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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30785
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30785
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Relatibility is more like understanding why people are doing what they are doing. Consider the movie franchise for Taken: the hero kills dozens of people without mercy. But we understand why, they are evil and they have kidnapped or killed somebody important to him. In The Matrix, nobody is like Neo (by design), but we come to understand what he is doing and why. In the series Mr. Robot we have an untrustworthy narrator because our hero is literally insane and hallucinating half the time, but we understand why he and his cohorts have broken the law (to fight evil as they see it) and even why the police opposing them are trying to enforce the law (also to fight evil as they see it).

What makes heroes relatable is us wanting them to succeed, even if their success for some reason means slaughtering thousands of people. What makes villains, villains is we don't want them to succeed. What makes for good conflicted reading (or watching) is characters we know we **should** want to succeed but don't want to succeed: We **should** want our uncorrupted FBI agent to catch Mr. Robot, but we also want Mr. Robot to succeed in his clearly illegal fight against the sociopathic villains!

For another example, consider the romance novels my 82 year old neighbor reads. She spent twenty years working as a seamstress, and another twenty as a hotel maid. She was married and divorced in fifteen years. The female leads in her novels are nothing like her, personally. They are young, often wealthy or moving in wealthy circles, they meet powerful men. Why does she relate? Not because they are cleaning toilets like SHE did, they aren't going to marry the guy from the pool hall that knocked her up. She relates because SHE wants to believe she could be like THEM, if her cards had been dealt just a bit differently. She wants them to succeed, falling in love, having epic sex, or whatever else is going on in modern romance novels.

A relatable character is one we can understand, even if they have skills or god-given gifts, or even magical abilities we will never have. A hero is somebody we not only understand but want to succeed.

Original score: 4