Maybe I'm just missing the point of your response, but it was clear that when I said "the writing reassures us" I didn't actually mean "the narration says 'this character is good, I promise,'" right?
When a character's actions consistently result in the "good" outcome or when they meet some ideal moral standard, when the character is self-sacrificing or consistently selfless or always kind or generous, when even their bad decisions are justified by the story, when they are consistently the smartest person in the room, that is all the writing reassuring us that the character is good, they promise.
I frequently read stories where the character always makes good decisions, where they are the ones who get to say I told you so, where the people who challenge or tell them off are always the ones proven wrong.
This is not about a love affair with self deprecation. It's not about wanting badness or self-destructiveness or unkindness to be spelled out.
But stories are less interesting if the narrative refuses to let the main character face real consequences for their actions, where bad things only happen to them in spite of their choices rather than occasionally because of their choices, where they are always the best and coolest and most special character.
In the book I was reading, by 40% of the way into the book when I wrote this post, the main character had already gotten into two or three unprompted bar fights, was having ill-advised sex, was being kind of an asshole to everyone around him, and had committed a couple of random crimes. These were decisions mostly being made because he was under a wild amount of stress--but they were bad, self-destructive, and sometimes unkind decisions.
And there wasn't much talk about the character's goodness or badness (other than some of the characters being impacted by his decisions wishing he would make different decisions), because it's a novel, not a children's TV show. But the narrative also didn't feel the need to reassure us that his decisions really were good actually, and the character was allowed to make those sorts of bad decisions instead of only making the sort of self-cannibalizing, only-lash-inward-never-outward, perfect suffering bad decisions that many books and fics are so fond of.
Anyway, maybe you do read different books than me. But there is always more than just "protagonist encounters events/challenges and people, and stuff happens.
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