On “Basically Decent” Protagonists
mephestopheles replied to your post “I just started watching “Turn”, the American Revolution spy drama on...”
I'm also getting more choosey about what cis white male narratives I'm willing to watch. If a show or movie has the same trite and frankly boring asshattery and plays into the same tired tropes as every other boring story being told then I am going to put my energy elsewhere.
I feel like there’s a class of cis white male story creators who have considered themselves and their demographic to inherently be the “Universal Human Experience” for so long that they don’t realize that other people outside their demographic need to be sold on why this person is the main character. Times are changing and the Everyman story in its original form ( “basically decent person/farmboy becomes Chosen One hero and gets the girl” ) is growing dull and needs more justification on why it’s being presented over any other number of fresher options.
I keep coming back to the idea of “basically decent” as a way to describe this milquetoast white cis male protagonists. They’re not bad men. But they’re also not as “good” as I think their creators think they are. They’re often given a dog, or as with Turn, a child to show they are “decent” men. They don’t beat their wives. They’re nice to animals. They don’t abandon their children. They help out their friends when they are in trouble. And this is presented as some great moral achievement and platform for our sympathy when really it’s the bare minimum of “not an asshat”, or a villain we want to go down.
Of course, it’s effective as a writerly shorthand to give a dog or a child to a protagonist that they treat well in order to introduce a character as a good guy, but it should never be all we are given for why we should like this person. Sure they can pat a dog on their way to work in the morning, but after that I hope to see them do something a bit more morally courageous before I’m on board with their supposed virtue. For example, I’m sure Steve Rogers petted dogs on his way to work in Brooklyn before he became Captain America, but I’m more interested in the fact that even when it was very dangerous to his health he also stood up to bullies and got regularly beaten up doing the right thing, at great personal cost, because not to do so was unthinkable to him even before he became a superhero. That’s what elevated his story of being a good man above the milquetoast “generally decent” cis white men that make up the majority of his genre.
To be somewhat sympathetic to these male writers, it’s a problem shared by any writer with a myopic view of their own demographic. We base characters at least partially off ourselves. We like ourselves, generally speaking. So we have a blindspot for why someone who is not like us should like these beloved characters of ours and root for them as protagonists. Maybe in “Turn” he’s a man with a small child and a young family who is just trying to get by, but in a female-dominated narrative the question could be why this girl who just went through a breakup deserves to get her dream job in your average chick flick. A lot of female writers don’t remember to include why this woman is inherently sympathetic, because just like the Cabbage Farmer in Turn, she’s just basically decent but not exceptional or likable if more details aren’t added.
Idk, TL;DR there’s plenty of boring, basically decent protagonists out there. White cis male characters in general and their creators need to realize the bar needs to be higher than average for us to be invested, and this seems to be a realization they’re still grappling with. That said, it can be a problem amongst writers in any demographic, we just see more of the mediocre cis white male story being treated as if it’s somehow inherently important because they dominate the industry. Writers of any demographic should be self-critical about their protagonist and what makes them exceptional, and not assume that their “basic decency” makes them inherently likable.
