: Stripping the Main Character's Plot Armour? I have a main character, I'm attempting to disguise this fact. But it is tricky. Out of nowhere, the character rises up as a successful military leader.

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So, if I got this right, you want your main character to be "The Great War Hero" who commands the respect of his men for his "heroic" deeds in the past great war.

One way I would suggest this is to have the story set in the future where he is in command and a new Ensign (sorry, I'm a Trekie, so new Ensign on the ship is a general starting point). Ensign Neo Guy is on the ship and learns The Captain is the great War Hero known far and wide as "The Hero of (insert famous battle here)" or some such nickname. Ensign Guy refers to The Captain by his nickname and the bridge crew falls silent. The Captain says he prefers not to be called that, or outright dismisses the notion that he's as important as his nickname implies and leaves it at that. Later, in the mess, Ensign Guy is approached by the XO, who happened to be in the very same battle and fought alongside the great war hero and saw everything. He'll tell you the real story.

This is where your story comes into play... We have X number of characters in the unit, not including the young XO. As the reader, we know that the XO is going to live, but he's not the protaganist... he's the POV. If you only refer to the protaganist as "The Captain" or "The War Hero" than you now have a scenario where one of the X characters is the young Captain... but since he doesn't hold that rank, he'll never be referred to as such. Since this is the start of the action that will earn him his fame, he isn't yet referred to as "The Hero". You as the writer know who he is, but to the reader, it's one of these characters from the XO's story... and our mystery is who do we think will be the Captain.

Re-Rank to flavor.

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There is a way to achieve uncertainty:

Everyone is a rabbit

The prime example is Watership Down, a movie about rabbits that kills characters left and right like there's no tomorrow, but so does nature. Everybody knows that rabbits are nature's fluffy popcorn, right?

Other examples include: All-guardsman party, The Walking Game of Dead Thrones

Based upon the underlying logic of these, you can achieve uncertainty.

Let me elaborate:
Game of Thrones works because it's "realistic", and in real life, there are no plot armors. In real life, Zrínyi Miklós had the best chances of driving the kebab off from Hungary, and he was killed by a boar. The truth is that nothing is certain, in fact, our universe had likely come into existence by chance, by a large quantum fluctuation.

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It sounds like you want the readers to genuinely believe the character is in jeopardy, including potentially lethal jeopardy.

To accomplish this, you need a story where people can die, so I'd say you need to kill off at least one other character.

You also need to establish that suitably bad things can happen to this particular character and perhaps even things that happen and can potentially get worse (e.g. an arm is injured during a swordfight and it looks to be potentially infected, putting the entire arm or their life at risk).

You essentially need to show the reader that people can die and bad things can happen to characters, and you need to point a 'gun' at this character in a way that's potentially less dangerous than a 'gun' that's already gone off pointed at another character.

Thirdly, you'll need to do your best to ensure that the average reader has no idea that you're giving a particular character special treatment in terms of focused attention in the story - if a reader catches on that this is a 'pet character', the threat is empty.

Of course, you should also call into question the reasons you might be wanting this scenario in the first place - is it for shock value? Is there a better way of achieving this effect? Does your story require this twist? etc.

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