Tying Protagonist to Plot

 I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed that on my drive back from work I tend to be in a fairly depressed mood. Maybe I just need to listen to my iPod on the drive back rather than the radio (I generally do iPod in the morning drive, radio in the evening).

I finished another book series this week, which was super cool! I’m glad I did it. At some point soon I will also re-read Stroud’s other big-name series, the one that I actually own signed books for.

I heavily considered doing a "Angelopolis is quite terrible" Note, but for now I'll spare you.

Tying Protagonist to Plot

I got Assassin’s Creed: Origins on sale from the Playstation Store, and I’ve been enjoying exploring Egypt. It’s really cool how much they’ve reconstructed! But I have long found that the main storyline of the game has a ton of problems for me, mostly that I think that it’s not a great origin story for the Brotherhood of Assassins (it contradicts too much of established mythology for that), and as a historical fiction story it misses the mark considerably (it changes to be about the Roman Republic at the end of the story, and it doesn’t even do that well).

I think one of the saving graces of the game, though, is that it has an awesome, likable protagonist. Unfortunately, I think he’s the wrong protagonist for this story.

We’re introduced to Bayek. He’s an Egyptian and the last of the Medjay–a role that used to be the pharaoh’s elite guard and protector of the holy places of Egypt, but now just sort of the local sheriff, going around and solving people’s problems. After his son is murdered by an evil cult that controls the pharaoh, the Order of the Ancients, Bayek and his wife Aya go on a revenge quest to murder every single member of the Order of the Ancients. To this end, they ally with Cleopatra, who, in her civil war with her brother Ptolemy XIII, is also on the Order’s hit list. Cleopatra promises to bring Egypt back to its former glory and eliminate the Order of the Ancients from the country.

Spoiler alert: Cleopatra does none of those things.

As the Plot goes on, it revolves more on Cleopatra’s civil war with her brother, and her alliance with Rome, and the effects it has on Egypt. It rushes through the major beats, and more focus is put on Bayek’s wife. To the game’s credit, she has playable sequences, including the last one, but when the final mission of the story (the assassination of Julius Caesar) does not feature the  game’s protagonist, nor take place in the country he’s fighting so hard to protect… it makes me think that the 

Bayek is fantastic. He’s likable, he’s cool, he’s good with kids, he’s deeply in love with his wife, and he’s a great example of a religious character in a series that tends to treat them badly. His entire motivation is built off of trying to bring peace to his son and let him move into the afterlife, the Field of Reeds. He cares about appeasing the gods, he cares about the common people; he’s not particularly invested in who is pharaoh, and from the outset he expresses doubt in Cleopatra. So centering the conclusion of the story around her feels a misstep.

[The short explanation is that originally, he was meant to be killed off in the opening hours with Aya taking over as protagonist, but Ubisoft executives insisted that a female protagonist wouldn’t sell so they nixed that. You can kind of tell this story went through several rewrites.]

I will not be the first to say that it would have been better to put Bayek in a part of Egyptian history in which religion is more central to the Plot, like the reign of Akhenaten. For those not in the know, Akhenaten was famous for having decided to change the central religion of Egypt to make the main god into Aten, the sun disc, relegating the traditional pantheon of gods to subservient roles. This, as you can imagine, did not make him popular with the religious establishment. The religion was switched back immediately after he died.

As someone who cares about religious orthodoxy, with entirely spiritual motivations rather than political ones, Bayek should be in a story that lends itself to that conflict. He would care about that ruler. Indeed, when it’s brought up in the “Curse of the Pharaohs” expansion, Bayek has VERY strong feelings about Akhenaten, calling him a cursed heretic. He cares about that.

My greater point is this: the protagonist of the story should have emotional stakes in the main conflict of the story. If your character is strongly religious and his main motivation is thinking about the spiritual implications of what happens, then the climax of the story should deal with that! There is something to be said about a character who finds him or herself out their element or depth in a story–but those character traits should be tied into the way the story concludes. If Bayek had been losing his religion, or learning the importance of political maneuvering, then it would make sense. But he does neither of those things.

If a character is becoming involved in the conflict primarily to save a love interest or family member, that person should be part of the resolution of the story (though not necessarily in the way that the protagonist expects!). If the protagonist is pursuing political power or reform, how successful that quest is should be the main focus of the climax (and failure is an option for the writer!). If the hero is trying to get vengeance, then whether or not he or she kills that enemy is where it all leads towards.

You can subvert the motivation along the way by making it so that the character develops during the Plot. Maybe the hero realizes that he or she needs to do something else instead! Maybe the quest proves pointless! Maybe the Plot stumbles into something deeper! That’s fine! But what the reader or player or viewer should NOT be doing is noticing that the protagonist has no emotional investment in the emotional climax of the story.

The character and his or her traits should match the story being told. It should drive the story forward in one way or another. You can play around with this, of course, but you cannot divorce your character from the story being told. If the the protagonist doesn’t care about what the story is about, how can the audience?

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