: Re: Are reactive protagonists inherently a bad thing? I'm just getting into writing and while reading about it I've found a lot of topics which claim that reactive protagonists are generally frowned

@Shanna875

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I think we are dealing with a scale of greys here. It's true, as Matthew Dave mentions, that the audience will expect the protagonist trying to resolve at least one of the major conflicts in the story arc.

In some genres, e.g. fantasy, the protagonist is usually the one who's supposed to do the final big leap ahead, willingly putting everything at stake in the final fight. In those situations, you don't want to have a pushover-protagonist: one who does things just because he's forced to do them, or his mentor suggests it, or again there is no other choice.

It's true though that in most genres the situation is not so extreme. In a sci-fi novel I'm writing, I'm struggling with the topic of agency: I have a female character who would like to be active, but can't since she usually misses a lot of information of the world she's in, and can't help being pushed by other more knowledgeable characters (maybe related question).

In a more general case, reactiveness isn't inherently a bad thing. After all the protagonist can't be the main cause for all the conflict in the plot - there are the other charaters, the antagonist, and the whole setting to account for.
In some situations, I'd say being reactive makes more sense than being active. A character who always takes the initiative regardless of the event will come off as brash, presumptuous or know-it-all.

It's true that protagonists are expected to take a certain amount of action later in the novel; e.g. when a major conflict is revelaed, the protagonist is expected to resolve it in an active way. Activeness in this sense is more like "I want to find a solution" rather than "I'm forced to find a solution".

TL;DR: Reactiveness (unlike total passiveness) is not a bad thing; but it can be ill-suited to some situations or events in the plot.
In the end, though, there are a lot of different stories to tell, and it's up to you to decide what kind of it'll be, so take everything with a grain of salt.

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