On the Rhetorically Invincible Protagonist

 Tuesday was rough, despite being International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but I sailed through those waters without walking the plank! I take me victories where I be findin’ them. The rest of the week went much better than that, and next week will be fantastic, God willing. I also hope to draft some letters soon.

We shall see!

On the Rhetorically Invincible Protagonist

I recently read To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. I want to preface this Note with: this book is fun, it’s fine, and we need more indigenous voices in mainstream genre fiction. If you like dragon books, its unique take on dragons and worldbuilding is worth checking out.

Now that I’ve said that, time to be critical!

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is an alternate history with dragons and people bonded to dragons, in which the 1800’s Western world has been conquered and colonized by the Norse. Our heroine Anequs is a Native American (or Native Markslandian?) teeanger who bonds with an American dragon hatchling. Because in order to use a dragon’s breath properly, one needs proper training, she goes the Anglish (English conquered by the Norse) school to learn, well, how to shape a dragon’s breath in ways that won’t get people hurt.

There is a persistent problem with Anequs (that’s pronounced ah-neh-KOOS), though. It’s that she’s never wrong. Whenever a character expresses a prejudiced or bigoted opinion, she’ll respond indignantly in a way that would please a 21st century Internet progressive, and go on to explain how in her home culture, this is all normal. When she does this, the bigoted characters she’s talking to usually balk, unable to come up with a good answer as to why they were prejudiced in the first place. As you get more of these scenes, Anequs feels less like an imagined character and more like a way for the author to preach at the reader.

This feels a bit tricky, as I said in my review–it isn’t as if we want to say, “The sides should be more balanced between the colonizer and the culture being exploited. That’s silly. At the same time, I find it more than a little frustrating that Anequs’s culture is apparently right about everything, and at no point does she ever express doubt, confusion, or hesitation about her worldview being correct.

A lot of words have been written about the problems of writing a physically invincible protagonist. What about a protagonist who is rhetorically invincible? This character is always right, always wins every argument or disagreement, and no one can formulate a decent response as to why they believe the things they do. In short: it provides some of the same problems. And in fact, a physically invincible protagonist is actually preferable.

What makes a character interesting, complex, and well-written is not whether or not they can physically defeat opponents (though that can also be part of the story to great effect), but how conflicts affect them and make them change as people. And if your character has his or her opinions already fully-formed, and are shown by the narrative to always be right, and no one can argue with this person, then he or she doesn’t get to do that. Sure, we learn what he or she thinks, but it’s really boring because it’s less an exploration of the character and more of a lecture.

[Atticus has this problem in Iron Druid Chronicles, too, but he’s infinitely worse because unlike Anequs, who has a progressive, 21st century viewpoint, Atticus pretends to have a progressive viewpoint all the while objectifying the women around him and being dumb as a box of rocks.]

So sure, I’m not saying that you can’t have your protagonist express views that are your own when it comes to topics where the modern world has a very different opinion–I’ve said that before. It’s going to come off as really odd if no one challenges those opinions though, or just goes with what the protagonist says. Sure, you can have your character in a colonial setting be anti-slavery, but if the main character says something against slavery, and all of the other characters in the room react with awe or babble in confusion, it reads like one of those “And then everyone clapped” posts on Tumblr. It doesn’t feel real.

The comparison that came to my mind was Lay Siege to Heaven, a novel about the life of Saint Catherine of Siena. The novel paints a very reverent picture of its lead character. She gets visions from God, and she’s also never really depicted as wrong–but at the same time, she doesn’t rhetorically step through everything because she’s surrounded by people who don’t agree with what she says. They doubt her visions, or think she’s naive and misguided, and so even when she has the clear answers, things don’t get solved because people won’t listen to her, or try to belittle her to do what they want instead. Given that some of these people are aristocrats or clergymen, they can express those opinions much more eloquently.

This approach allows for the lead character to both be right, and to have conflict with other characters. It forces the protagonist to have to work out why he or she believes or thinks what he or she does, and defend it against someone with a contrary point of view. The protagonist may express doubt or confusion about it as well, and might have to reconsider those beliefs and find a better way to express them.

To be clear: the book written about a saint (that does not question her sainthood!) has more complex character-building on its protagonist than my negative examples.

People aren’t perfect. Even if you want your protagonist to be right on all of the moral issues (and by that, we mean agreeing with you), they can have doubts, or they can find it difficult to defend those positions against an opponent who is more prepared. Have this person be challenged, rhetorically, so that when he or she says something against the popular opinion, there’s a reply other than confusion or quiet excuses.

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