Why I Adore Static Protagonists

[Kasper Hviid]

On the internet, exchange of opinions easily evolves into argumentation wars. As a medium, the internet breeds disagreement, gently herding us into opposing tripes. I really want to break out of this fractured world view. So I will try to tell why I think static protags can have great depth, but at the same time, I will try to avoid being too dismissive of dynamic ones.

Real people change over time. Therefore, we must accept the fact that dynamic protagonists are more realistic since they change over the course of the story. Or so goes the argument.

True, people do change over time. However, this is a slow process. It’s a bit like the movement of plants; it happens, it’s a thing, but we don’t want to watch grass grow.

For this reason, fiction exaggerates. Characters are either presented as one of the various over-the-top character arc tropes, or they are completely static. Neither choice is true to life. Both create a simplification which, while dumped down, becomes larger than life. You may not agree here, but just try running with the idea that neither protag is all that much true to life, and that they both represent different aspects of the human experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the strengths of the dynamic characters:

The dynamic character showcases the human ability to adapt and change, for better or worse, or the ability to seize a potential change and pass it by, and all this can make for some really beautiful stories. It’s pretty good for kitschy fun too, like in BRAINDEAD.

Storytelling-wise, anything that tempts the reader with something, like Dan Brown’s chapter-ending cliffhangers, or small and big mysteries that the reader is promised will be resolved, those things make a story terribly exciting. So if you put an arc in your protag, you have added an extra of those “what then” things to keep the reader turning those pages. The reader will be curious about how the protag will turn out.

And there are a lot of fun character arc tropes to choose from, on top of my head:

—Cleaning up your life (White Trash Zombie)
—Fresh off the boat (Vis a Vis)
—Downward Spiral, Redemption Arc (Bad Lieutenant, Taxi Driver)
—Coming of age, The loss of Innocence (Vis a Vis)
—Mid-life crisis, divorce
—Facing flashbackish childhood trauma (Braindead or that one by Stephen King)

The dynamic protagonist has now been respectfully introduced. Enter the static protagonist! Now, how to compare those two?

One way of looking at static and dynamic protags is to compare their different impact. In a given moment in the story, what does a static or a dynamic protag feel like for the reader?

The dynamic protag is a work in progress. We are not seeing who she is right now, we are seeing who she might become. Her potential. As a reader, we are not as much present in the moment, as we are wondering, what happens next? Who will she become?

The static protag, on the other hand, is rooted in this exact moment. She may not be perfect, but this, right here, right now, is who she is. Unlike the dynamic protag who can go arcing this way and that, the static protag has laid out her route in life, her character arc flatlining. In an oft-quoted bit from LORD OF THE RINGS, Gandalf says: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” The static protags have made that decision. They have chosen their path in life, or life has chosen for them. The static protag can feel unpleasant to write because she is so permanent. There is something a bit frightening, something a bit too final, about protags who commit themselves fully to their path. The title character from THE BIG LEBOWSKI has followed the way of the hippie with stoic determination well into the nineties. A very harsh and determined life choice. It’s played for laughs, but there’s an element of tragedy beneath.

MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (2006) is a movie where ... how can I even begin to describe this one? Well, it’s a two-hour musical from Japan. One review described it as “the equivalent of being castrated with rusty scissors by Snow White”. Despite the arc in the framing device, this devastating joyride is grounded on the determination of the heroine, who follows her cursed path with eager fatalism. The movie opens with us knowing that she ends up fat, lonesome, and murdered at the age of 53. So we don’t watch it in the hope that we reach a happy ending. It’s about the trip, not the destination. What was her life like? Despite the character arc in the framing, it’s the character study of a static character who drives the movie.

FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION (1972) showcases another committed woman. Beware—Spoilers ahead! This protag is in prison. Her crime: Stripping naked in front of a police station and then trying to stab a police detective to death. Said police detective was her boyfriend, who had her raped in a rather strange scheme to get a cut of the marijuana business. The majority of the movie takes place inside the prison where she endures torture and rape-seduces and mutilates her enemies with barely a word spoken, biding her time. Finally, during a riot, she escapes. She murders each of her rapists, then her ex-boyfriend. Then, she calmly allows herself to be taken back to prison; her sole reason for escaping was that being imprisoned stood in the way of her vengeance. This rock-solid determination of the protag is what sold the movie. True, the psychedelic fight scene in the showers and the lesbian rape-seduction helped too, but storywise, despite all the outrageous glamour, it is basically a story about unrelenting determination. And I think that is a good story.

I’m an atheist. As I see it, when I die, my life is over. All of it, soul gone too. Just gone. Dammit. Yet, I believe this grants me an opportunity to truly appreciate life for what it is. Every moment in my life has exactly the meaning I put into it. There is nothing, nothing at all, except life, right here and now. This is opposed by the religious world-view where the meaning of each moment is determined on how it is going to be reflected in the afterlife.

I try to inject my atheist life view into everything. This is why I love roguelikes, games where you play characters who actually die when they die. I want to play games for the experience here and now, not to “finish” a game or to create a perfect character build which just ends up gathering digital dust. Roguelikes force you to care about the present. That level 12 axe looks nice, but ... your character may not live to reach level 12.

In a similar vein, I like how static protags are grounded on what they are right here and now, instead of a promise of what they might become. Rather than the aesthetics of constant progress, the repeated promise of the new and the shiny, they have seen what life had to offer and decided on their path.

I spend way too much time being reflective. I’m not happy, I’m not happy, life isn’t what I expected it to be, how did I end up like this, is this really what’s left of life? The bad part is, it sounds just as annoying to me as it does to anyone else. But I can’t turn it off. I’m not happy, I’m not happy ...

Sometimes, when I read a novel, I want to see the world from a point of view that is less egocentric and whiny than my own. I want a hero whose story is about something other than himself, his inner journey. There is an element of narcism when the story is about the protagonist; even if the hero himself isn’t a narcissist at all, we experience him through the lens of the author.

A lot of our life is spent simply living it. Those moments where we are simply existing in the moment right here and now can have great beauty. Fiction is able to exaggerate this with the static protagonist.

 

[StrawhatOverlord]

I like both, imo both can be realistic. If someone experiences extraordinary things, especially if they're young, it will change them, but on the other hand, it's ok if a grown adult just stays who they are. The main protagonist group of my fantasy world almost all have circumstances that invite change, but the character who writes the journal entries of my occult mystery stuff has been doing what they do for a good while, so their growing is done from the get go.

What I still like doing for older, already set characters like this though, which kind of gets the best of both sides, is reveal bits and pieces about them throughout the story, so you'd still get new stuff about them even if they're staying the same.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I think real life personality changes can be both slow and fast. Everybody changes over time because of changes in environment, people they meet, amount of money they have to spend. This is usually a gradual process. But, big life events can have big changes in how you interact with the world. Moving out of your parental house is an obvious one. You go from a situation where you've got few real worries to having to do everything yourself (and learning that sometimes shops are closed when you have no food in the house or your money has run out while there is still a bit of month left...). But there are more. Death of a loved one (my mother had a brother who died in a car crash when she was 20 or so, and that has had a huge impact in how she view the world and on things like living now instead of postponing for "later"), finding you have a serious medical condition, losing a job, having a kid. All those can have a sudden impact on your personality.

As for in fiction, I like both if done well. James Bond is the obvious static protagonist. Dirk Pitt is another one. But I think Aragorn is also reasonably static. In the book that is. In the movie he has an arc and I seriously dislike it... Nothing wrong with them.

The main thing is that a story is built on conflict, in the broadest sense of the world. And a character arc is just that, internal conflict. It's a tool to add conflict to a story and it works really well. It's not the only way, it just means that if you don't have an arc, you need lots of other conflict in other places.

As a side note, there is a bonus for writers to having no character arc for your protagonist. And that is that it's a lot easier to write a series of books based on a single character. There's a reason Clive Cussler has been able to write a ton of books on Dirk Pitt. And that is that the character doesn't go anywhere. (ok, he does in the later books in the series, and like with Aragorn, it actually takes a bit away from the charm of the books for me). You can simply write the next book where the previous one left off. There's no need to worry about continuing an arc or retconning whatever happened. You just have a ready made character (who is hopefully well liked) ready to go.

 

[skip.knox]

There are lots of examples of the static protagonist. One of my favorite authors is Nevile Shute, whose protagonists are steadfast and firm. The first novel I read of his was Pied Piper, which tells of a English man caught in Switzerland by the outbreak of WWII. By chance he winds up in charge of two children. The novel tells how he navigates them across France to safety. He's the same guy at both ends of the story and that's what makes him admirable.

Ordinary people following their own lights appear in pretty much all of his novels--A Town Called Alice, On the Beach, Trustee in the Toolroom, and so on.

You see a similar treatment in a great many detective novels, mysteries, and thrillers. OTOH, there's pretty much always an arc and a change in romance. For fantasy I acknowledge the current wisdom is to write character arcs, to write stories that focus on that (along with the magic etc), but there's ample room for the static protagonist as well.

 

[Insolent Lad]

Tarzan immediately came to mind here. The Ape Man underwent change and development for like the first three novels (I suspect Burroughs was still trying to figure out just who this guy he had created was) and then stayed much the same for twenty-some more books. So how did ERB get around having a static protagonist? He introduced important secondary characters who did grow; in many respects, the later novels are more about these characters than Tarzan. As titular main protagonist, he provides a sort of grounding for the story.

I admit I have a tendency to write main characters who are reluctant to change and sometimes have to dragged forward kicking and screaming by events around them. People are quite adaptable, when need be, but generally do not like to give up their accustomed ways of life and of thinking about things. The right combination of events can jolt them out of this.

 

[S.T. Ockenner]

Atheism and ghosts are not incompatible

 

[Shashiri]

While I can agree with a lot of the points you are making I disagree on a few key points here.

1. I don’t agree that every character is an over-the-top trope. This is a very broad generalization that is inaccurate, even if you are using hyperbole for impact. Some of the best characters are known for not definitively falling into any sort of trope, and having both good and bad characteristics to make them seem more human. Since we’re using television/movies as examples, let me use a random example of a “good character” not being an over-the-top trope, Kiritsugu Emiya. This MC had believed all his life that his father was good, until he ended up accidentally killing the MC’s best friend in a bid for immortality. After his father’s work ends up killing a mass number of people, Kiritsugu joins a person who hunts those who use magic for evil, and ends up killing his father. The more evil people he kills, the more he realizes that innocent people inevitably have to die in the process. He begins sacrificing family, relationships and his own life in order to try and save as many people as he can, but ends up killing as many people as he ends up saving. At the end of it all he ends up accidentally killing thousands of people and not being able to accomplish his goal of saving anyone, and finally gives up his goal of being a hero. He has many internal conflicts, his desire to be a hero vs his knowledge that his actions are futile, his desire to be with his family vs his commitment to his line of work, as well as his desire to be happy vs his underlying feeling of never having been able to accomplish things. He has many layers of his character that goes beyond the main plot and delves into him as a person, and throughout the show we get to see both fantastical elements (how he sacrifices his humanity in an attempt to save that of those around him), as well as human elements (how he is forced to leave his family in order to do what’s best for them). This is all an amazingly gross simplification of his character by the way). As well his arc isn’t really a trope either, as even though he ends up failing his goal and doing horrible things to get there, through it all he manages to find himself and find what’s best for him, which is a mix of multiple different arc tropes. So yeah, I don’t agree that all characters are an over-the-top-trope, which moves into my next point…
2. There are as many over-the-top trope static characters as there are dynamic. The reason for this is that dynamic characters have the ability to change to the situations they are affected by, which can create entirely new characters in the process. By this very process it eliminates most of the tropes associated with these characters, unless their trope traits remain the same or they move from one trope archetype to another. For example, a character can begin as a trope of being a stoic and wise-leader and slowly reveal themselves to actually be weaker mentally than the other characters their mentoring. Although both can be seen as tropes if you want to examine it closely (let’s face it, almost every character is in some way derivative of another and falls under a certain category), the character in and of itself escapes the trope due to the writer crafting their arc in a unique way and changes only some of their traits. However, this is one method of escaping a trope. Static characters cannot evolve, however, they CAN be based on a trope twisted in a unique manner. All characters based on tropes, it’s how their actions and unique characteristics set them apart from other tropes that matter, and make them “not trope-like”(as examined in my earlier point).
3. Saying that dynamic protagonists are “a work in progress” is a misunderstanding of what dynamic protagonists are. The way a story should be structured the protagonist should evolve until the climax of the story, where we see who they were at the beginning vs who they are at their “peak” (with some rare exceptions where the ending drastically alters a character’s character arc). They may change throughout the story yes, but that change does not inherently make them “a work in progress”, as it implies who they were before is somehow inferior/superior to who they are destined to become. This is not true in the case of characters who change in a way that is not detrimental or beneficial to them, but rather change in a way where their perspective on things is altered or they adapt different characteristics as a result to a new situation. Guts is a great example for both of these. He loses and gains positive and negative characteristics and has neither a positive or negative character arc, he simply changes as a person. Additionally it is unfair to say they are a work in progress as most of the time the character evolves to the end of the arc before the end of the novel/show, so we still see a good section of who they’ve become in the story.
4. The same goes for saying dynamic characters are a “promise of who they might become”. They aren’t a promise, they become that character typically 3/4’s through the novel.


That being said, I do believe static and dynamic protagonists are both tools that are to be used in creating different stories. There are stories that can and cannot be told with either static or dynamic protagonists. The story of Berserk couldn’t be told if Guts didn’t learn to let go of his lust for revenge, and the story of Kill Bill wouldn’t work if she gave up on her revenge. I respect your opinion and appreciate all the time you took into writing this, it was an entertaining read.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I don't consider it for a second when writing. Characters change or things change around them... move along.

As for when I'm reading or watching a movie... I don't care. Yeah, back when I was into the literary thing and screenwriting I considered it more, but in the end, I'm either entertained or not. Defying change can be just as interesting as change, maybe more so, because we don't see it that often where a character not only doesn't change but doesn't despite strong reasons to do so. Followers of dogma or ideology of some sort are fascinating in real life because of this unwavering devotion. We're living through a whole lot of change and refusal to change these days, which makes reading political articles fascinating as a study of human psyche.