@cstross @Illuminatus @guyjantic I will say that I am FIRMLY Team T, she does no wrong, she is my precious blorbo
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@lilithsaintcrow I'm not sure how all these people read the book (or see the movie? IDK) and conclude, "This is a movie about a really great guy."
@guyjantic @lilithsaintcrow [Looks at 'Breaking Bad' and 'the Sopranos'] There are some people* who seem to confuse being the protagonist with being a good guy. I personally blame, first, conventional USAmerican 'Hollywood code' narratives that seeded Manichean perceptions of characters in fiction, and then cynical, Randian, bad faith pushes to confuse independence and self-reliance with being an arsehole.
*Morons
@Illuminatus That's a really good observation—mistaking the protagonist for a good guy. I've never been able to articulate it, so thank you! @guyjantic
@lilithsaintcrow @Illuminatus @guyjantic I think maybe 50-75% of readers uncritically assume a first-person viewpoint, or a third-person sympathetically portrayed protagonist, must be "good". It takes a deliberate authorial move to break them out of interpreting the story through that lens. (And if you do it, you'll lose a bunch of them because they go into must-throw-book-at-wall mode over the cognitive dissonance.)
@cstross @lilithsaintcrow @Illuminatus @guyjantic That is why American Psycho works well. Even described as a protagonist in third person would be less effective, partly because of the dissonance between the emotional responses of Patrick Bateman and, well, most other people.
@cstross @lilithsaintcrow @Illuminatus Lit teachers in my childhood/youngadulthood and, honestly, tumblr, have given me an alternative lens: It's a story, and sometimes stories are not about people we should want to be. However, even with that lens I find myself doing the "protagonist must be good" thing in my head.
I saw The Matrix the week it was released, and had not seen a trailer or anything. Those first scenes, when Trinity is beating up cops, were deeply disturbing and delightful at the same time. I was pretty sure she was a horrible villain but this was *her *story and I was there for it, possibly simply because it was from her point of view.
Okay, also because she was Carrie-Anne Moss. But I stand by my point.
@cstross @lilithsaintcrow @Illuminatus @guyjantic I think what makes shows like Breaking Bad better Call Saul so compelling is that they play with our notions of good and bad and what those terms even mean, especially in the context of the systems in which they operate and are entangled.
@cstross @lilithsaintcrow @Illuminatus @guyjantic Walter White does not become Heisenberg on his own. He becomes Heisenberg in a system that hasn't rewarded him for a lifetime of public service and in which his cancer diagnosis isn't just a death sentence for him but promises ruin on his family and diminished prospects for his soon-to-be adult disabled son.
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@cstross @Illuminatus @guyjantic That could be. It's so alien to the way I personally read; I don't have to *like* a protagonist to feel for them. It would be interesting to see the statistics in that area, if one could trust self-reporting.
@lilithsaintcrow @Illuminatus @guyjantic I think we underestimate the number of profoundly naive readers out there (who are just reading novels as bland escapism). I mean, you've read Starter Pack. Are Jum and Tabitha plausibly sympathetic protagonists? (Especially T, with her Chicago House of Horror thing going on?)
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