PROTAGONIST SUPREMACY ALL AROUND!

“Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring.”

-          Cassandra Clare

What do you understand by a Protagonist? What is that one thing that clicks in your mind when you come across this word? The main character, the hero/heroine, the person or character around whom the story revolves – aren’t these the thoughts that occurs in your mind? If further, then maybe the character which should have the most character development by the end of the story. But have you ever considered the fact, that writers often tend to leave any scope of character development in some stories by making the protagonists either ‘Godly’ – who are patients of protagonist syndrome believing themselves to be the supreme power or ‘God-like’ – who are astonishingly the most righteous, kind, walks on the path of higher level of spirituality, not even voicing against the unfair because that would be too rude!☺😅

This supremacy of the main characters we commonly refer to as protagonists sometimes makes me miss relatable and reliable characters to some extent. Now, I was aiming to pen this down since a long time, but I was short of examples somehow. Though, recently my Granny solved this problem unintentionally by watching some of her Indian daily soaps in front of me making me have enough examples to highlight in this blog.

So, here are some of the different story mediums highlighting the supremacy issue in characters and some of the over-rated, vague and disappointing writing techniques which are used to show the importance and ascendancy of the supreme torch-bearer of the stories –

A)    Indian Daily Soaps – Now, I don’t want to highlight my utter dislike towards serials, but I can’t overlook the fact I got a lot to say on these stories. Stories which would start from women empowerment, career prospects, dedication, struggle and all the different malpractices in the country. But would somehow end up in two girls fighting over a single guy, trying to harm each other so that he somehow accepts them as their life partner and all the ladies being pure evil in one way or other. Not to forget the habit of treating male characters as props, who would stand in background watching all this drama with a dramatic music playing in background (Dhoom tananana😂😂). As if the only thing left in a girl/guy’s life is to conquer (okay not literally) the person he/she loves. Then what is the whole point of showing someone’s empowerment when his/her whole life is shown dependent on the partner.
Not to forget, the extreme need of having ridiculously negative female leads with hideous bindis who would plan and plot, girls/guys who are supposed home-wreakers, and can even plan murders oh-so efficiently. Furthermore, the main point of this write-up, supremacy of the main characters where they would be shown so righteous and naïve that whatever they say or do – if even absurd and pointless – it would be the most correct thing to do in this whole damn world. Just to quote an example, I saw a glimpse of a serial today with Nani, where the female lead gave proposed a business marketing idea and the supposed villain too did. If we analyze the whole business situation, target audience and the plan, the female lead’s plan was shown the most effective even though the negative lead had the more effective plan. Just because, yeah we know, the naïve, perfect, righteous and obedient female leads are alwaysssssssssssssssss right?!😕😕

B)    Books/ Novels – Here, I won’t be talking about some respected authors and their published work because honestly I never find these issues in their stories but definitely in online stories and books which I have read around 200 by now. The most prominent problem in these is degrading the side or passer-by characters to showcase the supremacy of the main character. Remember those instances in stories, when a male billionaire would always have female employees who would be dying to grab their attention, accused of being after the main lead’s property, money and fame and being dressed like sluts? And then a girl enters who would be different from all these employees, the man would fall in love with her because she is oh-so different and then they would go play house-house. Perfect story, isn’t it? Has anyone ever wondered that to show the distinguished personality, authors practically tend to defame a mass of people. A person’s distinguished personality should never be dependent on the mass’s vicious traits (specially stereotypical, untrue and fake). Let’s just not forget, the tendency of showing the most righteous women would end up with a son of a devil often. And that, that man would somehow end up turning a saint by the end of the story losing all the character’s essence. No doubt, the term ‘opposite’s attract’ is over-rated in stories. Why having a negative character with all the relatable traits is still amusing for readers and people?

C)    Movies – I don’t think I even need to explain this much! The story is as same as the other two, the negative character would die the most painful death by the ‘HERO’ of the movie. And if a story is based on a villain, either he would end up dead, mad, prisoned, or losing his lover by the end of the story. Fine, I get the idea of truth, honesty and kindness being always triumphant but atleast writers should leave fictions sometimes. Honestly speaking, the negative characters add life to the story for me, because it’s really tiring to see heroes too good to be true, and people worshiping them.

Not just these, but stories all across us have these things somewhere or the other. My question here is, “Is supreme characters more important? Or relatable characters?”

My own answer would be relatable! I think most of us here would say, Relatable! But then, why a girl in serials who won’t talk back to elders is supreme, but someone who would point out the unfair, does not want to live within a family, and is not all about love is bad? Why a male character who is a gentlemen is supreme? And the man who is shown having drawbacks like insecurities, dark secrets, anger issues and selfishness is wrong? (Actually, selfishness is portrayed wrong more than often when in reality the whole world is somewhat selfish) No doubt, old daily soaps were loved because it had the perfect bahu’s and female characters in stories.

These stories impact us a lot in real life, whether we tend to agree or not. This supremacy factor makes people doubt that whether they are the protagonists of their own stories. If they are, then why so imperfect? They forget we as people and people as characters are supposed to be imperfect, that’s the whole point of character development. Either the person would turn more imperfect (nothing bad with it) or become a better person.

Perfect/Supreme characters are over-rated! Relatable, reliable and specially REAL characters who’re imperfect and flawed are the ones our stories need now.      

- by MeeRa 💖💓

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Note - The picture uploaded in this blog is not owned by me, but to its rightful owners! And this blog is not meant to hurt someone's sentiments or insult anybody's creativity or works, its just my opinion on the common scenarios in stories.