#it takes more than velocity and drama to make a driven character

[whumpfish]

Hi, I'm Fish, and I'm Blacklist trash.

And as Blacklist trash, I am begging y'all to give your protagonist a defined set of morals, even if they're challenged later.

[Spoilers for The Blacklist under the cut]

I adore each and every character in The Blacklist... except the main character. To the extent that I was genuinely disappointed when her death in s3 wasn't permanent. I was, pun intended, dying for her actress to quit or something, anything, so that she could be written out.

Setting aside the fact that after 8 fucking seasons we know absolutely nothing about Elizabeth's life between the age of 8 and the start of the series, in addition to having no narrative substance, she has no moral substance, no emotional substance, and frankly, no intellectual substance.

She has no loyalty to anyone, not the team, not Red, not the various people who appear and claim to be from her past or know something about it. Her loyalties and values and emotions change drastically every time she's told a new version of the story... and she believes everything she hears. Like an idiot. And nobody registers this as a problem.

90% of the character death in the series is the result of Elizabeth Fucking Keen bouncing around like a human pinball. Every time she ricochets off a plot wall, at least one person dies as a result. A whole goddamn secondary team dies before we're finally rid of her. Red and Mr. Kaplan split because of her bullshit, and ultimately Mr. Kaplan dies over that split, which for me is what pushed Elizabeth and her fundamental instability from annoying to unforgivable.

And yet she's the darling babygirl of the team forever, despite having an in-story body count that rivals Red's. Ressler overlooking it/being oblivious I can understand. Nobody else is that stupid.

It's possible to have distrust fade in and out of relationships without all this ridiculous back and forth bullshit. The writers do it just fine with legitimately every other character. For example, I love the dynamic Red and Harold have.

Every time Elizabeth ricochets off a plot wall, something stupid happens like her standing on a rooftop overlooking the city like she's fucking Batman. And all these aesthetic trappings, and the intensity and velocity with which she pinballs around, is painfully obviously meant to make her look Driven and like A Strong Female Character... but all it actually makes her look is unstable.

Like Elizabeth, Harold has some past entanglement with Raymond Reddington I* Like Elizabeth, he periodically has doubts about whether Our Red is the same person or not, and how sinister or benign or even random that connection might be if he isn't. Unlike Elizabeth, he doesn't believe everything he hears. Unlike Elizabeth, even in the transactional interactions he has with Red, he doesn't switch sides in the middle. Unlike Elizabeth, he recognizes that while who Red "really is" is an interesting question that has personal implications for him, the only Red that functionally matters is Our Red.

You know who has a shifting, sometimes volatile relationship with Red and is actually a strong female character? Alina. Her past is a mystery, but while you learn bits and pieces of it over time, you also learn bits and pieces of the shit that happened in between. Alina would have been a perfect match with Red narratively. She has the training to seek legal, in-bounds solutions, but her temperament can lead her to solve shit Red's way instead. It would make way more sense for Red to choose Alina as a potential successor, and she would have way more reason to be both inclined to embrace it and leery of becoming the next him. My fix-it au is "Elizabeth's first death is permanent and we get Alina starting s4."

Moral of the rant story: Your main character needs to have the most consistency and narrative substance out of everyone, unless it's first person and you're going for an unreliable narrator. If they have the least, you have a problem.

*(Who still may or may not be Our Red, because I don't think the fucking writers know his original identity. I personally stopped caring halfway through s5. I was sick to death of the identity shenanigans by the time s6 started.)