Classifying stuff is a classic pass-time for scientists, critics, and the parents of young children who want to decide whether the brown goo on the floor is baby food or something… more odiferous. Unfortunately, unlike brown-goo-on-the-floor, characters have more than one or two relevant qualities

Characters come in all sorts, shapes, sizes, and levels of annoyance to the writer. To suit this variety, we have a dizzying number of ways to classify and describe characters, together with a labyrinthine muddle of value judgements attached to those descriptions. Today I’m going to do my best to add to that puddle by providing three axes of consideration for characters, clarifying some terminology. What are protagonists and antagonists? Heroes? Villains? What do you call a character that’s really important versus one that you barely care about the name of?

Protagonist, Antagonist

These are terms we often associate with ‘hero’ and ‘villain respectively, but they are far from synonyms. Unlike those terms, ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ have no inherent moral meaning. They are purely relational, literary terms. The protagonist is the character the story is following; the antagonist is the character or characters opposing the protagonist. In most cases, what we mean by ‘the protagonist’ is the main character. Technically speaking, though the label of ‘protagonist’ can be applied to any character in the story, provided the character acts as the main character of any constituent narrative; the antagonist is then found by looking for those who stand against the protagonist. In other words, the antagonist is relative to your chosen protagonist.

Protagonists can be villains. Protagonists can be side characters. Protagonists can be anybody, so long as they are the main character of a narrative, however subordinate that narrative is to the central narrative of your story. Antagonists likewise can be anything, so long as they are in opposition to the protagonist. Note that I don’t say ‘act in opposition’. An antagonist can be purely passive; indeed, the role of antagonist can be fulfilled as much by an inanimate object like a mountain as by a character.

What practical use does this distinction have?

Remember that every person is the protagonist of his own life. He may not be the hero, at least in his surface-level self-conception, but his world is centered by virtue of his perception’s capabilities on himself. Every person, and therefore every character, is a protagonist. Your main character, of course, is The Protagonist of the story, his antagonists ‘The Antagonists’ of the story, but everybody else has a story too. Keeping true to this element of the world, so long as you keep it from breaking pacing or sending you on irrelevant wild goose chases, can provide a remarkable depth to your world.¹

Remember also that ‘protagonist’ does not mean ‘hero’. Characters can be protagonists without being good or pleasant or even slightly moral. Remember that the term is literary, not moral, and that though gratuitous flaws do not a character make, perfection is at least as bad.

Villain, Hero, Anti-Hero, Oh My

Villains are the bad guys. They seek morally wrong ends. They may be protagonists or antagonists, irrelevances or all-consuming, but their ends (and usually means) are bad. To themselves they may be heroes or villains. In their minds they may be confident or quailing. In the end, they are the Bad Guys.

Heroes are the good guys. They seek morally good ends. Sometimes, of course, we don’t agree with the author as to what the ‘good ends’ are. Here’s where the cracks develop (with villains too) between the ‘literary hero’ and the ‘moral hero’. Gilgamesh was a hero to the Sumerians, even if we find his intrusion on literally every marriage bed he liked in Ur to be morally repulsive. The story must be understood from both perspective; we must remember not only the story in relation to truth but the story in relation to the truth of what its authors thought true. Remember this distinction when you’re anticipating how your readers will react.

Anti-Heroes are ostensibly ‘heroes that use villainous methods’. Sometimes they say that the ends justify the means; sometimes they see no problem at all with the methods. Regardless of whether this category is all that morally different from the villain, it is a separate literary category and must be treated as such. Worth noting also is the fact that ‘anti-hero’ sometimes just means ‘hero with a dark aesthetic’, even apart from the theological debate as to its difference from ‘villain with ostensibly noble goals’.

‘Anti-villain’ is probably the least used of these four terms. Running by the established scheme, it should refer to a villain who uses good methods to achieve it. Most people, however, will recognize that doing exclusively good is a path to achieve good, not evil (even if they paradoxically hold that doing mostly evil can lead to good). Generally, then, an anti-villain is a creation of literary circumstance, not morality. The anti-villain is the anti-hero whose evil methods are emphasized rather than his ‘good’ ends, the villain who is given sympathy or partial rectitude, the antagonist that could be the hero if we lived in his head.

Not all characters fit cleanly into these categories. Some have too little moral character; some have too little direct connection to the story. Some seem too passive or mundane to deserve the term- what do you call the mayor who engages in standard political dealings? In some stories, of course, he’s a villain, oppressive by virtue of his office; in some, perhaps, he can be a hero, dealing out justice. In many, though, where he simply sits in the background, acting exactly as his position would cause you to expect, he’s too anodyne to call either.

Are You Anyone Important?

Characters come not only in different moral alignments and relationships to the narrative’s main character but also in differing levels of importance. I’ve formulated a spectrum here, though you should be aware that different people will using slightly different terminology for these roles, will divide them up differently. I also caution you that these categories aren’t exclusive, with every character belonging to one category. A character can belong to more than one of these categorie at a time.

First in order of most-to-least important, we have the main character or main characters. These are the characters around whom the story centers, the character whom the story is about. In some stories, this is an easier assessment to make than others. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is the singular main character. Around her the narrative revolves. Mr. Darcy, Jane, and various other character play a role, but the story is Elizabeth’s and none other’s. In Towards the Gleam, John is the main character; while scant few scenes do depart from him, ultimately they exist in relation to his narrative arc. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is the main character- an easy answer- but the large segments of the story in which he doesn’t appear do demand the question of whether another or other main characters do indeed exist. The one thing these characters all have in common is that they are the most important character in the story (not necessarily the most interesting).

Second, we have point-of-view characters. While, strictly speaking, some stories lack these (specifically third person omniscient), they can best be defined as ‘characters you see the story from the direction of’. It might be through their eyes, their brain, or just from a free-floating camera hovering over their heads, but the direction of knowledge-acquisition momentarily at least passes through them. The point-of-view character is quite commonly also the main character- hence their number two billing position- but can be anywhere on the ranking in truth. The importance of the point-of-view character can be measured along two tracks. First, how much time does he spend being the POV character (and how important are the events he sees)? Second, how important is he outside that role? For the first question, simply consider, well, how much time he spends being the audience’s viewpoint and how important is what he sees. For the second, slap him in one of the other categories; the point-of-view character can, outside of that role, be anything from the main character (Towards the Gleam, Pride and Prejudice) to the most irrelevant of side characters (The Great Gatsby) to a character actually nonexistent outside of the role (a narrator, such as Lewis in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe– though note that many narrators will employ subsidiary POV characters).

Third, we have secondary and tertiary characters. This is everybody important who’s not the main character. Sauron, Saruman, Gandalf, Aragorn, the entire Fellowship outside of Frodo, Gollum, Samwise, Denethor, and Faramir are all in this double category. Now, I’ve chosen to group these two for a simple reason: I can’t justify putting it all into one unified category, and I don’t have a good division point to make it fully two. Roughly speaking, though, secondary characters are those which matter to the narrative for its entire length, which keep making decisions and carrying out on-screen actions for most of the story, while tertiary characters, whatever their influence on the narrative, are present only for a certain part of the narrative’s time on the page. Thus, Samwise is a secondary character because he matters for the whole story, whereas Elrond is a tertiary character, because while incredibly important, he only affects the story directly and actively for a part of the end of the first volume.²

Fourth, we have functional characters- or as I call them, bit characters. These characters are arguably part of the setting. They have, at most, an aesthetic, a name, and a role. They fulfil their purpose in the narrative and fade back into the background. In a well written story, of course, they fade into the background in a realistic and convincing way, but they still leave the stage. They fulfil mechanical roles in the story. The child Pippin meets in Minas Tirith would be an example of such, as would be the flight attendant who said ‘hi’ and gave the protagonist a bag of peanuts in romantic novel #4400. As you can see just from those two examples, such characters can have a range of traits, of vividness or use. The child Pippin speaks with stands in the highest rank of ‘actually a character’ rankings inside this category; the stewardess, presuming you have no more details on her, stands much, much lower. This category includes characters that lack even names- the sentry on the camp the protagonists must infiltrate, the bread-merchant the story mentions kicking a kid out of his store, the man who elbows the protagonist in the bar by accident. The defining characteristic of such characters is that they fulfil a certain role and nothing more; they are not characters like the previous categories, they are character-as-setting.

Fifth and finally, we have off-screen characters. These can be all sorts of important or unimportant (possibly more important than Category 4 characters), but they also don’t show up on screen. If they matter, they matter from behind the scenes, their presence filtered through other characters onto the page. Think Denethor in The Fellowship of the Ring, when all he’s done is send Boromir. He may be influential and important to the story in so-doing, but he’s not on the page as a character, just as a part of the setting that happens to promise to be character shaped if he ever does show up. Be careful with these characters, though. They can be effective setting, bit characters deprived off their time in the limelight and reduced to being stagehands, but some, like Denethor, are more important than that, more lively. Some off-page characters will need to be actual characters, obscured as they may be by distance. Caveat emptor, as they say, except you should be making instead of buying.³

A final note on importance is due. Characters can vary in importance to different parts of the story. If you have two major plots running, a character may be completely off-screen for one while being essential to another, as Samwise is for the Gondor-and-Rohan side of The Lord of the Rings. Don’t just categorize a character by how important he is to one story or to the central plot of your story. Consider how important he is or should be to the sub-plots, the secondary stories that hold your stories up, to the individual scenes with their individual arcs. Importance is relative, after all, and even a small fish can be a big fish in a puddle.

Conclusion

Today’s set of descriptions merely dipped its toes into the vast pool of describing character. If you’ve been around writing discourse on the internet, you’ll notice that I didn’t even address flat versus round characters. Characters have a lot of different facets, and part of using characters is understanding not only the character but the role that character plays in the story. Is the character the villain or the hero? Is he a protagonist? Who are his antagonists? Who is he antagonist to? How important of a role does he play in this story verses that one? Sometimes, some of these answers will be useless. Asking them, however, will give you the chance to find out which ones aren’t useless, which ones are opportunities to better your writing. I must admit, I rarely consciously use these categories nowadays. As you get used to writing, two things happen: first, you’re better able to sort out and describe what you’re doing; second, certain parts of what you’re doing get done less by internal monologue and more by intuition. These categories aren’t an end-point; they’re a starting point, a place to step out from into the wider world of story-telling. Have fun.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Dictionary of Obscure Sorrow: Sonder.

2 – We’re ignoring the bloody awful decisions Peter Jackson made in adapting Elrond (and his daughter) to film. Just remember: it’s better than what he did to the scene with the Mouth of Sauron.

3 – Most of us can’t just buy a franchise to get our characters pre-made. It’s also lazy; be sure to actually put the work in if you do, somehow, buy a franchise (or work for somebody who does). Laziness (born of contempt and low standards and Marxism, to be fair) is at the root of some of the recent… degradation in the literary quality of franchises (leaving aside their moral quality altogether).

Go check out the new short story, ‘Come, Drink of His Cup‘, published today!