: Re: How do you make the reader root for the protagonist when the primary antagonist is more relatable and more likable? I said in a previous question that my protagonist "is a very shitty person

@Annie587

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You can't get your audience to root for a character they fundamentally don't like. If you try you risk running into the Designated Hero trope where the only reason we are expected to treat a character as a hero is because we are told to by the author.

Tropes aren't inherently bad if used properly, of course. You could argue that Deckard, the protagonist of Blade Runner, is a designated hero. We follow events from his point of view but he's an alcoholic, he treats women terribly and there's no getting around the fact that his job is killing beings that are indistinguishable from people for money. However it works in that setting because a) the whole work is deliberately morally grey (the antagonist only wants to live, and he only commits one completely unjustifiable act during the entire film), b) his opponents utterly outclass him which makes him relatable because everybody loves an underdog, and c) Deckard has qualities that can make him relatable and even likeable to a degree, for all his flaws. His determination is admirable and he's obviously also very good at his job regardless of how morally dark that job is.

If you want your hero to be a jerk and the villain to be better than him, then you could consider character growth as a possible way out. Just because your character starts off as an unlikeable jerk doesn't mean it's impossible for him to learn the error of his ways and tone down his behaviour. If he makes bad decisions he should suffer negative consequences for those decisions. More importantly he should learn from those consequences so when confronted with a similar situation in the future he doesn't repeat the same mistake (though you could have him make a completely different mistake if you want him to have to learn his lessons the hard way). An audience can really bond with a character that exhibits the ability to recognise and rectify his own flaws.

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