The Mythcreant Podcast 576 – Secret Protagonist Backstories
We’ve all seen this moment in TV and movies: a character we thought we knew is revealed to have a completely different history than we imagined. The soft cinnamon roll protagonist has actually been an assassin this whole time. The grizzled mercenary hero is using a glamor to disguise the fact that they’re actually a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed adventurer. This kind of backstory reveal is often exciting and memorable, but is it a good idea? Listen and we’ll try to figure that out.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m… Chris? Or am I?
Oren: Are you? Who knows? We just don’t know.
Chris: Who knows? Have you seen the scene where I was born and named by my parents? Because unless you’ve seen that scene, maybe I’m not Chris.
Oren: I haven’t seen that scene. And for all I know, maybe you actually fell into a seam in reality, in a scene I haven’t seen.
Chris: So this is obviously an episode about tongue twisters.
Oren: Just as much alliteration and as many… homophones? The ones that sound the same, but is different. I forget which one that is. [Chuckles]
Chris: We’ll just say it’s homophones because I’m not gonna look it up. Maybe we need some online real-time fact-checking.
Oren: Someone could point out what the actual one was. So this episode we’re talking about secret protagonist backstories. And the reason is that we’ve been watching Castle Rock, which is a fairly old show by now, but still some spoilers. And as I’m watching it, our protagonist is Annie and she’s got some problems. It’s based on various Stephen King stories, so of course she has problems.
And then, boom, huge reveal halfway through the show—or at least through the season, ‘cause it’s sort of an anthology show—that her entire backstory is not what we thought. Her daughter isn’t really her daughter. Also, she accidentally killed someone and then attempted to kill somebody else. It’s a whole thing. And the moment I saw it, I was like, “Oh boy, so many authors are gonna want to do this.” Maybe not this one specifically ’cause I don’t know if this show is popular enough for that. But I see this sort of thing a lot and I work with authors who see it and they wanna do it too.
Chris: Flashy stuff of course is always gonna be attractive. And reveals and twists are very flashy. And that’s why we rarely encourage a lot of reveals except for when they’re absolutely needed. For instance, the end of the mystery or something like that. Just because we’ve seen so many people go for the flash and not realizing what they’re wrecking.
And we generally just… tell a good story. Get people emotionally invested. Keep them entertained. You don’t need the shocking reveal. And this has, “Oh, I just wanted to shock people,” written all over it. I wanna talk more about that. But first perhaps, this might be a good time to, when we’re talking about protagonist backstories, I feel like we need to go over the meta mystery issue again.
Oren: I was gonna say, “But Oren, isn’t this just meta mysteries again?” Well, yes, but also no.
Chris: It depends. What a surprising answer. It depends. In many cases, yes. And most of the time when I’m talking about meta mysteries, I just tell people they shouldn’t hide anything a viewpoint character knows. But I think it’s a good time to get a little bit more nuanced into exactly how this works, because I want people to be able to use their own judgment and also do edge cases.
That’s where a lot of the fun is, in these little edge cases, and how far can I push this, and et cetera. So there’s multiple reasons, like execution. “How do we pull this off?” is one thing. But for me, the biggest thing is the emotion of the situation. So the base problem that we run into here is that a character’s feelings and motivation just don’t resonate unless we understand the full reasoning behind those things.
Basically, storytellers, particularly writers tend to think that emotion will kind of rub off directly from the character to the audience. So if the character is sad, then the audience will feel sad with them. And if you have a good actor and a visual medium, on film, there might be some empathy there. But especially in a written work that doesn’t really work.
Instead what you need to see, you need to give the audience the stimulus that caused that emotion so they can react to that stimulus along with the character. And feel some of that too. So if you hide that stimulus, ’cause it’s a secret backstory. Basically, there’s no emotion and the story ends up feeling surprisingly emotionally flat and kind of dead. And if you’re not trained to look out for it, a lot of times that is more subtle than the reveal. Which is why meta mysteries are so attractive, because they’re easy to pull off. The reveal is very flashy, and if you’re not trained, you won’t realize how much you’re missing.
Like one example is in the novel Boneshaker, there’s two POVs. One POV character is Briar and she’s the mother, and her son has run off into this really dangerous area full of steampunk zombies to find his father. And she goes after him and we are told that she is full of regret. She’s like, “Oh, I should have told him everything and I didn’t, and therefore this is my fault.” But we can’t feel it with her because we’re like, “Well, why do you feel so guilty about this?” It feels flat. It doesn’t resonate.
And then only at the very end of the book, spoilers for this book, we’re revealed that Briar actually killed his father years ago. And so by not telling her son—’cause her son wants to believe that his father is alive—because she didn’t tell her son the truth, now he has put his life in danger because she was not upfront with him. And so if we had that information, we would have a lot more feeling in her POV for most of the novel. And it both gives the novel more emotional power and intensity and makes it more compelling, which is often really important to the story. But it also really helps audience connect with the character to feel what they’re feeling.
Oren: And what’s interesting is that there’s several different varieties of this kind of missing context. There’s the Boneshaker one where we are told something is missing and we just spend the book waiting to find out what it is. Then there’s something like, Carnival Row is our go-to example where a critical part of the character’s backstory that informs all of his actions and is really important is withheld. And as a result, the character is really boring until we find out what his deal is.
Chris: I have a whole article going over this issue in Carnival Row, but the central thing is that Philo is really supposed to be the main character. And again, he falls emotionally flat. And this is a visual story. We can see Orlando Bloom plays Philo, great actor. But it’s weird because he doesn’t seem to have anything personal at stake in the situation. His problems seem to be smaller than the other characters, and we don’t know why he does what he does. He’s feeling things, but we’re not sure what or why exactly. So the reveal that happens in episode three is really instrumental in illuminating his character and it makes him a much better protagonist. But we needed that earlier. It wasn’t worth it.
Oren: And the example in Castle Rock is a little different because it’s really not either of those things because we did get hints that she had a secret backstory, but it turns out her secret backstory is completely different than what all the hints were. The hints were all just lies. [Chuckles]
Chris: I think in some ways. So, one of the nuances of this meta mystery thing is judging how important is this information to the way the character feels, and the story at hand. And the less it’s actually relevant to what’s happening in the story—you can’t just dump the protagonist’s entire life. You can’t tell the audience absolutely everything. It becomes a meta mystery when it matters, when you hide it. Which unfortunately is also what makes it a good reveal.
But in the case of Castle Rock, we have Annie. There are some things like, she has a daughter. If something happens to her daughter, she gets really worried. We can understand and empathize with her wanting to protect her daughter without knowing what her backstory is, for instance. Those things are fine.
Oren: And the hinting at her secret backstory is that Joy, the daughter’s father is somehow sinister. And then it turns out that the backstory is completely different. Really had nothing to do with that. And it’s weird because before that reveal, I wasn’t really thinking, “Oh, well I need a backstory reveal to help me understand Annie.” I felt like I understood her pretty well, and so that was a little strange where it was like, “Oh, actually everything’s different than you thought it was.” Okay, sure. I guess.
Chris: I think with Annie, the thing where we are missing out on is, we don’t know exactly what she’s running from. We can conclude that she’s kind of on the run from the law or from a person, but we don’t know that she stabbed Joy’s biological mother and then stole Joy as a baby. [Chuckles] And ran off with her. And without that information, the tension between Annie and Joy, where Joy wants to know more information, and Annie’s trying to put her off. That would certainly be a lot more riveting, with the knowledge of the backstory. Or you don’t understand her fear of discovery, that her daughter will find out what happened, for instance. So there are emotional elements that would play out very differently.
Part of the weird thing here is, of course we have to look at, “Is Annie a good protagonist?” Because it does feel like we decided to make this shocking at the cost of Annie’s character. I’m not completely objecting to a character who did something bad in their past and is now just trying to deal with it, but I was expecting an explanation for why Annie was so violent.
Oren: There really isn’t one. The explanation is that she has a mental illness. That’s the explanation, which is a little bit unsavory at this point, I would say.
Chris: Annie’s not violent all the time, but when she’s actually threatened by a guy, she turns on. She actually knows how to be violent when necessary and does it on the drop of the hat and very effectively, which is actually a cool thing about her. And she’s very scrappy. She’s a very good liar. I actually am impressed. I am kind of tired, I realized, of all of these protagonists that struggle to lie all the time because the storyteller wants the character to lie, but also wants them to be seen through instantly by another character.
So it’s refreshing to have a protagonist who’s really good at lying. And that doesn’t mean she gets away with it every time, but she always has a good lie at hand and sometimes she pulls off some very impressive talking her way out of situations. But in this case, expecting some backstory to explain how she ended up sort of being used to violence and this, “Oh, she’s just always been that way. She just sometimes gets violent when something happens.”
Oren: Also, she apparently spontaneously picked up nurse skills somewhere?
Chris: That was the other thing, is that she’s a registered nurse. And it’s like, okay, even if we say she’s not really a nurse, she still knows enough to fake it well. ‘Cause nobody’s caught on that she doesn’t know what to do. So how did she get those skills?
Oren: Just trained herself on the job.
Chris: It has all the hallmarks as, “We did this to be shocking.” You thought Annie was on the run from some terrible man who terrorized her, but actually she’s the killer. And it doesn’t really fit all the pieces very well, unfortunately.
Oren: And if this was a written story, there’s a whole extra layer to it. Because at least in television, there isn’t an an expectation that you’re always gonna know what the character is thinking, and all those things. Whereas in most narrative premises, you are expecting to know that stuff and it will also be way more obvious that you don’t know them. It will be harder to drop some hints and then move past it, because you’re in the character’s head the whole time. You can’t just cut the scene.
Chris: Don’t think about it. “Don’t think about your backstory,” character tells himself repeatedly.
Oren: Oh my gosh. Oh gosh. Okay. I can’t believe people would say that sometimes. People would be like, “No, you can’t say that’s a meta mystery. They said not to think about it.” Have you ever tried not thinking about something?
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Even if that were possible, it doesn’t change—first of all, it’s very heavy handed. It doesn’t feel natural. It definitely feels like the author is doing that on purpose—but also it doesn’t change the basic dynamics of, the information is missing so the audience doesn’t have that stimulus to emotionally respond to. Therefore, the book just falls emotionally flat. We still have that same problem. It doesn’t change anything.
Oren: Now the obvious solution here, if you want to have a big startling backstory reveal like this for an important character, is to make that your most important secondary character. So in this scenario, Joy would be the protagonist and would find out this terrifying thing about the woman she thought was her mother. That would work perfectly well.
Chris: We talk about viewpoint characters a lot. Or I talk about who should be a viewpoint character and who shouldn’t, based on who are we supposed to sympathize with and relate to and get familiar with, versus who should be mysterious. And some types of characters would be better off mysterious, depending on their role.
So in this case of Castle Rock, if we were in Joy’s perspective, Annie might come off as pretty menacing. And that would be interesting in itself. That would be a slightly different story than we have, but it would still be a very interesting story if Annie was mysterious. She would probably be more threatening.
But then, what often happens with non-viewpoint characters is at some point, the storyteller decides, “Okay, I would like the audience to sympathize with this character more now and get to know them more now.” And then we reveal the backstory. So we could have, Annie seems super menacing, and we could have even a positive reveal like, “Oh, actually Annie is better than we thought.” Or we could have the negative reveal. But then Joy still realizes that Annie loves her like a mother anyway, decides to forgive her. So that would’ve been an interesting story.
Oren: Hilariously, I actually felt the same thing about the show Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale where we were finding out weird reveals about Sarah, the main character, that actually make her a bad person. And I thought those would’ve been more interesting if the show was focused on her daughter Harper, who is kind of a cipher for most of the show. But it turns out the reason she’s a cipher for most of the show is that she also has big reveals to make. So we would’ve had to pick one. [Chuckles]
Chris: “I have the magical ability to take care of the situation anytime,” like that.
Oren: That’s a problem. No matter if it’s secret or not.
Chris: The thing I really liked about the show is that it was really good at setting up all of these… I shouldn’t say great conflicts, because they’re essentially—the antagonists are bigots in the story. But at the same time, you can see this stuff happening. One thing leads to another and how the situation escalates. Nobody thinks of themself as pure evil. They’re reacting emotionally and they have their problems. And how the situation kind of naturally builds up and gets worse with all of these different actors who do something that escalate and inflames the situation, and that’s really neat to watch.
But as you go on, you increasingly realize that the protagonists are not allowed to actually do anything, because—again, this has happened before. I think we talked about this in our agency episode. I’ve seen this many times, where the storyteller wants a situation to go worse and doesn’t know how to give the protagonist agency while still having things get worse. And so the characters just don’t make a difference ever. And finally at the end, they actually just use their magic to fix it. It’s like, okay, well. [Laughs]
Oren: Well that’s nice.
Chris: That’s nice. And we didn’t know that character had all this powerful magic, but apparently she does. And I guess if she was the main character and we understood her, we would know that she has these powers.
Oren: Back over to the Castle Rock example. If you’re gonna make Joy your protagonist instead of Anne, that is totally viable. But you do have to refigure who is the main actor in the story. ‘Cause in the show as it exists, Anne has a lot of storylines where she goes off and does something that not only is Joy not there for, but that Joy never really interacts with at all.
And so that would be weird. If Joy was your protagonist, it would be very strange to have huge chunks of the story take place in ways that Joy’s not involved in. And then you either never find out about them or you have to be info dumped later. That’s not ideal. But it wouldn’t take that big a change. Joy would have to be looking into, “How did this guy get murdered?” And then find out, “Oh, my mom murdered him. What.” [Laughs] That could be really cool. But you would have to make some changes.
Chris: I have a blog post that came up recently on Warrior Princess Assassin, which is a throuple romance, MMF. And so it has three protagonists that all get a viewpoint and cycles between them. And it’s kind of interesting because each protagonist is kind of handled a little differently when it comes to what we know and what we don’t know.
So the character that is supposed to be the audience insert, we just know what her deal is immediately. She’s the first viewpoint we’re in and she has a secret that she’s in a political marriage. And the benefit the other party is supposed to get is access to her father’s magic. But she learns her father is dying. [Chuckles] And now she’s gonna have to keep this from her fiancé and that’s gonna be a problem.
And then, we know that. And so we know how she feels, and that adds tension to the romance. Whereas we have another character, Asher, who gets less of a viewpoint in the beginning. So that he can seem kind of like a danger boy and seem menacing when he’s first introduced. And that’s kind of an interesting effect, especially since he’s the best-friend, love-interest character. And that’s usually a safe boy.
So we put emphasis on, “Oh, he’s changed and somehow he acts different and the protagonist doesn’t know why or how.” And then when there’s actually a chance to move to his viewpoint, you’ll get all of his traumatic backstory. He becomes a very sympathetic character instead, even though he can still be inclined towards violence.
So sometimes with a certain amount of viewpoint shifting, you can cast a character as mysterious, sometimes. Granted, once you start to reveal a character’s backstory and get to know them, it’s hard to go back again. You can do a little bit of stuff. And then of course there’s a third character, Ky. And he kind of has a meta mystery where we know something is going on at home and he feels responsible for his people being afraid of him, but we don’t really know why. And so that kind of doesn’t feel like he has a character arc, or really has emotional issues like the other two characters.
Oren: I guess it would be less annoying if you only had to spend one third of the story in his viewpoint. Don’t have to deal with it as much.
Chris: And it’s not always relevant because it becomes more relevant when they head to his country and then we reveal it. And so if it’s not very relevant in the story, usually the character can just not think about it. I think the problem that’s happening here, is that the author wants, just like with the other character who—“Oops, my father is dying and now I’m in this arranged marriage”—that can be used to create tension.
But if he’s vaguely worried that they’ll learn something bad about him. If the character is, and we don’t know what that bad thing is, it’s kind of hard for us to feel that tension or feel that concern. You can’t just tell the audience, “Oh, that thing is very dangerous.” You have to show them and give them the deets. So it doesn’t really work to just tell. Which is why hiding a backstory can become such a problem.
Oren: So what about the option that we get asked about a lot, which is getting weird with your POV. You’ve got either omniscient or the… *Spooky Voice* …unreliable narrator. Wooo.
Chris: [Chuckles] I think that’s an execution difference. There’s nothing that really changes the motion difference. Well, okay. There is one thing I’ll mention in a second. But with omniscience, if you have an omniscient narrator, if your character isn’t narrating, it is way easier to leave stuff out. So if you want your character to know something and don’t want your audience to know it, an omniscient narrator definitely has the leeway to just not say things.
And so that definitely smooths over the execution problems of having that awkward, “Oh, don’t think about it. Don’t think about your backstory.” Have the character tell themselves not to think about it. We don’t have to do that with omniscient. We’re already outside the character’s head. The narrator doesn’t have to tell us if they don’t want to. That’s how omniscience works.
So we have that, but that’s never gonna get rid of the issue with emotions not being there. Now, granted with omniscient narration, a lot of times the goal is to be less emotional and more jokey and snarky and lighthearted. So maybe if the narrator is entertaining that would be less damaging, but it doesn’t take care of that problem.
There is one thing though, we talk about the hidden plan reveals sometimes. So if you have a character that has a secret plan for besting the villain, and you wanna hide that plan, and then they get in a conflict with the villain, and then you find out, “Oh, everything has gone according to the secret plan.” So this actually follows all the same principles. It does work as a turning point, technically. Does make it feel like the protagonist earned that victory.
But remember what I just said about tension where you can’t just say something is threatening. And what can happen there, is now you kind of have to lie to the audience about how threatening—’cause this is a protagonist who walks into a dangerous situation already knowing that they’ve got a plan for success. That’s not a situation that creates lots of tension.
Oren: Your hidden plan has to be very carefully calculated so that it’s something that is credible and can explain how they win, but also once they find out about it, the reader’s like, “Oh yeah, there was still a chance you could have failed that.” So that it justifies why your character is worried and why the scenario seems dangerous.
Chris: So you can do things like that, but generally the briefer the time period is when the character has some kind of plan you don’t know about, is better. Because during that time you’re trying to kind of play it both ways. Often make the audience think that they don’t have a plan, but also have them act believably, and it’s gonna be harder to create tension during that sequence. So I think those work best for more minor conflicts and not the climax, for instance, because it’s gonna be harder to create tension. But if for a short period of time, that can be worth it sometimes.
Oren: And it’s similar if you are using an unreliable narrator, and I mean an actual unreliable narrator. Not a narrator who has opinions, which is how people sometimes define it. But one who you can’t trust what they’re saying. If you’re actually doing that, actually establishing it, you can use that to hide the protagonist backstory. But that still raises the question of, should you? You could still end up in a situation where the readers don’t know what they need to know to feel emotionally connected. Or, you could end up with a backstory that doesn’t match the character you’ve created. Those things can all still happen.
Chris: Although, sometimes unreliable narrators, I think, was it House on Haunted Hill? The old one. In this case, the character is an unreliable—wass that an omniscient? I think it gets into her head anyway.
Oren: It sort of zooms in and out.
Chris: So when it zooms into her head and she’s unreliable, she still believes what she falsely perceives. So she thinks, for instance, that characters are scheming against her. We might have doubts, but we still see her experience that and we see kind of what evidence she uses to conclude that they’re scheming against her.
And in that case, the goal is, “Okay, maybe that isn’t convincing to us.” Maybe we don’t think they’re really scheming against her, so maybe we don’t feel that tension. But we do feel tension of seeing that she is not perceiving the situation correctly. And so it’s just a different effect and in that case, you still get an authentic experience of what the character is perceiving and thinking. Because the character believes their own lies in that case.
Oren: And in both scenarios, it’s something where I wouldn’t recommend that you make as heavy impact a choice as going omniscient or going with an unreliable narrator, just to have a smoother secret backstory reveal. I think you would want to be getting more out of those choices.
But if you are already doing that kind of story. If you are writing in omniscient and you are writing your story closer to what we would see in a television show, you have more options. And similarly, if your story benefits from an unreliable narrator and you’re actually using it for something, then hiding things about your protagonist is a more open option. But still not necessarily the right one. You still have to think about if you’re hiding something the story needs or not.
Chris: Of course, the ultimate way to hide protagonist backstory is amnesia.
Oren: Yeah. [Laughs]
Chris: It’s something we haven’t even brought up yet. But this is why amnesia is so popular in stories, is because it totally gets around this problem. You’re just trying to get the audience on the same page as your character. If your character can’t remember their own backstory, it’s not causing any feels in them right now. And so, no, the audience doesn’t need to know it.
The audience should be on the same page as them and find out about their memories when the character does, which is why it’s so popular. It doesn’t mean that it’s never weird. In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace, the main character, uncover a lot of memories. That makes sense. And then later he covers a memory that, doesn’t make as much sense. [Chuckles]
Oren: And admittedly I have grown a little tired of amnesia, just as I have learned more about how amnesia actually works.
Chris: Shh. Shh. We don’t want anybody to know that.
Oren: No, don’t tell ’em.
Chris: It’s so useful for us storytellers. We don’t want people to know that it’s not realistic.
Oren: It’s easier for me to accept a magical brain fog than, a character bonked their head, and now doesn’t remember anything about their life, but still has all the skills they learned during their life.
Chris: Okay. But what you can do, I’m pretty sure this is realistic. If your character still knows who they are, but they don’t remember the last five years, for instance. That you can totally do, they’ll also have lost any random facts or knowledge they’ve gained in those five years.
Oren: Another thing that I think is a underused option, which is another way of hiding the information from your protagonist that doesn’t require amnesia, is for them to learn that a thing they thought about their backstory was not correct. And in this case, Joy finds out that she was actually kidnapped as a baby by her half-sister and not from her actual mother. So, she’s a baby. We don’t expect babies to remember that part.
But you could also have this be like, “Your protagonist thinks that they worked at a lab creating vaccines or creating medicines of some kind.” And then the evil bad guy is like, “Actually, you were helping me create the genetically modified super soldiers that I’m using. Your work was invaluable.” And they didn’t know that. That is a big backstory reveal. And if what you’re going for is a shocking twist, that can do it and not have all the temptations of hiding the emotional context that people need.
Chris: That could definitely work. I can say some situations where authors would try to do something like, “Oh, the character thought they saw one thing, but actually it was a different thing.” And then we try to describe it to audiences being like, hmm. It’s like character death. “Oh, that character totally died.” Okay, but have I seen the character’s broken body? And then has it been set on fire? And also chopped into lots of bits.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: There’s a lot of times if you’re trying to have a situation where your character misperceives something, that’s going to be somewhat easy to catch on. But in that case maybe they have no way of telling that they weren’t working on—well, they would know something about the work that they’re doing in that lab. But still you could have, “Okay. No, this was just beyond their knowledge.” Or something like that.
Oren: Well, with that, since that was the last thing I wanted to cover, we can reveal that secretly this podcast has been going for over half an hour and therefore, part of our backstory is that we have to end it right now.
Chris: And did you know if you become a patron, you can see extensive backstory of our Patreon rambles? You can. Going back many, many years. It’s very, very secret. Only patrons know about it. So check us out on patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: It’s very exclusive. But before we go, I want to thank a few 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. [Outro Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.