Academics: Protagonists and My Understanding of Them

Heroes, baddies, and confusion. Ready to analyze?

Hey everyone, it's Lin here. It's been a loooong time since I've actually written something and I'm so sorry about that. Unfortunately, Hibiki is going to be taking a...break with no particular time frame attached. Bummer.

But we're not here to talk about that today! I'm going to be using this post as a means to talk about something I had some confusion on recently that I'd like to share with a number of people. Perhaps people who have had the same problem as I do or perhaps don't know they had the problem till they read this.

You see, I have a tumblr and if you don't know that then it's this link: http://gammaatsu.tumblr.com/ (enjoy btw). This is important because I currently am doing a 30 Day Challenge. Sounds productive, no? Well it's not, it's a 30 Day Video Game Challenge, haHA! :>

I ran into one of the days that I thought I pretty much had in the bag, but I questioned myself and asked a friend if I was correct in believing what I did. "The guys from PayDay can count as my favorite antagonists, right?"

Yeah, these slick lookin guys.

I was immediately shot down by a "No. Those guys are protagonists". I couldn't, for the life of me, wrap my head around why these guys are protagonists. They literally shoot police. A lot of them. For money. And drugs. And "THE GOLD....". At first I was absolutely sure of my answer; there was no way in my mind that the guys from PayDay, as much as I love them because they're just so cool, are protagonists. I decided to look up the definition of 'protagonist' so it can clear up things. It gave me a definition that they are the "leading character, hero or heroine" (dictionary.com). But that just contradicts each other; sure the PayDay guys may be leading characters, but to call them heroes is just...wrong. No one would call them heroes for the things they do and what they do it for. I was thoroughly confused...a dictionary has never confused me so much before and I needed to do some more research.

Well...they are. I was wrong. The issue I found was that media had disillusioned me that protagonist immediately had to mean "hero". That isn't always the case. A protagonists is the point of view which the media is supposed to take, even if they are a villain. The relationship between the reader, listener, watcher, player...is to empathize with the protagonist or see themselves in the protagonist, regardless of what where on the alignment spectrum they may be.


And let's be honest, good characters aren't straight laced. Most characters in media (at least good ones who aren't in children's books) aren't fully a hero...think of yourself as a protagonist in a story. Most people believe themselves to be good people, however even the best people of today have done some wrong things in the past. They're never perfect and we shouldn't have expectations for them to be perfect, just as we don't or shouldn't have expectations for ourselves to always be absolutely perfect either.

This is the same reason why I couldn't ever have any emotional attachment to Sora from Kingdom Hearts. He's a nice kid, but he's also just too 'good', too 'perfect', too 'white knight' for me to empathize with.

I think protagonists are best understood with first understanding what an antagonist is. Let's take PayDay, the main example of this post, again. We take the viewpoint of four guys trying to rob banks, jewelry stores, nightclubs, galleries, what have you, for money. Who is the antagonist?

Well, first off what is an antagonist? An antagonist is someone who places obstacles and challenges in front of the character you are following. They are the person who is opposes the lead character's viewpoint, lifestyle, or actions and therefore can take their own actions to prevent the lead character from moving forward. Antagonists can also be literally anyone or even anything (even things like nature or abstract), as long as they are creating issue with the lead character. A tsunami can count or so can a spell that's going to wipe out the whole planet if the protagonists don't stop it in time. Identifying an antagonist is empirical; it's based on experiencing or observing a situation through a certain pair of eyes versus logically stepping back and determining who's a hero. Afterall, evil characters can develop and change into heroic characters. You just never know.

Both Lust and Scar work as evil to heroic characters. While you can argue that one is on the spectrum of evil moreso than the other, they both have done misdeeds, yet died in ways that was to redeem themselves, a trope known as "Redemption = Death". Also, spoilers, but honestly if you haven't watched FMA by now, that's your fault.

Back to the example. Who is the antagonist? Should be obvious by now: the police. We know that in the PayDay series that the people who shoot at you, regardless of anything, are the police. They are clear antagonists, since they're literally shooting at you. So who is the protagonist? It has to be the PayDay crew...because they are the eyes we're looking through, regardless of whether or not they're posing heroes.

Okay! So that's about it for today. I hope this post didn't drag on too long and you enjoyed it. Perhaps you learned something......perhaps you didn't. Nevertheless, till next time!