How best to prevent a protective response from overshadowing a heroic act?
My main character is injured, having been shot earlier. This injury renders him much slower to respond and reduces his agility. Because of this, two of his colleagues are with him to protect him.
His colleagues are a young woman who is his protégée and a man who is a good friend of his.
She never had an instructor like him before and knows that the longer she is with him, the more she will learn and the better she will be. She needs his knowledge, but likes him too as a teammate and there is camaraderie between them.
I see the scene: the protegee notices signs of danger and, at the moment every instinct tells her to evade, she leaps into the line of fire, taking a bullet for her mentor. Danger is neutralized.
He carries her away. She is being driven away to receive medical care, but he follows to clear the way, protecting her because she is a valued teammate, his protégée and just saved his life.
How best to balance their actions so as not to overshadow the woman’s courage?
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2 answers
Don't make it about him.
If it works in your story, switch to her point of view.
If you need to stick with your main character's point of view, then focus on him describing her actions as a narrator would and don't focus on what he's feeling. Some feelings will come across and that's fine. Just make it about her.
If you have a narrator that moves around, then keep the narrator with your hero and not with your main character at this point. You can move back later, or intersperse.
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You're in a tricky situation here: there's been so much written about women needing protection, that responding negatively to it is almost a knee-jerk reaction, whether justified or not.
One way you can address this is by acknowledging the problem. If you're telling the story from the man's POV, he can acknowledge that the woman would hate him being all protective, but he'd do it anyway because... If you're telling it from the woman's POV, she can hate the situation, even if she (maybe) acknowledges the necessity. This is the route Jim Butcher routinely takes in his Dresden Files series.
Another approach is to change slightly the focus of the scene. Instead of the man "protecting the woman because she is a valued teammate, his protégée and just saved his life", he is impressed by her performance, appreciative of what she just did for him, and of course he's going to watch over her now, just as she's done for him a moment ago. The events are the same, but you're telling them in a way that builds the woman up, and downplays the man's role as protector.
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