Character
Ego/Self
Hero/Protagonist
Messenger/Catalyst
Hero/Shadow
Enemy/Villain
Ally/Friend
Joker/Fool
Skeptic/Critic
Emotion
Reason/Logic
Seducer/Contagonist
Gatekeeper/Protector
Orphan/Neglected Child
Exile/Criminal
Mentor/Teacher
Sidekick/Companion
Love Interest
Hero
Hero. Protagonist. Main Character. When you hear these words you think they all refer to the same thing. The Hero is on an epic journey to realize his or her authentic self. The Protagonist initiates the primary action in his attempt to get what he or she wants. The Main Character is just another way of saying Hero or Protagonist. What a nightmare. All of these statements are somewhat true, but not in the way you have been led to think they are. Understanding the difference between a Hero and a Protagonist and a Main Character will do wonders for the story you are currently writing. Appreciating their subtleties will open up new avenues of creativity and will most likely confirm, in some shape or form, that your writer’s intuition was always right. You’re not writing a Hero. You’re writing a point-of-view.— Jim Hull. Never Trust a Hero
You are not here to hero worship.
A Main Character is the player through whom the audience experiences the story firsthand. A Protagonist is the prime mover of the plot in the Overall Story throughline. A Hero is a combination of both Main Character and Protagonist. In other words, a hero is a blended character who does two jobs: He moves the plot forward and serves as a surrogate for the audience. When we consider all the characters other than a Protagonist who might serve as the audience's position in a story, suddenly a hero becomes severely limited. It is not wrong, just limited.
Caveats Abound In The Land Of The Hero The definition of Hero:
- a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.
- a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal: He was a local hero when he saved the drowning child.
These standards become a problem when the character labeled Hero fails to live up to its noble definition. To combat this lack of character, writers ascribe terms like tragic heroes, or anti-heroes, or dark heroes, or whatever perfunctory adjective they can come up with to justify the original definition. Regardless how twisted the terminology may be, the pattern is clear: when you need to clarify what kind of a hero you have in a story, you have effectively destroyed whatever useful purpose that term ever had.
With the introduction of these colors, as many as those in a double rainbow, the word Hero simplifies to simply “who the story is about.” In that case, it might be more accurate to cite this entity as the Main Character. Why bring into question the heroic nature of a character if you don’t need to? Needing to attribute the status of Hero to the central character of a story is where the confusion in understanding story structure begins.
Heroes are Both Main Character and Protagonist
Reference the first character list above: Luke, Neo, and so on–all these characters, while certainly what their stories are about, also happen to be the prime movers of the central plot of the story. This is the definition of a Protagonist, the one who pursues the successful resolution of the story’s problem set into motion by the Inciting Incident. (Activation) This dual conceit of being the character who the story is about and the one responsible for driving the plot was what they were trying to describe when they coined the term ‘Hero’ way back when. This need to tack on qualifiers like ‘learning’ or ‘teaching’ or ‘reluctant’ or ‘anti-’ comes from a lack of awareness that the one who drives the story does not have to be the one who the story is about.
Main Character
The Main Character Throughline For a story to be complete, the audience needs another view of the battle as well—that of the soldier in the trenches. Instead of looking at the Story Mind from the outside, the Main Character Throughline is a view from the inside. What if that Story Mind were our own? That is what the audience experiences when it becomes a soldier on the field. Audience members identify with the Main Character of the story. This is the personal, first person, "I" perspective. Through the Main Character we experience the battle as if we were directly taking part in it. From this perspective we are much more concerned with what is happening immediately around us than we are with the larger strategies that are too big to see. This most personally involved argument of the story is the Main Character Throughline. Other names often associated with the Main Character are the Primary Character, the Principle Character, the Hero, the Protagonist, and others. — Dramatica
Blended Archetypes/Roles
“…another way of looking at the archetypes [is to see them] not as rigid character roles but as functions performed temporarily by characters to achieve certain effects in a story.” — Vogler, Writer’s Journey. In other words, while you may end up with eight unique characters, you may also decide you can combine your archetypes. Your Love Interest may also be a Skeptic. Your Contagonist may be your Reason character. Your Sidekick may also be your Emotion character. The important thing isn’t that every story presents a unique character for every one of these archetypes. Rather, the important thing is that your story incorporates as many of these character aspects as possible, so you can bring full-fledged depth and resonance to both your plot and your theme. — 8-½-character-archetypes-writing