Looking for a word

[radiantfracture]

I feel like there is a technical term for the kind of protagonist who is more or less a blank so that the readers/viewers can project themselves into that character without getting snagged on some startling individuality, but what is it?

If there isn't one I might plump for "void protagonist" but I'm open to more established terminology.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Blank slate?

[radiantfracture]

Like that, but for some reason my brain is convinced that narratology or fandom has coined a technical-sounding term. This may not be true at all.

[radiantfracture]

Blanktagonist?

[sovay]

Blanktagonist?

I like it.

[sovay]

I feel like there is a technical term for the kind of protagonist who is more or less a blank so that the readers/viewers can project themselves into that character without getting snagged on some startling individuality, but what is it?

I call them lenses or stand-ins, but that's my coinage as far as I know.

(This is actually relevant to something I am writing about as we more or less speak!)

[radiantfracture]

(This is actually relevant to something I am writing about as we more or less speak!)

That makes this all the more intellectually exciting.

Tell me about "lens" as a term. I like it. I am a camera etc.

[sovay]

That makes this all the more intellectually exciting.

I mean, mostly it's that I appreciate a movie I am writing about for not falling into this trap even while the structure in some ways encourages it.

Tell me about "lens" as a term. I like it. I am a camera etc.

That's how I think of it: the protagonist who is supposed to be transparent prose, to interpose as little of themselves as possible between the audience and the narrative: they exist so that we have an excuse to see what's going on.

[radiantfracture]

I mean, mostly it's that I appreciate a movie I am writing about for not falling into this trap even while the structure in some ways encourages it.

God, that's a great bit of analysis and I don't even know what movie it is

[sovay]

God, that's a great bit of analysis and I don't even know what movie it is

Sam Mendes' 1917 (2019)! I had watched it last year and never written about it and was reminded of it over the last weekend, although then did not manage to write about it for Memorial Day, as I was still in the middle of The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) and everything takes me far too long these days.

[radiantfracture]

the protagonist who is supposed to be transparent prose, to interpose as little of themselves as possible between the audience and the narrative: they exist so that we have an excuse to see what's going on.

Yes, that's what I'm thinking of - the protagonist who is only slightly more than an embodied narrative voice.

[sovay]

Yes, that's what I'm thinking of - the protagonist who is only slightly more than an embodied narrative voice.

I like that way of putting it. I feel perhaps unfairly that I have encountered this device more often in the first person in written fiction, although I am sure that it must occur in the third person and perhaps I just don't remember because the instances were so successfully bland. With movies, it's the problem I have occasionally described as a protagonist-shaped hole in the plot.

[jasmine_r_s]

Maybe audience surrogate or stand-in, everyman/everywoman, Mary Sue, hero, wounded healer, or a kind of self-insertion?

[radiantfracture]

Ha, it's for our video that I ask -- we talk about it quite a bit.

[jasmine_r_s]

Aha! I'm excited to listen to our convo through the lens of the perfect word!!:-)

[elusis]

Yeah, Mary Sue/Gary Stu and self-insertion were the terms I thought of, though self-insert is about the author's projection really. But MS/GS are I think meant to also be the reader self-insert.

[jasmine_r_s]

"Gary Stu" is new to me, and I love it!

Question of usage

[ng_moonmoth]

My understanding of Mary Sue/Gary Stu (I've also seen "Marty Stu" in that gender) is that it involves a good-sized helping of deus ex machina, in that the character has concealed exactly the capabilities necessary to resolve the plot jam the author has backed themself into, despite nothing in their stated background that would lead the reader to expect that.

Deploying an MS is regarded by a significant number of folks as a plot hack, often indicating authorial laziness or lack of skill. I can't place one right now, but recall having enjoyed a couple of works where the author has subverted the trope to well-done comic effect.

[radiantfracture]

What I want is something that focusses on the blankness of the entity itself, as much as the action of the reader.

I feel like a MS/GS is often kind of an idealized self -- that's what it's criticized for -- someone who has the perfect tragic backstory and is called "not pretty" but yet described in a way that only an extremely beautiful person could be -- that sort of thing.

Whereas the blanktagonist (as I am temporarily calling it) is bland and has even fewer features than the MS/GS. In the video, you talk about Carrie from Sex and the City, and that seems like a great example to me -- you note that she does lots of things, often iddily-dramatic ones, but she doesn't seem to have any specific point of view.

[troisoiseaux]

Everyman?

ETA: whoops, didn't see that someone had suggested that already :P

[radiantfracture]

Must be a good answer then!

[marycatelli]

Placeholder

[marycatelli]

Vanilla protagonist.