#You need to know C.S.Lewis and Le Guin and Tolkien atleast by reputation and subject

[heljar-heimur]

for reasons ™️ all I could think of in that first half was Quentin from The Magicians.

Both books and show, even though way more in book.

I started thinking about how there's a clear difference between the audience stand-in type of an everyman protagonist that's deliberately kind of bland, featureless and sensible at all times because the largest amount of viewers should be able to imagine themselves in his (yeah, as it's almost always a dude) shoes, and then there's the kind of protagonists who are clearly realistic, genuine characters just like everyone else in the setting.

A lot of the time when some story has a protagonist that people hate and consider unrelatable and unlikeable, it's because they've confused a Flawed Character Personality Protagonist for a stand-in type. Or maybe the creators weren't sufficiently clear about what they were selling, or sent mixed messages about who and what the audience should expect.

And now that I think about it, I think it would be funny to do that on purpose. Set up a story where the protagonist is the most Standard Stock Character everyman main character, let's say the quiet and well-mannered, understated dark-haired Generic Anime Protagonist guy. And once the audience is settled comfortably into this audience stand-in guy's shoes, he starts gradually making more and more unhinged choices, and justifying them with less and less sensible arguments, before the whole audience is sitting there wide-eyed and horrified like what the fuck is wrong with this guy.

Half a season in and this is how the show does a plot twist reveal: This is actually psychological horror and this is a villain protagonist.