Hey, it’s Luke from Unwritten Tomes.

In today’s issue:

…and as usual some behind the scenes updates at the end.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

You can also watch this on youtube.

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Good stories tend to manipulate you.

They control who you support using their narrative. Sometimes they make you forget morally gray areas and other times they can even make you root for someone like Light Yagami who by all accounts is a mass murderer.

And if fictional stories can have this effect, it shouldn’t be surprising that similar mechanisms are used in most modern media.

But before we explore this topic here’s how this all started.

While reading the Red Rising series I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the inner conflict of the protagonist whenever he did some clearly bad things “for the greater good”. Whether that’s killing someone innocent or using lies and manipulation to achieve your goals.

Of course it’s far from the only story where the main character enters some gray areas of morality. In general, black-and-white stories tend to be somewhat boring since they often lack deeper internal conflict and they don’t reflect the complexities of real life.

But these morally gray areas raise an interesting question: How far can the protagonist go until we start considering them evil?

Does it depend on the actions themselves or the motivation behind them?

Can anything become acceptable if the justification is good enough?

And how much are we simply being manipulated by the narrative? Naturally siding with whoever the story happens to follow.

It definitely seems to be some sort of balancing act between the actions, the justification, and our familiarity with the characters.

We judge based on the information we’re given. If we only see the outcomes, we’re going to judge based on that. But if we learn the motivations behind them and the worldview of the character, the situation becomes more complex.

Due to that there appears to be a very strong “protagonist advantage” – we pretty much always sympathize with the main character but is it because stories always follow the good guys or are the good guys good because they are the ones who the story follows?

We know that if the character’s motivation, pain and goal are understandable to us then it’ll be difficult not to empathize with them.

And since we’re mostly focusing on the protagonist, getting to know them the most, we tend to adopt their perspective and justify their actions.

That’s the reason we don’t want Walter White to be caught despite him being kind of a psychopath.

That’s why we root for Light Yagami, even though he’s a mass murderer.

And in Red Rising we forgive the lies and the death count of the protagonist.

The “protagonist advantage” becomes clear once we contrast such characters with really well-written villains. Those tend to be characters that seem to have an understandable reason for the evil acts they commit. The reason that they’re the villain is that their justification is something that exists in the past not the present, or they’re simply crossing the line of what we think their motivations can justify.

Or maybe the circumstances simply force them to commit evil acts and they must be stopped not because they themselves are evil.

But it’s not unreasonable to think there are some villains that receive that label simply because they’re not on the side we follow in the story.

Whether it’s fiction or real life – everyone’s the hero of their own story.

Many questionable actions can feel justified once there’s a narrative that supports them. That goes for the narrative you tell yourself, the plot of the story you’re reading, and also the news we get about the world around us (something the media is happy to make use of).

Shaping the narrative to fit what you want the audience to think is the bread and butter of politics after all.

Circling back to Red Rising, it actually does a good job at adding nuance to the narrative. Making us part of the main character's inner conflict, showing us the difficulty of his choices, while also providing fair justification for many of the opposing characters.

But even then we don’t escape the protagonist effect. The story wants us to root for Darrow so we end up rooting for Darrow. And while at the end of the day, I do believe him to have moral superiority, it’s difficult not to wonder whether I would still feel the same way should the story follow someone else and paint the characters a bit differently.

Hope you enjoyed today’s topic. I surely did until I tried recording it and after a 30-minute session it turned out the mic had ran out of battery (my fault for being too excited about trying out a new mic).

But at least I got a practice run. And the microphone turned out to work really freaking well once it was properly charged. The sound quality is much better and the recording process itself will be much easier in the future.

You can see the results I got in the new video.

See you in the next one!

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~ Łukasz Skoneczny, Unwritten Tomes