In the previous posts about unmade Superman projects, I didn't wrestle with the notion of protagonism enough, or correctly. I've been thinking about it since immediately after they went up.
The word Protagonist comes from the Greek Protos, meaning "first in importance" and Agonistes, meaning "actor".
Who is first in importance in this story?
Whose story is this?
The protagonist is the character in whose story (whether that involves a dramatic arc or not) we need to be invested. It doesn't necessarily follow that this character has to be the one behind the inciting incident (hence my mistake in attributing Brainiac, Morpheus and Delia as the protagonists).
But it DOES follow that their inner/outer turmoil in dealing with the inciting incident and how it changes their world should drive the story forward.
I concentrated too much on my faulty understanding of what a protagonist does (i.e. their function in the story) and ignored what they are (i.e. the story as a means of exploring them). That's not a good way to think when you're trying to develop character-driven stories. It's mechanistic. I'm not even sure it's an easy mistake to make, as it's rather a fundamental misunderstanding.
The word Protagonist comes from the Greek Protos, meaning "first in importance" and Agonistes, meaning "actor".
Who is first in importance in this story?
Whose story is this?
But it DOES follow that their inner/outer turmoil in dealing with the inciting incident and how it changes their world should drive the story forward.
Reframed in the correct context, Superman is clearly the protagonist of both the scripts we've looked at. The villains are the antagonists. The inciting incident is, well, incidental (at least to this argument).
I'm not going to go back and change the posts, as it's a learning experience and I've got to cop to my mistakes. I will put a link to this post in though, for posterity, so you'll all know I've changed my ways. ;0)
