: Re: Should my main character make a ginormous mistake? I'm rereading my draft, and there is a part in the book where when the main character is helping others escape prison, she accidentally reveals

@Lee1909368

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Well, first off, I kind of hate your backup plan. It's just... simply because someone is the hero of the story, doesn't mean they have to be unflinchingly, superhumanly heroic at every turn. The larger-than-life hero archetype has been done to death. Sciborg is right to invoke the Mary Sue trope. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's boring. Your original idea is far more interesting.
As far as how the audience takes it, that'll all depend on you. You haven't given us enough information about the outcome of that event to interpret its effect on the story, and how your audience views the protagonist will hinge entirely on the outcome, not the event itself.

Is the person who was killed a stranger, a random scene extra with no personal connection to the protagonist? Does your hero shrug off the event and go about her business with barely an acknowledgement of her role in the other character's death? Then, sure, she will look like a complete asshole, and the audience will want nothing to do with her. Would you?

Is the hero affected by the death, deeply and profoundly? Does she spend the rest of the story haunted by the memory of the dead character? Well — maybe good, maybe bad. It's possible to blow that kind of thing by failing to sufficiently build a foundation for it before the incident. If you want to dump something like that on your story, it's gotta be able to support it. A strong emotional reaction like that requires a strong emotional connection between the characters, or it will feel hollow to the audience. OTOH, if the character who's killed is the protagonist's relative, or close friend, or the past associate she was attempting to rescue in the first place, then you've built a plausibly devastating event that you can use to shake her right down to her core. At which point you've got carte blanche to rebuild her in a dozen different ways, should the story require it.

If the protagonist doesn't have a connection to the character who's killed, can you proxy those strong emotions via a third character who does? Perhaps the dead character's brother, or child, or best friend, is also among the group being rescued, and has to deal with both the loss of their loved one, and the knowledge that your main character is partly to blame for that loss. Now you've created a believable, totally organic conflict engine that you can mine to create tension between that character and your protagonist. (...Holy crap, did that metaphor get away from me.)
If that's the case, then the audience reaction comes back to: How does the protagonist handle the events that follow? Does she take responsibility for her mistake? Does she respect and validate the feelings of the surviving loved one, even when they manifest as anger or disrespect directed at her? Does she make a promise that, while she can't bring back the lost loved one or ever undo the mistake she made, she will do everything in her power to succeed against their common foe / mutual oppressors, and ensure that $character's death was not in vain?

Your audience won't hate your protagonist for a mistake, or for her role in events that were beyond her control. But they will judge her for everything that happens after.

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