The Likeable Protagonist
As a voracious consumer of media, I’ve discovered one of the quickest ways to get me to lose interest in a story is to have an unlikeable protagonist. A solid premise, cool setting, terrible world-ending consequences of failure, none of these matter if the main character is a nice, well-spoken, super-intelligent, weapons master with powerful magic, inexhaustible wealthy, emotionally in-control, and morally unquestionable person who wins all the time. They’re the worst.
Wait, what?!
How are all those traits a bad thing? In the real world, that’s the kind of person we would probably aspire to be. Having all the best traits of Superman and Batman wrapped sounds awesome. Don’t we want a story protagonist to be someone that we’d want to be best friends with, or cheer on as they saved the day because they’re such a good person? I would argue that the answer is no. Not because I’m a contrarian who wants the bad guy to win, but because if “likeable” means “perfect”, then it also means they’re a boring protagonist. And a boring protagonist makes an uninteresting story. You already know they’re going to win. There’s no bad guy they can’t defeat, no obstacle they can’t surmount, no challenge they can’t overcome with a minimal application of effort. What’s the point of even engaging with a story like that?
A negative critique I’m sure we’ve all heard about a movie or book is that “the main character was so unlikeable”. Maybe you’ve recived that note from a well intentioned friend about something you’ve written. Perhaps the follow up suggestion was to remove those aspects of their personality or actions which made the reader uncomfortable. Make them nice. Make them kind. Make them good.
In Blake Snyder’s popular screenwriting book Save The Cat, the title literally is a reference to his rule about making a likeable protagoinst is to show them doing something good, like saving a cat from a tree, so it puts the audience on this character’s side. As a counterpoint to this, allow me to present Melvin Udall. He’s the protagonist of the film As Good As It Gets, and is portrayed by the legendary Jack Nicholson in an Oscar Winning performance. In the opening scene, he’s literally doing the exact opposite of Snyder’s advice. Melvin Udall is taking his neighbor’s adorable dog (who has been peeing in the foyer) and puts him down the apartment building’s garbage chute. That’s villian behavior!
You’re going for a ride, Verdell
Mevin doesn’t stop there. He’s cantankerous, racist, homophobic, sexist and says the most savagely mean things to pretty much everyone he talks to. Everyone at the local diner where he eats hates him to the point where only one saint of a waitress, Carol, will serve him. He’s shown as being horrible to everyone he encounters. But, Melvin is also a successful writer of romance novels who also suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which might give us some insight into why he acts the way he does. But overall, writer James L. Brooks goes all they way in showing us just what a piece of work Melvin is. Not someone you’d want to be your friend, let alone just be in the same room with. So how does this deeply unpleasant character become likeable?
Here’s my little writing secret: Your protagonst doesn’t have to be likeable. They just have to be interesting.
There’s more to it than that, obviously. Brooks does a masterful job of threading the needle with a character that lives without a filter. Melvin is nasty enough to give his character a HUGE opportunity to grow, but he’s not so hateful that we reject him entirely. We get glimpses of his humanity and see the toll that his unchecked OCD, isolation, and mysanthropy is taking on the world around him— which creates some sympathy. And we also see that the two other characters with the most goodness in them (Carol and the dog), also see something good in Melvin. It’s a sign that Melvin can change. It makes the audience interested in seeing how that change occurs. If I can roughly paraphrase Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces [the character with the greatest dynamic change has the most satisfying catharsis]. Or more simply: bigger character growth, more satisfying conclusion.
As someone close to me (let’s call her “my wife”) recently said: “I’d never watch a show about my own life, I’m too nice and too boring.” I have to agree with her on that. She’s an awesome person but story-wise, she wouldn’t make a very interesting protagonist. Let your protagonist have somewhere to grow and change, your story will be better for it.
