On Character Popularity

 I have a Note idea of a list of movies/shows/books to consume over the course of October for Halloween, but I need to look over it again. I imagine that you would find it disappointing because I don’t watch that much  Halloween/horror content. I had hoped to have it out today, because I fully expected to do more this week, but it has turned out… weird, and I don’t know that I liked it.

So we’re going to talk about this thought I had while on a walk through my neighborhood. Inspired a bit by the sporking.

On Protagonist Popularity

Have you ever noticed that protagonists don’t tend to be very popular people?

I was thinking far too much about Iron Druid Chronicles again (but I’m sporking it, so that makes it okay, maybe?) and something I picked up on is that our lead in that series is not exactly popular–he’s not throwing parties all the time or anything–but he is very well-regarded by the community, outside of a couple of side characters that we’re meant to see as fuddy-duddies. Every sympathetic character we come across is friendly with Atticus, and everyone who isn’t is painted as being stuck-up. He’s just a swell guy, everyone loves him! Women practically throw themselves at him!

This isn’t good writing.

And to be entirely fair, Atticus isn’t the worst example of this, but it’s not great. Generally, it’s a wise idea to not make your leading man or woman a popular person. Part of this is basic sympathy from your audience for your character–everyone loves an underdog. It’s also a lot harder to make conflict with the surrounding characters. If your protagonist is well-known and loved by everyone, then having him or her have any interesting conflict is going to be difficult.

One of the problems we see with Atticus in Hounded is that he has friends to do his dirty work at every turn. People are happy to show up and tell him which villains are going to be appearing next, or help him fight them. For the final battle, he’s able to easily convince his pack of werewolf friends to watch his house for enemies and charge into battle with him without having to give them any reason–and even sacrifice themselves for his cause. A friendly witch shows up in the nick of time and happily agrees to kill one of the main villains for him. It’s ridiculous.

[Although the werewolf thing gets him in a bit of hot water, because in the next book the pack leader doesn’t want to talk to him for getting his pack dragged into his shenanigans.]

But we like seeing stories about outcasts, because when/if they do manage to get groups of friends together to face the conflict then it feels more like a triumph. This character has overcome a barrier that previously existed in order to reach the end goal–whether that’s defeating the Big Bad or surviving high school (or it could be both!).

This is not to say that lead characters absolutely cannot be popular, but those are trickier in some ways. A lot of successful characters who are popular also tend to have a conflict that indicates that the popularity is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yeah, Harry Potter’s popular when he shows up at Hogwarts, but also everyone’s constantly in his face, he’s getting attention he doesn’t want, and half the school is happy to believe he’s the Hogwarts Antichrist in the second book at the drop of a hat, proving that most of those people weren’t really his friends to begin with. 

Something similar happens with Rand al’Thor in Wheel of Time. Yes, he’s the Dragon Reborn, but that means he’s surrounded by sycophants who don’t really know him trying to get what they want out of him through manipulation or sucking up, any one of these losers could secretly be a Darkfriend, and while this all happening Rand is slowly going homicidally insane. All the while other factions, some even well-intentioned, think he’s a false prophet and should be killed on the spot.

You do also sometimes see fiction in which popular characters lose their popularity as the inciting incident of the story. Jeff in Community is, before the events of the series, a big-shot lawyer who basically gets whatever he wants, and he’s knocked back into community college because it’s discovered that his law degree is fake. His character development is realizing that trying to reach that level of success again was never really worthwhile–that his previous lifestyle was hollow and empty compared to the one where he has a loving group of friends (just not put in a way that straightforward and cheesy, I think).

Basically, it’s not uncommon to do a story of “This character WAS popular, but discovers that it’s not that great and finds friends regardless of that fall from public grace.”

If you have a popular character, you have to play around with what that popularity means, what it’s actually worth, and its fragile nature. But for the most part, it’s a lot easier to make a sympathetic character who isn’t popular because it lets your story have more conflict between characters and maintain tension. 

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