: Personally, I don't need to identify with the characters to enjoy a story, whether in literature or in cinema. What I do need is to identify the characters as realistic constructs with human

@Jessie137

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Personally, I don't need to identify with the characters to enjoy a story, whether in literature or in cinema. What I do need is to identify the characters as realistic constructs with human reactions and quirks.

As a young teenager, I discovered one of my favourite authors ever. The Portuguese Miguel Torga wrote plenty of short stories whose protagonists were animals or people living mostly miserable lives in the poor, harsh hinterland of his time. As a young middle class girl reading tales fifty years after they were written in a seemingly completely different society, I couldn't possibily relate to the frog eviscerated by a wild little boy or to the pregnant young woman who faced a lonely labour in the middle of the mountains to prevent her village from learning of her disgrace. But those characters I could never identify with allowed me to learn about sides of human nature I couldn't possibly know about at 13.

I feel the same towards films or any type of story, no matter the medium. If you can recognise the character as human in its actions and reactions, then you can enjoy its tale.

In fact, it strongly annoys me the growing pressure to have protagonists the reader can identify with, especially when that advice is explicitly connected with a character which can work as a sort of self-insert for the reader. Someone the reader can think 'this could almost be me'.

A story allows the reader/viewer/listener to put themself in the shoes of any person. Why should one purposefully limit the protagonists to constructs that mirror the supposed average or minority reader?

Some of the best stories I've read were the ones where I couldn't possibly relate to the character - whether in gender, social class, fears, ambitions... Those were the stories that opened my eyes to the fact that different people think and feel differently than me, that such differences are neither bad nor good, that actions one may deem insane or even evil can have profound reasons behind them, and that, through all those unsurmountable differences of feeling and action, we're all still human and fundamentally the same.

In conclusion: while I don't think it's inherently bad to have a character the reader can identify with, I certainly do not think that is essential. A character the reader can identify as fundamentally human is all a writer needs, as far as I'm concerned.

P.S.: While re-reading the answer, I felt the need to state that what I wrote above should not be seen as an excuse to always have the same typical white man/boy as a hero. While it's true that, as a woman, I thoroughly enjoy well-crafted male protagonists, I do think a lot of men would benefit from being allowed to experience stories from a woman's shoes... and I definitely don't mean 'chick' tales.

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