability to just snap your fingers and have everything be the way you want it to be, right? Which is partly where agency comes into play. But as far as successes, you can, every time your protagonist has a success, it generally means you have to do something to restore the tension. Because them succeeding usually means they’re a step closer to victory, or things have gotten easier because they succeeded and it makes it look like they’re more likely to succeed in the future just because they have a good track record. So you have to put in something in the plot to make them head into danger or have something else go wrong or do something to restore the tension.

And I think in a movie length, you could probably continually have the protagonist succeed maybe, and get away with that. But the longer the story is, the harder that might be, especially, and again, there’s a difference between “do they succeed” and “do they succeed easily.” That’s definitely gonna make a difference. So if they fail, that can be easier because you don’t have to do as much to keep the tension up. You don’t have to put in a plot device right there usually, and if they don’t have a constant track record of success, it just can make it feel more likely that they’re gonna fail in the future.

Oren: So this brings to mind an interesting contradiction that I’ve run into where if your character never fails, they often, audiences don’t tend to like that because it feels like the character is invincible or can’t fail and everything’s too easy or what have you. And this is especially true in longer stories like novels or TV shows. But at the same time, I have found that audiences get very easily frustrated with your character making mistakes.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: I have a scene in the novel that I’ve been working on for a million years, and maybe I’ll be done with that soon. Who knows? I have a scene, probably the one that I’ve revised more than any other scene, is the scene where the protagonist makes a serious mistake. And plays into her enemy’s hand and things go really wrong. And I’ve had to revise that scene so many times because people keep reading it and getting frustrated and they’re like, no, “why isn’t she doing this? And that’s the wrong thing. I hate it so much!” And if they like the character, they don’t like it because they feel, they identify with her and now they feel like they’re making a mistake and if they didn’t like the character, they also don’t like it because now it feels like I’ve validated all the things they said about this character not being, like, deserving of protagonist status. I think I finally got it to a place where it’s working, but that, wow, that was a surprising amount of work.

Chris: [sarcastic] Oren, this is just what you deserve for getting your readers emotionally invested in your story.

Wes: How dare you?

Oren: Yeah. I guess it was my own fault really.

Chris: They want the protagonist to win. Geez.

Oren: Yeah. So that is, in my experience, the most difficult kind of failure is your protagonist making a bad choice.

Chris: I will say though, and we’ll talk about, I have some tips for that. But in your case, it was actually interesting because one of the things that you did is you made it, instead of her just losing control, you basically turned it into a moral dilemma. Where she had to make a strategic choice about what was most important to her, and that definitely made the reception better because she was, it was less frustrating if she had a reason to choose that. And decided that she could not in good conscience do what she had been planning to do.

Oren: To a certain extent I cheated, is that I made it not an issue like a poor choice or an issue of bad judgment. I made it a moral dilemma with no good answer. And you know, she picked the one that was most important to her. And that still frustrated a couple of people, but it was certainly easier to get them to accept it than when I was trying to write it as she just made a genuine mistake and did something that she shouldn’t have done. So that was just, that was much harder, and I still think that you should be able to do that. It’s just very challenging.

Chris: Right. And you could consider that a failure if you want. On one hand she did what she intended to do, so we might not call that a failure. At the same time, she still had an objective she did not succeed at because she was not willing to do what it took. Eh, we could call that a failure, even though through a different lens it’s a moral dilemma.

Oren: Yeah. I would call it a failure because she didn’t get the thing she was after, but it’s not a poor judgment failure, right? I made it into another kind of problem. I made it into a less extreme version of the “I could only fight 1 million guys, but there were 5 million guys” scenario.

Chris: Going back to what failures are for, besides tension, which is usually what you’re concerned with most of the time, cause we always have to manage tension, keep tension up during the story. But as you mentioned, teaching the protagonist lessons, right? If they’re on a character arc, a lot of times failure is very instructive. And can help them do better next time. You can set up for a nice payoff later where they fail to do something and that thing is, “oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just do this thing, but I’m always failing.” And then when they finally succeed later in the story, right, we get a good payoff for that. In addition to the lessons, if you wanna send your audience a message, we’ve talked about tragedies before. The idea that at the climax, the hero just fails and we’ve got like a cautionary tale. And those stories are generally not as popular, but they can send really strong messages. And then also if you’re an edgelord.

Wes: Most importantly.

Chris: Or if you have any other dark themes, right? There could be other things like you want to send a message about dealing with regret or guilt, for instance. That would be a reason to use failures.

Oren: Shall we talk about the potential problems that your protagonist failing can cause in the story? The most obvious one is that if your character fails a lot, the story can just get too dismal. And I’m not just talking about The 100.

Chris: The 100 does surprisingly good with its failures, though.

Oren: It does. The 100 avoids the other problem with failures, which is that if by default, often when the character fails, it just means they didn’t get the thing they needed for the plot to move forward. And so now you’re just stuck and all right, now what? There’s no, you don’t have movement, and so it just feels like the story is paused for a while. You try to find a way around whatever the roadblock is, whereas The 100 is very good at using failures to also advance the story, just not in a way the protagonists wanted.

Chris: The 100 uses the Plan B trick a lot. There’s different ways to keep the plot moving, but that’s one. Cause you need to have the failure make a difference, right? It should never just put the characters back where they started. So you have to figure out a way that this failure changes the trajectory of the plot while still keeping it moving. And one way is, okay, the heroes have a plan B. They try their safe option, that’s been eliminated. Now they have to get desperate, and then it’s nice to add something in addition to that. Because of their failure, the villain is onto them. So basically, they have to face a consequence every time they try and fail. That’s important for tension because if you have heroes that can just keep trying over and over again and it costs them nothing, tension will drop. This is why in a time loop story, usually pretty quickly after we get past the novelty stage, some kind of urgency is gonna be established. There’s gonna be some limit for how many times the loop can happen, so that tension stays up. Because having a situation where we can just trial and error, just brute force this and do it over and over again, will kill your tension.

Oren: Yeah. If it feels like they have infinite time to solve a problem, then they’ll solve it eventually.

Chris: So every time your protagonists try and fail, they do need to face some kind of consequence for that.

Oren: And this has been a problem in old school RPG design for a long time now. And fortunately, the state of the field outside of the really big games like D&D has mostly figured this out. But for a long time RPGs had this real problem where you failed a roll and then what? You just, okay, you just didn’t get the thing you wanted, so you’re just standing there. Do you try again? What do you do at that point? And it’s really frustrating. Basically, nobody enjoys that experience. I did have one person try to tell me that, no, it’s actually fun because then you try to come up with a different plan. But that’s not my experience of that.

Chris: No, players give you their first plan. That’s the plan they thought of. They really struggle if you take that away and make them think of another one.

Wes: Yeah, whoever would say that it should go that way clearly just hasn’t played a game where you can roll low, roll a failure, but accomplish something and then have the game master introduce a complication, right? And it’s suddenly, oh, something new to play, like a new puzzle piece to work out. That’s infinitely better.

Oren: Yeah. That’s basically the fail forward, is the catch-all term for that philosophy. And that’s basically the default now in any indie game. It’s very rare to find a new game outside of one of the established lines that doesn’t have some form of fail forward. At this point, it’s weird if you don’t have it.

Chris: So we talked about having a plan B for avoiding that. Going back to where we started and just doing it, trying again. Having the villain do something that the protagonist has to respond to that ultimately moves things forward. You can move the plot forward just by escalating the situation and leading to a final confrontation. For instance, the protagonist fails. As a result, the villain captures somebody. Now the protagonist has to rescue that person. Or something else. The villain moves a step forward. Now the protagonist has to act to prevent the worst from happening. That’s another way to keep things moving forward. And finally, you can also do the silver lining, right? Okay. So we failed at our main objective, but a new opportunity appeared while we were doing that. We met a new person. We got a new clue, right? We got some new ideas. And now we have a different pathway to pursue.

Oren: That’s part of the jagged, ascending line of tension that we’ve talked about in other places where as the story moves forward, it should simultaneously feel like a conclusion is drawing nearer, but also that it will, it is less likely that conclusion will be favorable. And that’s tricky. That’s hard to do. And so when you have a failure, one of your things you have to figure out is, how does this failure move the story closer to a conclusion? Not necessarily the conclusion we, the protagonist and the reader wanted to have, but a conclusion. And with success, it’s a little easier to move it forward, but then you have to figure out how to keep tension going up. So either way, you have to maintain the feeling that the end is getting closer, but also the end is harder than before.

Chris: It’s the weird magician’s trick where the protagonist has to be closer to success, assuming you’re gonna have a happy ending, but it has to seem more dire and desperate than before, despite the fact that they’re getting closer to success. So we could go back to, you were talking about the story getting too dismal. I think it’s good again to remind people that first of all, tension, which is what makes your story exciting, is created by the anticipation of something bad that could happen. And if lots of bad things do happen, that’s not exciting. Just the fact that after something bad happens, tension often goes down, right? Because we’re no longer worried about whether or not it will happen. And also tension requires uncertainty. So if you ever get to the point where it doesn’t feel like the protagonist has any path to succeed or any chance of success, your tension won’t go away. It’s all a part of that preserving hope that Oren has talked about in the blog,

Oren: And to a certain extent, there is a level of taste involved here. Like we try to talk about things that are more broadly applicable. There’s very rarely anyone who’s gonna enjoy your story less because it has a more satisfying ending. That’s not common, but when it comes to how dismal the story is, that is, to a certain extent, a taste question. Because like I said, like Chris mentioned, if you do all the things The 100 does, of making it so that failures still move the story forward and still have turning points, that’s downward turning points. It’s a specific kind of turning point you have at a failure, which I’ll add in the show notes, we have an article on that. You can do all those things and the story will still move and it will have all those things and yet it will still get too dark for some people, but for other people, they will love it because there are people who like really dark stuff. And so, that’s a taste question. There’s not an objective right answer to that. That’s just a question of how dark do you want this and what kind of audience are you looking for? There are probably fewer people who like really dark stuff, but they’re also likely to be pretty devoted because more stories are written for the wider group that doesn’t like super dark stuff.

Chris: So let’s talk about agency and turning points. Since that’s another tricky thing, right? Besides moving the story forward. Another thing that storytellers can have trouble with is, how do they give the protagonist agency. And to review, agency is the character’s ability to affect the outcome of the story. So your protagonists need it, your antagonists should have it too. It’s really unsatisfying if a protagonist is just escorted through the story and they are helpless and can’t do anything. People do not like that. They often blame the protagonist and stop liking the protagonist when that happens. So you don’t want that.

And I think that some storytellers, they want things to go wrong, and they imagine that if their protagonist has any power over the outcome, then they would just fix it. So their reflexive way of having bad things happening is making it so the protagonists just can’t do anything. This can work for one-off incidents, right? If you have something suddenly bad happen, and we would call this calamity, like, oh, suddenly a big meteor strikes. You can have those things happen in the story. They’re useful when they create problems that then the protagonist can work on taking care of. And those problems raise tension, but you also don’t wanna do that a lot. So if you have a sequence in your story where everything is supposed to go downhill for a while, the situation is gonna get worse and worse for a significant period of time. You can’t just rely on stuff happening without giving the protagonist any agency.

Oren: So usually when it comes to downward turning points, they’re the opposite of a normal turning point, right? Because by default we’re assuming the protagonist is gonna succeed, and a traditional turning point typically works by the protagonist showing some kind of cleverness or persistence or selflessness. Those are usually the ones that’ll get you through. There are some others, but those are sort of your workhorses. So for downward points, and I’m just reading off of Chris’ article here, you want to do the opposite. You usually show selfishness, poor decision making or taking the easy path instead of doing what’s difficult. And those are kind of your workhorses for a downward turning point. And you will usually want some element of that, even if you’re doing the thing where “I could only fight 1 million guys.” Because if the only thing, if the only reason your protagonist ever fails is that the bad guy has overwhelming force that’s gonna make it feel like, well, I guess the protagonist is gonna lose cause no matter how badass they are, the villain always has overpowering force. So whatever.

Chris: But I do wanna point out that the most prominent downward turning points happen for villains. Because we don’t have to worry about villain likability. So those ones get really obvious. You have a villain who kills a bunch of people and then, the hero defeats them, but of course your hero can’t dirty their hands killing your villain. Like the people that the villain hurt, they suddenly come back from the dead and drag the villain into the grave or something. That’s an example of a downward turning point because the villain did something bad and then that bad thing came to bite the villain.

So they’re pretty obvious when applied to a villain, but when we apply them to a protagonist, they’re usually much milder. And the goal is to create something that we can say, okay, that was the wrong choice, but it’s an understandable choice. And the punishment for that wrong point, wrong choice is disproportionate, right? So they did a thing that’s only a little bad and then just a huge tragedy occurred as a result. And so even though they have a mistake that they should correct, right, and they have some responsibility for the bad things that happen, it also builds a little sympathy for them cause they didn’t really deserve that much.

Oren: Yeah. A fun example from a recent movie is actually from Shang-Chi. Chris has an example in her downward turning points article using the villain. But there’s also an interesting example in this movie of the hero having a downward turning point. And this is when Shang-Chi, our protagonist, is fighting Wenwu, the bad guy. And they’re, this is the early part of their fight before Wenwu has really started using his magic. So like logically, there are some questions there. It’s like, why isn’t Wenwu just using his magic to win the fight? But he hasn’t started doing that yet, so we’re not gonna ask those questions. Shang-Chi is actually getting the upper hand. And it manages to knock Wenwu down and has a chance to end the fight, but instead takes a moment to gloat a bit because he’s got it. He’s been, this is his father who’s been a jerk to him for a while, and so he has a second to be like, “hey, I’m gonna give you a piece of mind dad,” and it’s sure we can totally understand why you would wanna do that. But it was a bad choice. He should have finished the fight when he had the opportunity. Cause then he gets sucker punched and tossed into a lake, at which point the climax gets noticeably worse. So my point is, Shang-Chi, you shouldn’t have let yourself get tossed in that lake.

Chris: One of my favorites, because clearly a lot of effort was put into balancing this one, was Spider-Man: No Way Home. So Peter has a situation where his secret identity has been revealed. And somebody’s also blaming him for things that happened. So people are wondering if he’s a villain and as a result, his friends don’t get into the college that they applied for. He feels bad about that, so he wants Doctor Strange to cast a spell to make people forget his secret identity again, so that his two friends can get into college, because he’s the reason they didn’t. So he has a selfless reason to start, which would normally make it just fine.

But then when Doctor Strange starts to cast this spell, we first see that Peter didn’t actually do his due diligence by appealing the decision before asking for magic. Which means that he’s taking the easy route a little bit, even though his motivation is selfless. And then while the spell’s being cast, he starts to get a little greedy and make more and more demands of Doctor Strange, which kind of strains the spell and makes it harder. And as a result, the spell does not have the intended effect, and then he has to make a sacrifice later in the movie to make up for that because he is responsible for the bad things that happen as a result of the spell. So is Doctor Strange, honestly. You don’t have to just say yes to the high school kid who comes up and asks for a huge world changing spell, but as you can see, okay, that’s understandable, right? It’s understandable that that happened. At the same time, he could have done better.

But yeah, this is a good place to, if you have a character arc, and you want your hero to learn a lesson, right? That’s often a really good level. Of course, depending on what character arc you have, your hero, again, could potentially do really frustrating things if they just lose control and cause a lot of damage. But if they’re just a little impatient, for instance, or you could have a situation where you show what the right tactic or wrong tactic is in a situation by having your hero first try the wrong tactic. For instance, maybe they tried to persuade a villain to stand down by pretending to buy into what the villain believes, and that’s actually a bad choice because they’re only reinforcing those bad beliefs. And that encourages the villain and then it comes back to bite them, for instance. You can show, okay, no, we need to not pretend those things are good. And that could be a little lesson that you have in your story.

Oren: You can also use some, you can also use a bit of narrative trickery to create some distance between the outcome of the mistake and the actual mistake, which tends to reduce reader frustration. So there’s a scene from the beginning of the second Lockwood & Co book, which does this in, I think, an interesting way where they’re on a job, and this is one of the jobs that got cut for the show just cause it wasn’t super important and they were condensing things down. But they’re on a job and they are digging up what they think is a body, and they’re trying to find the body and they can’t find it. And then a bunch of ghosts show up and attack them and it’s, oh no, it’s bad. And we messed up. We don’t, where’s the body? And then they have to get saved by the rival team who they hate.

And then we discover that the mistake they made was when they were digging, they discarded the marker stone, which was the actual haunted object. Now if during the scene if they had been like, oh, and here’s a suspicious stone that is marking the grave. And they had then just tossed aside and ignored it. The reader would’ve been like, “no, it’s the stone, you guys! It’s the stone! Why are you not doing the stone?” But since we didn’t know about the stone, because the scene starts after they’ve already made that mistake, there’s a little bit more narrative distance and so there’s less of an opportunity for the reader to get frustrated with them.

Chris: Yeah, that’s really good.

Oren: So you can do tricks like that, right? You can also do it in reverse where the protagonist makes a mistake, but the effects of that mistake are not obvious until later. The protagonist is like, “no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna go out and fight the bad guys, and we’re not gonna stay in our city and hide.” And it turns out that the bad guys are too strong because of something that the protagonist maybe didn’t know about at the time, or at least the readers don’t know. And so that creates some distance between the initial mistake and the outcome of the mistake.

Chris: And again, the more understandable you make it, the better. Like, for instance, maybe your hero makes a bad choice because they are rushing through something when they should take more care. But you can also give them a reason to rush. So they had to make a difficult decision and they made the wrong choice.

Oren: Okay. I think we have successfully managed to break the time loop. I guess it was talking about creating narrative distance and making it understandable. We just never thought of doing that until now, which would’ve been very frustrating if you’d had to listen to that. But fortunately that happened in backstory, so you don’t have to worry about it. So I think we’re gonna call this episode to a close.

Chris: If this episode was not a failure for you, consider joining our Patreon and keeping Mythcreants going. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

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