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It can work sometimes, especially if your main character is a pinball protagonist who is simply caught up in events happening around them or to them. For instance Arthur Dent is very clearly the ma...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-29T02:49:10Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48437 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T13:07:08Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48437 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#2: Initial revision
It can work sometimes, especially if your main character is a [pinball protagonist](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PinballProtagonist) who is simply caught up in events happening around them or to them. For instance Arthur Dent is very clearly the main character of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but for a large portion of the book series he instigates almost nothing and does almost nothing on his own. However whether it's advisable to structure a story like this is another matter. In HHGttG it works because Arthur is the surrogate for the everyman reader who would be equally out of their depth in the universe suddenly turned upside down. But in case like yours where each character, at least in theory, should be equally equipped to handle the situations it can raise the question "why are we watching this character instead of the hero?" You need to have a very good reason that you can justify when you pick an unorthodox main character when the orthodox one would be a perfectly good choice. Why do you want to follow not-the-hero in this story?
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-10-07T18:35:31Z (about 5 years ago)
Original score: 13