1. I think generally you need a likeable main character; one out of your main cast needs to be a role model. It’s more realistic if everyone struggles, but on the other hand, it gets complicated when everyone on screen is battling inner demons and not the external forces which must needs be knocking down the door. (I’ve done a bit of writing in the past where I dealt primarily with inner struggle versus external and it was rather dry and didactic.) 

    But this is why I like stories like Doctor Who. You get the best of both worlds. Flawed, very flawed main character; but likeable because he’s so human and really is trying to do the right thing. Side characters who generally are good and likeable. External enemies who sometimes attack internally. Occasional episodes where the Doctor’s flaws put everyone in danger. 

    Another literary technique that works well with this is the foil character: like Gandalf and Saruman. Show the audience what could be, while never doubting the good/evil alignment of the character.

    Just thinking out loud here. 🙂  

  2. Galadriel says:

    The Doctor was my first thought too. Especially considering how dark he’s become over the past season…one of the best examples of ‘enemy within’–and an amazing plot twist–was in The Pandorica Opens. The Doctor describes the inhabitant of the Pandorica as follows

    There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior… A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world

    And with minutes to go, we find out what the inhabitant is
    “The Pandorica is ready!”
    Doctor: Ready for what?
    SPOILER: ready for you SPOILER

    And that’s not to mention his over-the-top showmanship in A Good Man Goes to War, or Ten’s Time Lord Victorious moment  in Waters of Mars….even the Dream Lord in Amy’s choice drives home the ‘enemy within’ theme.

    • The Dream Lord was a lot of what I was thinking of. And the fact that the Doctor hurts people without meaning to, all the time. (SPOILER which is why he dropped off Amy and Rory SPOILER) And in the Runaway Bride, when Donna points out why he needs a human companion. Et cetera. 

      Pretty much the overarching story of the entire series: the Doctor has always tried to do the right thing, and he’s always finding that it’s (1) harder (2) costs and (3) he’s not perfect.  

  3. For “secular” stories: if they will show a character’s inner struggles (either gritty or not), don’t go trying to persuade me that this character is Basically Good and Only Bad Things Happen to Him/Her. I know what I see, both in myself, and in the story. That’s why it’s so strange that many stories will both forsake improved tension and enhanced audience appeal by clinging so desperately to humanism mantras: You’re Basically a Good Person.

    But what’s even more confusing is when Christian stories do this … ah well, next week.

    At present, though, it would be fascinating to hear whether you believe most Christian fiction, if it explores such issues, keeps our sinful nature in view, or else minimizes the greatest battle lying within in favor of emphasizing our battles against The World or Satan.

    • See, I’m not so sure on that. Some secular stories seem to deal with the idea that characters do have a ‘dark side’ and not in the dualistic Force kind of way. You don’t have to sit down and have a discussion of fallen human nature to understand this. Yes, the Doctor is a good person. Yes, the Doctor is a bad person. Both at once. He’s a person who makes choices, every day. Some of those choices are good and some of them are bad. 

      Ditto for Christian stories. I’m not sure, though, why in a lot of them just because a character is saved and secure, they never make bad choices. Bad stuff happens to them, but they don’t make bad choices. There’s not that kind of struggle that I see in (going back to previous example) the Doctor.

      I’m becoming more hesitant to label a character as good or bad. People too. Because it’s not so simple. You are saved or lost, not good or bad. Good or bad is more of a description of the choices that you make. Saved people make bad choices; lost people make good choices. The world isn’t so simple as to assume that it’s always going to be saved-good-lost-bad.  

      • Kaci Hill says:

        Excuse me while I quote you:

         
        I’m becoming more hesitant to label a character as good or bad. People too. Because it’s not so simple. You are saved or lost, not good or bad. Good or bad is more of a description of the choices that you make. Saved people make bad choices; lost people make good choices. The world isn’t so simple as to assume that it’s always going to be saved-good-lost-bad. 

         
        And done. 0=)

    • Saved people make bad choices; lost people make good choices. The world isn’t so simple as to assume that it’s always going to be saved-good-lost-bad. 

      I quite agree, Jenni, based not only on what I see, but on Scripture. It says both:

      Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

      Matthew 7: 9-11

      … And …

      as it is written:
      “None is righteous, no, not one;
      no one understands;
      no one seeks for God.
      All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
      no one does good,
      not even one.”

      Romans 3: 10-12

      Not to mention the frequency of Scripture’s urges for God’s people to fight their own sin-shrapnel, and Paul’s lament about his own continuing struggles in this (Rom. 7).

      Evil people can do bad things. And redeemed people, while “good,” can do evil.

      I suppose that if God can present us both truths simultaneously, I can wrap my head around it!

      Thus my statement that humans are not “basically good” or neutral, as too many stories (even Christian ones) seem to imply. If we hate God, we are at heart evil; if we are saved by Him and love Him, we are at heart declared righteous, and becoming holy, but still combat our sin-shrapnel. And even the secular stories that show this — whether they show a character given over to evil (like the Joker) or a flawed hero who ultimately makes good choices (like Bruce Wayne/Batman), they are “incarnating” in condensed story-form truths about our world.

      As a Christian, I easily admit that even non-Christian people can do good things, and if we “suspend disbelief” long enough to picture a world in which God/Christianity are not factors, then flawed, “non-Christian” heroes become in a sense avatars of the redeemed individual, the human beings we are meant to be. They are not perfect Christ-figures, I suggest, similar to how we are not; rather, they are portrayals of how Christians as Christ-figures should act, and in a sense Christ-figure-figures.

  4. Kessie says:

    That was one of the discussions that came up when they were making the Lord of the Rings: do you believe that you have corruption inside of you, and there is also an external force in the world attempting to corrupt you? (Like the Ring.) They interviewed all the cast with this question, and apparently they had been debating it while filming it. Some believed both, some believed only in the external, some believed only in the internal. (The making of LOTR is win and awesome.)
     
    I love flawed characters who wrestle with evil desires. In my fanfiction days, I took one of the series’s characters and made him half robot. The robot half has had a bad copy of his living personality programmed into it’s AI, originally intended to make his robot and living minds work in harmony. But the AI went very, very bad, and struggled to master the living brain, even as the character’s living side struggled to master the robot. So this character is forced to do bad things sometimes because the robot has taken control. But the people around him don’t always believe that it was the robot–they think it was just that the split character is entirely evil. And the reader is left to decide if they are right.

  5. Martin LaBar says:

    Thanks for your analysis, and the reminder.

  6. Paul Lee says:

    This is certainly an insightful article, but I disagree very slightly on one point.  Although it’s definitely true that modern entertainment wrongfully ignores sin and human depravity and incompetence, I believe there is a place for a protagonist that truly is “basically good” within the context of the story.
    One of the main reasons for enjoying speculative fiction (especially fantasy) is that we can see the authors’ vision of the pure ideals that we long for but that we never see in uncorrupted form in this fallen world.  I think a genuinely good hero who is justified in his or her sufferings is a fundamental part of fiction in general.  We know that we are weak and evil (even if we deny it), and we want to see someone overcome.  As Christians, we know the Story where the One Hero prevailed against all evil.
    Thus, stories with basically good protagonists echo redemption.  Never perfectly, of course — no one can write a truly accurate Christ figure, because everyone who would try to write such a character is too flawed and blind to do so.  Fiction with a morally-upright hero who echoes the True Hero will always be imperfect, but so is everything we do, even our Christian worship and fellowship.  Again, one of the reasons we need speculative fiction in the first place is because we must believe in the perfection that we do not see.
    I’m not trying to say that all protagonists should be basically good, either.  Mr. Burnett described good uses of a flawed hero in the article.  When the protagonist is flawed and struggling with his human nature, he is an Everyman figure seeking his own redemption.  When the protagonist is a genuinely good person on a righteous mission, he is a Christ figure seeking to conquer and end all evil.  And neither the Everyman figure nor the Christ figure will be perfect in fiction, because all authors and artists are imperfect.
    Those are just my thoughts on the issue. 🙂

    • Although it’s definitely true that modern entertainment wrongfully ignores sin and human depravity and incompetence, I believe there is a place for a protagonist that truly is “basically good” within the context of the story.

      Thanks for your thoughts, Paul; they helped me heat some of my mental leftovers!

      Fully agreed here — because it is true that Christians are, post-redemption, basically good, who do bad things because of that heart sin-shrapnel, or the Devil, or the world. Stories should echo that also, and not have only “gritty” heroes.

      This is why I liked the recent Captain America movie so much, because it dared to go against the “gritty hero” who is gritty just for grittyness’ sake (if that’s a word).

      The truth that some stories, especially those with strong Christian characters, should echo this truth as well, might lead to a fourth and new final installment of this series: perhaps Human nature 4: Saved for good works, or something like that.

What do you think?