Why People Tend Not To Favor Main Characters
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Why People Tend Not To Favor Main Characters |
| Creator: | Dylan Gleason |
| Date(s): | December 28, 2006 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fanfiction |
| External Links: | Why People Tend Not To Favor Main Characters, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Why People Tend Not To Favor Main Characters is an essay by Dylan Gleason.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Excerpts
Now, you may or may not have noticed that, for the most part, people in any fandom at all tend not to favor the main character. For instance, exactly how many times have you actually heard someone say that their favorite character from the potterverse was Harry himself (oh, and I'll be using examples from the HP fandom since it's the one I'm most involved with at the moment)? Or, perhaps, back in the olden days when cavemen rode sauropods to work, how many of you remember people saying that Leonardo was their favorite Ninja Turtle? Zero, right? Well, I wrote an essay about my thoughts on why exactly this is. You know, aside from things like simply finding characters attractive.
Ask any individual who his or her favorite character from a given book, movie, or TV show is, and chances are that it will be either a supporting role or a minor character. In few cases will a person admit to favoring the main character, no matter how interesting or easy to identify with he or she may be. There are two reasons for this: protagonists are unlikely targets for pity, and tend to bore the readers/viewers.
People may also pity the lesser characters, despite their status as fictional entities, for being cast into such minor roles. This explains, for instance, why Blaise Zabini is so absurdly popular in fanfiction. Until HBP, the only thing the readers knew about him was his age, sex, and house--and even today, some people are still blatantly ignoring the second one--not only is there more room to work with, but to some degree the fans feel bad about how Blaise gets hardly any attention at all (even after HBP), while other students in his house and year *cough* Draco *cough* have whole chapters written about them and are given more significant roles as short-term antagonists. Speaking of which, some readers and viewers may also feel sympathy for the villains, and view them as simply misunderstood. After all, it's not pure coincidence that there are so many Snape and/or Draco sympathizers. The protagonists have already been showered with attention; after all, the story is focused around them. Surely the poor, underdeveloped minor characters deserve some attention, too. It's not their fault the author/creator made them such flat characters. Of course, the vast majority of readers/viewers are fully aware that the "pity characters" they're devoting so much attention to are not real, and are thus unable to care one way or the other about the roles the author/creator cast them into. Most people on the planet know the difference between fantasy and reality. Generally speaking, people develop emotional attachments to fictional entities not because they actually believe that the characters are real, but because they enjoy imagining how they would feel about their role in the story, or how much they would appreciate all the attention from their fans if they were real.