The Mythcreant Podcast 581 – Fights Between Protagonists
Look at your main characters, such good friends! Be a shame if anything made them turn on each other in a conflict that’s as full of angst as it is cool action moves. Who are we kidding, that sounds awesome. But how to go about it? We need disagreements that are big enough to turn heroes against each other while not seeming like they’ve suddenly turned evil (unless they’ve suddenly turned evil). And you probably want to leave room for a reconciliation at the end. We’ve got some thoughts!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Oren, I know you wanna keep using Audacity to record the podcast, but I have this gut feeling that it’s evil and will destroy us. And no, I can’t give you evidence, but I’m really mad that you don’t believe me about this.
Oren: Well, I think that the obvious solution is for us to spend the next eight episodes repeating conversations in which I tell you this isn’t real, you insisted it is real, and we don’t go anywhere.
Chris: So we’ve watched hundreds of episodes of the soap opera, “Dark Shadows”.
Oren: Yeah, we have done that.
Chris: And how do you write a show that’s like, a thousand episodes long? Not by moving the plot forward.
Oren: Yeah, don’t do that.
Chris: Well, obviously, since you don’t believe me, I’ve gotta go behind your back and maybe kidnap some Audacity developers to prove that I’m right.
Oren: It just makes sense.
Chris: It’s just a very constructive action that will cause no further disagreements.
Oren: Yeah. Afterwards, I’ll be like, “oh, I guess you were right the whole time. My bad.”
Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about when protagonists fight.
Oren: First thing to do is get some popcorn, I guess.
Chris: Yeah, get some popcorn. So let’s just start with why make protagonists fight?
Oren: Because it’s fun. I like to use the Let Them Fight GIF over and over again.
Chris: Because we like drama. Or sometimes you gotta romance and you gotta keep the lovebirds apart for a little longer. You know? You gotta come up with something and the fight is a way to do that. Or in a suspenseful story, maybe it’s ‘no one could be trusted’ and so you wanna create separation between people so that you don’t know who is a friend and who’s an enemy; trust no one. Or you just really like great conflicts with nuance.
Oren: Right. The characters fighting could be a number of different things, right? It could be characters who start off on the same team and have a temporary disagreement. It could be characters that start off from the same team, and then one of them, you know, decides they can’t work together anymore and becomes an antagonist. Or maybe they are opposed to each other from the start and you’re following both sides of a conflict. There’s several different ways this could work.
Chris: Yeah. And of course we also have situations where people are at odds at first, and they solely come together, and then there’ll be some relapses when additional differences surface they break up again or whatever. So, certainly a variety of situations when we have these kinds of relationship arcs where people have to, you know, encounter problems in their relationship and work things out. But there are lots of issues. I’ve seen many, many storytellers struggle with this one.
Oren: Right. Well, at the core of it is if you want characters to disagree about something strongly enough to oppose each other, not necessarily in a physical fight, they could just be arguing a lot. Something that goes beyond just a mild, oh, maybe you should do something else. It needs to be something that is important but also something where in most cases, you want to be able to see both sides of it, because if one character just seems unreasonable, that character is gonna get a lot of hate.
Chris: And again, there’s just a lot of people who just have trouble coming up with great conflicts. That’s just something that storytellers struggle with a lot. And what can happen here is that the writer just doesn’t come up with a reasonable fight, so maybe the fight feels overly petty over something that is not a big deal, or people could be talking it out and instead they’re fighting instead of just reasoning with each other, or, this happens a lot in long running shows, where the characters change personalities. Like, in order for this fight to happen, a character manifests a new flaw we’ve never seen before and is just overly dramatic. And often a character comes off like an asshole maybe ’cause we need them to be an asshole for this divide to occur in the first place.
Oren: Yeah, you know, we need these two characters to be in opposition or the plot won’t go forward, but we don’t really know why, so I guess one of them is just mean today.
Chris: Yeah. This reminds me, we were just watching the show, Tide Landers or Tidelands. We also referred to it as Violent Women because it’s about like these half-sirens and sirens, you know, gotta be sexy ladies. So there’s just a lot women who do violence in the show, which is kind of fun, but this main character, Cal, which is short for Calliope, man, she is just very angry with people because while they’re in like emergency situations they won’t stop and take her to the place she wants to go.
Oren: Yeah, I liked that show way more before we had clearly jelled around Cal as our viewpoint audience insert character.
Chris: I thought she was the main character from the beginning.
Oren: She was supposed to be, but early in the show there was a lot more focus on the different factions in the town and what they’re doing. And Cal’s story doesn’t really heat up until a few episodes in and before that it’s just a lot more like a mafia drama where everyone’s kind of bad and you’re just waiting to see what types of extreme violence they inflict on each other.
Chris: Because the half-sirens in the show are dealing drugs.
Oren: Right.
Chris: They’re supplying drugs. We’re not actually sure where they get the drugs from, but they supply the drugs.
Oren: They never explain where the drugs come from. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: They manifest drugs from the ocean, I guess, but we also don’t know what the drugs are. I think that if they named what the drugs were, then it would feel more real and the viewers would be more likely to be like, “uh, I don’t know. Do we like these people? They’re dealing cocaine.” Right? Whereas if we don’t know what the drug is, it’s like, “I dunno, maybe it’s a fantasy mystical drug that’s not so bad, but that people kill each other dealing ’cause it’s illegal.”
Oren: Yeah. Who knows what it is.
Chris: Any case. So the conflicts in there are just her not understanding that somebody else is in an emergency situation and like, yeah, she’s going through some stuff. She just found out she’s not entirely human and that would affect a person, but the other person is [in] a very understandable situation and she just doesn’t see that. It’s like, yeah, somebody just tried to kill your brother and he’s being hunted right now, so this is not really the time to complain about the fact that he won’t drive you where you want to go.
Oren: Yeah. That whole show is full of characters just not having great motivations for things they do. As you go, you’re wondering, “okay, why are the sirens and the drug dealers at odds with each other? And why does anyone care which siren is in charge? It doesn’t seem like it makes that much of a difference.” There’s a bunch of stuff like that going around.
Chris: And I do think it’s one of those situations where we have a set list of characters and we have to fill the show with scenes with those characters at odds with each other. And sometimes the writers might be struggling to be like, “okay, so why did these characters hate each other? I don’t know. I just need them to draw their guns.”
Oren: Yeah, they need to point guns at each other. It’s very dramatic.
Chris: So anyway, not having a natural reason for characters to fight and then making them come off as really petty, that’s a very, very common one. Another one that I see is a character – this is the “Voyager” problem – a character getting too much candy.
Oren: Mm-hmm
Chris: Because sometimes what happens in these protagonist fights, is that one character who is the writer’s darling, the whole point is that everybody doubts them so that they can later be proven right. Jane Way has some of these arcs on “Voyager”, and usually to make that work, you know, if you have this one beleaguered character who just, nobody believes in, but they’re right, well, okay, why doesn’t anybody believe them? So all of the other protagonists have to disagree with them, which probably means that they don’t have a very good reason for doing what they’re doing, and then they’re proven right, usually by luck.
Oren: Yeah. The whole “everyone’s against me and I have to prove them all wrong” is, it’s not that it can never work, but man, that is a steep hill to climb. “Babylon Five” does the same thing with Sheridan and I find it just as annoying there.
Chris: Yep! Korra has it once in Legend of Korra too. So there’s a number of characters where we’ve seen this arc.
Oren: Yeah. It’s just like, look, if everyone disagrees with your protagonist, what is it your protagonist sees that none of them can?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: Why is your protagonist the only one who is correct?
Chris: Which is one of the reasons I brought up this like, oh, it’s just my gut, which we have seen on Star Trek before. I don’t think that one was Janeway, I think that one was a different character.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But again, why have people doubted you? It was like, “well, look, I just know this to be true, but I can’t give you any evidence.” It’s like, okay, well this doesn’t feel like a hill to die on then if you don’t have any evidence, this would be more interesting and more realistic, but take some more thought where there’s evidence that can be interpreted in different ways. And then you have to establish, okay, why is each person heavily invested in their own interpretation?
Oren: Yeah, and you can make this easier on yourself by introducing a time limit. If the characters have to make a decision quickly and they have limited information, then they can’t just be like, “all right, everyone, hold up. Let’s calm down. Let’s reorient and see what we’ve got.” You know, there’s no time for that. You gotta make a decision now. And so the characters are gonna come down on the sides that they are, you know, predisposed to for various reasons.
Chris: And you can also have a situation where characters disagree but you’re not endorsing a particular person as necessarily being right. One of them might succeed in getting their way and the other won’t or maybe they’ll compromise, but you’re not trying to be like “this person was right all along”. But if you do have a person who’s like, “this person was right all along,” that’s a lot of candy. And so if the character is already candied, really feels like too much. Whereas if you had like a really downtrodden main character who was marginalized, and that’s why nobody takes them seriously, then that would be seem a lot more reasonable. We know why people aren’t taking them seriously, they already have lots of spinach, they could use a chance to show everybody what they’re made of. That’s very different than a character who is kind of insufferable and then gets to be the one person who’s right when everybody else is wrong.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Another really common issue that I see in a lot of these protagonist versus protagonist kind of fights is things that feel morally twisted. Sometimes that’s to vindicate the character who looks wrong. We need a character who looks wrong. If we had a situation where it’s like, “no, I swear in my gut these people are evil,” and then I break in and kidnap them, and then it turns out that I’m right, there’s something still wrong with that! I didn’t have any evidence, I still broke in, kidnapped somebody without evidence. Even if I’m right by luck, that’s still kinda like, ugh. Or another one, because storytellers have so much trouble coming up with gray conflicts, gray washing a black and white conflict.
Oren: Oh God, that’s such a problem.
Chris: This is where you’re like, okay, you present a situation, oh, these are the oppressors and these are oppressed. But what if the oppressed people also did crimes or something?
Oren: Right. It’s like, so there are two sides out here, and one side murders, crucifies and enslaves people, and the other side is vaguely problematic. So they’re basically equal.
Chris: Or “The Librarians” did an episode where they were talking about this American Civil War. It’s like, okay, no, no, no, no, that was not a black and white conflict. One side was a bunch of rich slave holders that wanted to continue enslaving people.
Oren: Yeah, or specifically it was a black and white conflict. Which is not to say that the North were like perfect good guys, but there was obviously a bad guy side in that conflict. It was good that the Confederates lost.
Chris: Ironically, the thing about this is that if the Confederacy had not withdrawn, there’s a good chance the North would’ve never, at least not soon, pushed the slavery issue. What happened is that these rich slavers were sure that Lincoln would try to abolish slavery, and so they preemptively wanted to withdraw from the Union.
Oren: It’s a little more complicated than that. What they also wanted to do was expand slavery because they thought, or at least this is what I’ve read, they thought that the institution of slavery would die out if it stayed contained to the current states that it was in and so they wanted to expand it. And some of ’em had these wacky plans of like, conquering Mexico and instituting slavery there. And that was also part of why they decided to secede ’cause they knew that Lincoln, while he was unfortunately not an abolitionist, would not countenance the expansion of slavery and would try to curtail it slowly over time. And that was just not acceptable to them.
Chris: But the North previously had done a whole bunch of appeasement of slavers, so not showing a lot of moral bravery there, not– [chuckle] when the war started. That was definitely the correct side. So when “The Librarians” comes and it wants to do this whole brother versus brother framing, where they go to a historical town where they’re doing civil war reenactments and they have two of the characters get possessed by civil war ghosts or something like that. And it, it definitely is trying to basically reframe it as a gray conflict where both of them learned they were wrong. And it’s like, no, no, don’t do that.
Oren: Which is funny. They could have just used the Revolutionary War if they wanted to do that. Like yeah, absolutely, have a story about a patriot and a loyalist who realized they were both wrong. Works for me.
Chris: So basically trying to take a black and white conflict and then be like, okay, but it’s too simplistic. It’s black and white, and then adding something to try to make it, that really ends up creating some very morally twisted storylines. You wanna take an issue that is inherently gray and you’ll know it’s gray enough when you talk to different readers and they all have different opinions about which side is right. I did an article on doing moral dilemmas a while back and had some examples of moral dilemmas that you could have in your story. And it was really funny that commenters would come in and be like, “how dare you say that that’s a moral dilemma, this is obviously the right side.” And then another commenter would be like, “how dare you?” And then pick the other one. And it’s like, “yep. That’s why we call it a moral dilemma, folks.”
Oren: Yeah, it was funny reading that ’cause on the one hand, the fact that some people are willing to take up for one side and other people will take up for another side doesn’t inherently make something morally gray, but in this case it obviously was if you just reasoned through it a little bit. And so you just seeing people like both confidently take different sides in the same comment thread was very funny.
Chris: Yeah. Those are some things to look out for. I do think that it really just helps storytellers a lot to just have ideas because I think a lot of these problems, maybe not the candy issue, but a lot of these problems are just rooted in struggling to come up with something that works. I think offering some ideas and templates for how you can have a big disagreement that turns into a fight and gives people somewhere to start with is helpful. And I have a couple articles. I have one that’s specifically “Seven Ways to Create Rifts Between Close Characters”. That one is for what I think is the trickiest situation where your characters are already getting along well and you need to add a new issue that can put them at odds with each other. I also have one on personality clashes, which is generally from characters that don’t have that much exposure to each other. They’re not already friends and writers also have a lot of trouble with personality clashes and tend to make characters come off as very unreasonable. Now, a lot of times you don’t need to do a personality clash ’cause that’s a particularly tricky one. You can do something that’s a little bit more significant than just they rub each other the wrong way. But there are ways to do that productively.
Oren: Yeah, and one aspect of this that is I think, useful to think about that isn’t just setting up the argument itself is making sure that you have room in the plot for this kind of split, because this is something I have encountered occasionally with client manuscripts, thankfully not that often in published stories, where you’ll have two good guys, right? You’ll have two characters on team good, and then a villain that they’re both opposing. Then there’s a split between those characters and now one of those characters is opposing the protagonist, but there’s still this villain, so now you’ve got two villains and what are you doing with both of those?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: So depending on how long the split is going to last and how serious it is, you usually want to make sure that it is tied into whatever opposition you already had as opposed to just, well now a new challenger has arrived and, and now what am I doing with him?
Chris: Right. Or have the story have somewhere to go with it.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: If a protagonist is going to split off and just even become an antagonist, where does it take the story that it wouldn’t have gone before in interesting ways? So we’re not just, “Okay, well characters caught in a fight, but we still need to like go in this direction. So I guess they make up now.” Now granted, a fight can matter for multiple reasons. It can change the way the external plot goes, but also it can just be part of a character’s arc. If they have some issue that they need to resolve, the fight can be part of that and show them overcoming that, just part of their relationship arc, whatever. But you know, you do want somewhere to go instead of just, being like, “okay, well I counted on the protagonist doing this and now their head lieutenant is against them. How is that gonna work?” So should we go over some ideas for types of disagreements?
Oren: Yeah. I have found that a very good one is, who should we be helping with whatever it is we’re doing? If you have two characters who have found a bunch of money, how should we spend this? You got maybe one character who’s like, “we should spend this on ourselves and our friends and our family,” and the other characters like, “we should spend that to buy a building that we can use to help people who don’t have housing.” And that’s a sort of conflict where you can sympathize more with the second character, but you can see where the first one’s coming from.
Chris: So they have different priorities that kind of separates them, I think that also works really well. Something similar is risks. What risk are we willing to tolerate? And we can combine that, “okay, we wanna help somebody, but that person is also a fugitive, but we know that they’re innocent, but they’re still being hunted and we can get in trouble. Do we wanna prioritize helping this person or not getting in trouble?”
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: “Do we wanna make sure we protect what we have or are we gonna decide we’re gonna go and proactively attack the enemy even though that’s a risk because we’re just getting weaker if we stay here?” So that kinda like risk tolerance can definitely be a dividing point for characters.
Oren: Yeah. The uh, “are we willing to face danger on someone else’s behalf” is [a] good thing that can drive otherwise reasonable characters apart.
Chris: Another one, we had a recent episode talking about questionable allies, trust and loyalty I find are really useful for dividing people. If they have some kind of authority figure, can be useful for authority figure to show up who’s just kind of questionable. Which brings up the question of like, okay, even though this person is doing some things that don’t seem quite right, are we going to trust them and still follow their orders? And if one character does a lot more rules following than the other, that one works really well. You have an ally, right? And if you have somebody questionable, you do want them to provide some benefits. So we’re again, talking a lot about priorities and risk here, we have a questionable ally, that person might not be trustworthy, but they can bring us really valuable information. I think the nice thing about loyalty and trust is we can get a lot of emotion in there and a lot of drama, if that’s what we’re looking for. Sometimes the questionable ally might be somebody’s childhood best friend or something suddenly shows up, then you have one character who’s really attached to this person already and might take offense if somebody else doesn’t trust them.
Oren: You can, she can use that to show that this character trusts the new ally because they have a history. This other character doesn’t have a history and is just looking by what we know this person to have done. And that’s a great way to build conflict between characters.
Chris: It can be fun if the characters are not already close. This one kind of requires, if it’s clear that there is a spy somewhere, there is a mole. That can be great fun because all the characters can suddenly start following each other, spying on each other, trying to find out who the spy is. But that behavior may also make them suspicious, and everybody can suspect everybody else.
Oren: Yeah. The fear of a spy is also the perfect way to establish why characters aren’t sharing information.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: Which is very useful and writers really struggle with that. I’m still baffled to this day that they didn’t use that in the Last Jedi just to explain why Poe and Admiral, what’s her name? Holdo.
Chris: That was just an easy one. That was a really easy solution right there!
Oren: Especially since they had this question of like, how is the Imperial fleet following us? It’s like, well, I just assumed they had a spy on board. But no, they have a new techno what’s-it. I mean, hell, they might not even have been a spy. Sometimes all it matters is that they think there’s a spy. We could have had a reveal where there is no spy, they have a techno what’s-it, but everyone’s been acting like there was a spy ’cause that’s what they assumed.
Chris: Yeah, that would’ve been perfect.
Oren: I just assumed that’s where they were going. But no, apparently not.
Chris: There’s a number of conflicts that happened with protagonists where if everybody just talked it out, they would be fine. And that is really hard to deal with. But suspicion is one of the best solutions to that if they actually suspect each other. Sometimes otherwise making characters just like less knowledgeable. I actually have a list, I have another list of how to try to sabotage communication. It’s still pretty tough. Another solution is to have a malicious go between who, you know, you need a reason why people are talking to this person instead of to each other directly. But if they both trust somebody and that person is malicious, they can distort messages.
Oren: Right, and if they are clever about it, they can insert themselves into the communication line and then the protagonists who are getting their messages garbled, increasingly distrust each other and only wanna communicate through this new person who is totally trustworthy. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: Another big source of protagonist disagreements is just prior secrets. So this is something where when they first met, somebody had kind of a dark secret and they were like, okay, well you know, obviously I’ll tell this person when I get to know them a little bit better and they trust me. But then the closer they become, the harder and harder it is to tell the secret, leading it to just be held onto for years, which the other person considers a betrayal. And you do want something that’s kind of personal.
Oren: That one is tricky because it can absolutely work, but you need this balance where the secret is significant enough that we can believe the character wouldn’t have wanted to share it, but also not so significant that it becomes impossible for the characters to reconcile after it’s shared. Assuming reconciliation is what you want, maybe you don’t. Sometimes writers don’t want their characters to reconcile, but that’s, you know, sort of the default assumption.
Chris: Yeah. Involvement in an organization that’s antagonistic, for instance, is a good one because that person could have come to regret their involvement and left. We don’t know exactly what they did necessarily as part of their organization. So there’s like a variety of things that kind of can create a level of distance between them and some of the horrible acts the organization was doing. But it’s also very implicating when the other person could have been, for instance, personally harmed by this evil organization. So that’s one that I think works pretty well.
Oren: Yeah, I would agree.
Chris: And then probably one of the most robust ones, just giving them conflicting goals. So they actively want different things. And sometimes that can occur with people who are already, for instance, best friends, but sometimes that’s a good one for characters who meet each other and form a temporary alliance based on their needs right now. But then just at some point in time have to turn against each other because they have mutually exclusive missions, for instance.
Oren: But they have shared needs early or they need each other, and so they need to cooperate, but they also have something pulling ’em apart because if they know they’re going to different places at the end of this.
Chris: Maybe they’re both danger-ing through dangerous terrain and they need each other to survive. But then when they get to the temple at the end, one of them wants to take the artifact, the other wants to destroy it. Something like that works really well, and then they can be allied for much of the story and then get to like each other and then, oops! Now we can’t be friends anymore. That’s just a nice, easy one. Of course, you do have to come up with a reason if you want them to make up again, often you would come up with a reason why one of them would change their mind.
Oren: Right. It needs to be something that’s not so far apart that they couldn’t ever reconcile over it. Assuming that you want them to reconcile, it might be that one of ’em changes their mind, they might have a compromise, or it might be something that one of them gets their way and then eventually enough time passes that the other one is willing to put it behind them, something like that. All right. Well, now that we are finished having our conflict, we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: Now if you want to hear about us actually fighting with people, not each other, but people we were attempting to get along with, we do have some juicy stories in our collection on Patreon. I’m not gonna name any names. I’m not even gonna mention the blog nemesis, but it’s in there. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.