The extremely competent protagonist
They can be a complete jerk, but they're the only one who can solve the problem, and that's cool.
I've been thinking about the rule of competent protagonists.
You can have an absolutely unlikeable protagonist, but as long as they're extremely competent at something, you'll read and even enjoy them. See: Sherlock Holmes and House. It’s fun to see this antisocial grouch tackle a problem nobody else can solve and figure it out. It’s clever and it teases your brain. You want to figure stuff out like that, too.
It's even better if the protagonist IS likeable, like Deku from My Hero Academia. His extremely competent strategist brain combined with his down to earth demeanor really makes you root for him. Same for the hero of the Martian by Andy Weir. Sure, he’s a scared dude stranded on Mars. But he’s a COMPETENT scared dude. He figures out the science of food, oxygen, shelter, and ultimately, have to get off Mars. Probably my favorite part in the book is when the arm gets ripped off his suit, and he keeps a clear enough head to seal the breach with tape and get a fresh suit.
The rule of competent protagonists is what every Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, other technical mens writers like that all have in common. Their characters are pretty flat, but that competence SHINES when the nanites attack or the dinosaurs get loose or the silver apes are crushing people's brains with paddles or the nuclear submarine disappears.
The hero of Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia might be an accountant working a desk job, but he also works out and knows a lot about weapons, so when his boss turns into a werewolf and tries to kill him, the hero throws him out the window of a skyscraper and gets hired by MHI the next day.
I read an article somewhere that stated that extreme competence is the ultimate male fantasy. The idea that you, with your weird collection of skills, might one day be the only one capable of fending off an alien invasion. Like in Ender’s Game where Ender is the only one who can think far enough outside the box to defeat the aliens for good. And you know? I don’t think it’s just a male fantasy. I know plenty of women who wish that their collection of skills would save the day someday (and win them a handsome man in the process).
The trouble arises when you have a writer who botches this.
The entire Young Adult genre is a parody of this. You have a girl who ostensibly has some crazy skill, or magic, or political position. She should be competent. But instead of feats of cool-headed competence, what we get is an air-headed cupcake who just has everything handed to her because she’s the protagonist. The Voice of Power series is particularly guilty of this. It’s like the author kind of knows that the heroine needs to be competent, but then lets her win by virtue of girl-bossing it instead. (Also the heroine is as dumb as a box of rocks, so you never feel like she earned any of the stuff she does.)
The flipside is when you have a character who is extremely competent in TOO MANY areas. I read a book where the heroine was a super skilled mage, a super skilled marksman, a super skilled shapeshifter, and also a dragon. It was too many things. Pick one of those skills to start with, and have her earn the rest over the course of the book. When she starts with all the skills, she comes off as a Mary Sue, and it ruins the conflict in the story. “Another world-ending threat? I’m sure the heroine will pull a new skill out of her butt to solve it. Oh, look, she just did.”
In Final Fantasy 14, the protagonist of the latest expansion, Dawntrail, is very guilty of Mary Suedom. I don’t know if they fired their writers or what, but in every other expansion, the new characters were extremely competent in at least one thing. Aymeric is a good leader. Estinien is an expert at killing dragons. Lyse is extremely well connected and knows everybody in the Ala Mhigan resistance, plus she’s a great fighter. Alisaie is socially awkward but a fantastic sword fighter, while her brother is great at politics and social situations but extremely weak when it comes to fighting (comparitively). The Crystal Exarch is a complete dweeb but he’s insanely good with his own brand of magic and uses it to protect a whole city over and over.
Meanwhile, the new character in the new expansion isn’t competent at anything. She’s the YA girlboss who is a princess who somehow wasn’t educated in anything about her own country. She gets seasick (and airsick and carsick) despite being a toughened warrior. She succeeds at everything OFF-SCREEN while your character, the hero of the story, waits around the campfire for her to come back. (There is a campfire scene on average every 1-2 hours of playtime.) Everything is handed to her, she earns nothing, and she is competent at nothing except … talking to people? And even then she’s still dumb as a box of rocks. AND YET she defeats the final boss FOR YOU, stealing your moment of glory, with her powers of … talking to people. You know it’s bad when you can scroll Tumblr for hours and see more fanart of every other supporting character but not her.
In general, people like to see competence. They like to see a smart hero who has a weird skill that can save the day. In Dragon Mage by M.L. Spencer, the hero is autistic and his only skill/interest is tying knots. He collects different kinds of knots. He wants to be a sailor so he can tie knots all day. Then it turns out that he’s this incredibly rare mage, and tying knots is how his magic works, because he’s literally messing with the weave of reality. So you have this hero who is autistic, with all the drawbacks of that, but he has this shining, amazing ability to work magic through his knowledge of knots. It’s really fun to read.
I’m over here mulling over a story I want to write, thinking of how to build a hero with that one weird skill and a host of other, more normal traits. It’s kind of reassuring that even if I screw up and make him kind of unlikeable, that one skill of extreme competence will carry him through.
Is this something you think about when you’re creating characters? Do you give them that one skill to be massively competent in? Tell me about your characters/stories/books!
The original Mission Impossible was the first show I sae where I realized that the draw *was* watching extremely skilled people be extremely skilled. And the show knew it because the moment-to-moment drama came from near misses and unexpected complications and watching them deftly improvise.
I find this kind of extreme competence really satisfying if the art focuses on the details of how they accomplish the task. To the point if being one part training manual.
I tend to like to write these kinds of characters too, but I also like to make sure that the thing they're competent in is *not* the thing that will most directly lead them to their goal in the story. The main character of my novel is a very effective demon hunter and investigator, and only gets more so as he gains more training and experience. But that competence often backfires against his ultimate goals as he finds himself in the employ of people with questionable ambitions, in conflict with those he holds dear, and in constant danger of injury and death.
Put another way: he's really good at what he does, but sometimes he regrets doing it.
I actually replied to this in a note where someone shared your article and I wish I had copied the text now. It seems that where YA has gone wrong with their highly competent female character is that they come across as stupid? Having not read a whole lot of YA, I wonder if the authorial struggle is between wanting to create their fantasy character vs the way society wants them to be (pretty airheads that need to be coddled — basically have things handed to them as you described). If they are too competent, nobody (especially the reader) will like them. But there are examples of this highly competent female character done well, yes? It’s just everyone wants a piece of that pie and doesn’t quite have the chops to pull it off?