Anon E Mouse
Not A Giant Space Spider
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2015
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You are mischaracterizing my posts. I am not sure whether you are reading things into the post that aren't there or misunderstanding the post itself. I never said anything about everything Jaune did being stupid and foolish. I specifically stated that he was a mix of competent and foolish that I find very realistic and plausible, that he would act in a competent manner do impressive things and do them well. But that time after time he would be at the point of succeeding and then sabotage himself by abandoning his current actions to do something "good" and self-sabotage destroying all his progress. And it's something I've seen many people do. It's something I personally find very annoying in a protagonist because I've seen it so many times over decades of reading and to me it reeks of an author who must sabotage the protagonists victories so that they do not ever succeed. But the annoying thing is not that the protagonist doesn't succeed in everything, it's that he had succeeded and then suddenly did a metaphorical 180 and sabotaged himself in a way contrary to his own actions and motivations of just a scene or two ago. What he does show is severe lack of self-discipline something kind of expected of a teenager in modern society but Remnant for all its trapping i not the modern first world. Also a lack of the sort of pragmatism and down to earth reality check you should very much see in a person raised on a world as dangerous as Remnant. But that is something that a protagonist can begin a story with but must grow out of swiftly.
Tattletale I have never said is stupid. She is quite intelligent, but her personality is a toxic self-destructive mess. The sort of person that you never leave near yourself because they are going to destroy themselves and they are going to drag everyone around themselves down with them when they go. Tattletale is such a toxic personality she came across in Worm as a misogynist stereotype of the manipulative scheming self-destructive woman. She is a social cancer to all around her and unfortunately Jaune does not appear to recognize that, which again is very realistic for a young man dealing with an attractive but emotionally toxic woman.
I took your post to be in favor of protagonists that are not only incompetent but stay incompetent, that fail time after time due to their own failings but are saved by luck and circumstance to screw up again. There is a place for growing into a more competent character over the course of fiction. Protagonists should never be perfect, but they must be capable and they must be heroic in the original Greek sense of the word. They must have arrete. Otherwise they are not protagonists, they are object lessons. Icarus isn't a protagonist or a hero, that you see him in this light shows a lack of understanding. He's an Aesop, he the idiot you tell stories to children about to remind how dumbasses get themselves killed with their stupidity. Protagonists can be villanous, evil, immoral and flawed. What they must never be is incompetent, stupid, and weak willed. Because those aren't protagonists, they are the object lessons to deride and ridicule so everyone understands not to be them.
