Non-Action Protagonist

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As is typical within the sphere of fiction, The Hero is generally the protagonist of any given work, and in works where combat and violence are at the forefront, it was generally held that they would be combat-capable as well. Those who often find themselves in the line of fire are seen heroically as those who go out of their way to defeat evil.

But the hero may ultimately not be a fighter. Then you get this case.

A Non-Action Protagonist stands out as an everyday schmuck or the otherwise-mundane person who in particular is found in a situation well in over their heads, but there's no way they stand a chance at besting their enemies in a physical fight. Maybe it's a World of Badass where everyone but them is capable of fighting in some way, maybe they're Trapped in Another World with no notable qualities that'd help their survival. Some writers' portrayal of this kind of character (mostly for men) would tend to make them a Non-Action Guy for their lack of clear masculinity, but other, more creative writers may genuinely roll with this idea in spite of such. Often, it's their qualities outside of combat that drive the story forward and serves as much of the conflict.

Maybe they're a Guile Hero who uses trickery and deceit to deceive and con to get out of sticky situations. Maybe they're a Magnetic Hero who uses charisma, oratory, and minions to do the fighting, oftentimes Talking the Monster to Death if their flunkies can't defeat them. Maybe they're a Stealth Hero who prefers sneaking past enemies than fighting them head-on, or maybe they're a Science Hero who uses technology and applied knowledge to accomplish what combat cannot. Either way, if the protagonist of the story is in a setting defined by present danger and isn't an Action Hero, and regularly prefers using any other means to achieve their objectives outside of violence, then you have a case of a Non-Action Protagonist.

Often, this trope's practical applications comes in the form of making an Audience Surrogate even more relatable to the audience, especially if the setting is present with preternatural powers. Obviously, most readers and writers are entirely normal human beings, so while there's definitely a market for having a Power Fantasy self-insert main character, it's a lot easier for people to relate to somebody who doesn't have any special abilities. If anything, it would likely inspire the audience's sympathies by them overcoming their problems outside of the use of sheer force.

This trope is especially common in Mons Series; barring a few genre outliers, most Mon games generally don't feature combat with the inevitably human protagonists so much as their monster companions doing all of the heavy lifting, which in turn allows more emphasis and development on the human characters' non-combat qualities.

It's worth noting that while examples of characters that can't fight themselves but let other beings do the fighting for them qualify (like The Beastmaster or The Minion Master, or autonomous variants of a Puppet Fighter where the controlling character doesn't do the physical fighting themselves), characters that have direct control over another character's movements in a fight don't count, so tropes like Marionette Master and Fighting Spirit are to be excluded.

Not to be confused with Badass Pacifist, Action Survivor, or Supporting Protagonist; they don't have to necessarily be a pacifist themselves to qualify for this trope, just that they don't do the fighting in a predominantly action-packed series. Action Survivors can overlap, but they are generally considered separate due to many Action Survivor characters being to some degree combat-capable unlike Non-Action Protagonists, wherein a Supporting Protagonist is defined by being the main POV of a story while not being the main focus in Character Development. Super-Trope of Non-Entity General and Stock Light-Novel Everyman, the former being a form of Featureless Protagonist used mainly in strategy games who doesn't take part in combat, and the latter being a common figurehead in Japanese isekai media. Compare and contrast with Non-Action Guy, the trope's (almost always male) comedic counterpart, and Non-Action Big Bad, where the Big Bad of a work is defined by their inability to fight themselves.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Rokuro "Rock" Okajima from Black Lagoon. In a setting defined for being a crime-ridden, crapsack World of Badass, Rock is (or rather, was) an idealistic Japanese salaryman who was abducted by a gang of pirates and took to life as the group's negotiator. He has no combat skills to speak out (outside of one instance of clocking somebody with a bowling pin, but the circumstances were that severe), but he really doesn't need it; he's generally bodyguarded by resident Dark Action Girl Revy, he sticks out by being a non-combatant who is very good at talking down his enemies non-lethally while using guile to overcome any problems that come his way. By the current point of the series, he's become near-universally respected among the denizens of Roanapur and is fast-track to becoming a Dark Messiah Anti-Hero, much to Revy's mild disappointment.
• Juste Ueki Tylor from Irresponsible Captain Tylor is a lackadaisical, incompetent, and above all lucky captain (in fact, his name is pidgin-English for "Just Lucky Tylor") who spends the series lightly drifting through a war between humans and Space Elves, sweet-talking, smooth-talking, and occasionally seducing his way out of trouble throughout the series. He only got into the space force because he, er, "impressed" the assessment AI so much "she" crashed, and he was made a captain as a "reward" for accidentally rescuing an admiral from a hostage situation.
• Yukiteru Amano from Future Diary is this at first, but gradually subverts this over the course of the story. In the beginning, he leaves most of the fighting to Yuno, though it's downplayed since even then he offs three other diary owners even before taking a level in badass. This is subverted later on when he becomes more competent in combat and even fights alongside Yuno.
• Ciel Phantomhive from Black Butler is a young boy from Victorian London who ends up contracting a demon — Sebastian Michaelis — to serve as his butler and guardian. While he himself is not a fighter, and if anything is the weakest character physically, he is noted as a capable Chessmaster who is far more than capable of manipulating others into his plans. He proved it during the murder mystery arc where he planned out and orchestrated the entire event; lacing the blame on someone else in order to complete the mission given to him by the queen, all while not only keeping suspicion off of himself but also making himself seem like a victim. Then very end where he only tells a young Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of his scheme because he wanted to motivate him to continue to write mystery novels.
• Headhunted to Another World: Protagonist Uchimura Denosuke is a Japanese salaryman who is transported into a Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting without any Isekai cheats, so he remains a completely ordinary thirty-something human who is expected by the Demon Overlord to solve administrative, diplomatic, and logistics problems for the demons using Awesomeness by Analysis. The MegaCorp he worked for on Earth didn't properly appreciate his talents in this regard, but the Demon Overlord very much does.
• Princess Tutu: While the show is a Magical Girl anime and Fakir, Rue, and Mytho all show some level of combat ability throughout the series, Duck as Princess Tutu dances with her antagonists rather than fighting them and, at most, disarms armed opponents. Justified, since her main purpose is to extract Mytho's heart shards from their hosts, which involves the hosts processing their own emotions so they'll let go of the heart shards. Discussed with Fakir, who at a few points questions Tutu's common sense when trying to fight particularly violent antagonists with ballet.
• Digimon actually downplays this compared to most Mon series; most Tamers stay out of the fray altogether, but it's not at all uncommon for certain individuals to wade into the fray with their partners to the extent possible, and mechanics like Biomerge means that some of the non-direct fighters get in on the fun.
• Re:CREATORS: Sota is the main protagonist (and narrator) of the show. He's just an ordinary boy, with no particular power or ability. Since he is not a superpowered fighter like the Creations or even a skilled Creator, all Sota can do is run away from fights and hope his friends can solve the crisis at hand. Despite that, not only does he attempt to protect Meteora from Aliceteria's attack, he even tries to appeal to the latter's better nature.
• Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh! was conceived as the antithesis of a typical shonen hero of the time; he is a pacifist whose alter ego Yami Yugi defeats opponents in games, while his buddy Jonouchi handles any physical fights that might arise.

Fan Works

• It Gets Worse: Taylor doesn't have any weapons, training, Super-Strength, or any other direct combat power. What she does have is extreme luck; her power constantly, and without her conscious direction, shifts probabilities in her favour, setting up chains of Disaster Dominoes and Humiliation Congas for her enemies and deliverance for her friends. Taylor herself is basically a passenger, strolling through life and seeing the world rearranging itself around her.

Films — Live-Action

• Maverick: Played with. Bret Maverick would certainly like to stay out of the action; he's a professional gambler, not a gunfighter, and much prefers bluffing and tricks to get out of tight spots, like arranging himself to win a staged fight and scare off an opponent, or tricking a bunch of drunk renegades into thinking they're surrounded by gunmen; he's also a quick draw but admits he "can't hit shit," and being a bit of a dandy he's wary of ruining his clothes. That doesn't stop him from being forced into several scrapes, including stopping a runaway wagon (nearly getting himself tossed off a cliff in the process), and engaging in a non-lethal shootout with the aforementioned renegades. By the third act, Bret seems to have gained some spine, shown when he straight-up attacks Angel's thugs by himself.
• Children of Men: Theo is a cynical bureaucrat tasked with protecting the world's first pregnant woman in 18 years, no easy task when crossing dystopian England with trained soldiers shooting at them from one side and armed militants shooting back on the other. Theo himself never even picks up a gun and survives mostly by guile and a good running start (although once he smashes someone's face with a car battery).
• Hacksaw Ridge: Downplayed with Desmond Doss. Due to his religious beliefs and past trauma of wielding a weapon against his family, Doss enlists in the U.S. military as a combat medic, refusing to arm himself even in training. And while he does enter the battlefield, he's mainly around to carry the wounded soldiers to safety — not once does he pull the trigger. As a matter of fact, he ends up lasting much longer on the battlefield than his fellow troops.

Literature

• The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Tales: In "The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga Zanniga", a rabbit is about to be eaten by a bear. Seeing as he's very small and his teeth and claws can't do much damage compared to the bear's, he can't fight the bear off. Instead, the rabbit saves his life by observing that the bear has an uneven amount of eyelashes and tricking him into thinking this means he's dying but can be saved by holding a flower to his eye.
• The Gruffalo: The mouse doesn't fight his would-be predators (probably because he physically can't) so instead, he scares them away by claiming he's friends with a monster called the Gruffalo, who eats their species. When it turns out that the Gruffalo does exist, he points out the predators running in fear from the Gruffalo and tricks the Gruffalo into thinking they're afraid of the mouse instead, scaring the Gruffalo.
• The Twilight Saga: Bella becomes the focus of Edward's existence, but when he fights other vampires to protect her, they're too fast for her to even watch, let alone contribute. Not to mention that even if a vampire stayed still, a Gatling gun would do nothing but annoy them. Her vulnerability in the middle of a coven of strong protectors is what makes her such a fascinating target for James, who lives for the thrill of the hunt.
• Dracula gives the male protagonists plenty of action scenes, but Mina Harker's primary contributions to the plot come in the form of developing a psychic link with Dracula after she's bitten by the count and helping riddle out his route across Europe.
• Neverwhere:
  • Richard Mayhew is your everyday 30-year-old office worker living in London who is thrown into the London Below after he tried to save a wounded girl. Subverted at the end, when Richard takes a level in badass and kills the Beast of London.
  • Lady Door also counts. She appears at first as a Damsel in Distress, but later the trope is subverted as her Opening ability is proven to be unexpectedly deadly. She uses this to send the Angel Islington, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar "As [...] far away as I could".
  • Marquis de Carabas is the resident trickster of the London Below, who has little combat ability, but is a formidable enemy — for his true strength lies in his trickery and his Chain of Deals. He manages to use both to bring himself Back from the Dead for the grand finale.
• The Hobbit: Peaceful hobbit Bilbo Baggins is hired to be a thief in a company of rough-and-tumble dwarven warriors. While he starts out a stuffy Classical Anti-Hero, he later proves his mettle through his wits. Nonetheless, he misses the entire Battle of the Five Armies because he got knocked out early in.
• A Hero's War: Cato has no combat-relevant skills, not even leadership, and for some reason he physically can't use magic. However, his insights from Earth about engineering and science led to a Magitek revolution that resulted in the territory of Minmay developing the most dangerous military force in the world. Cato himself, meanwhile, is mostly just running the new university and collaborating with specialists to come up with new ideas.
• How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Souma Kazuya was a well-read college student intending to join the Japanese civil service when he was summoned to a Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting, expected to become a Heroic Fantasy hero. He instead chose to put his knowledge to use restoring the fortunes of the declining Kingdom of Elfrieden, to which end the incumbent King and Queen chose to make him their Heir-In-Law and then Abdicate the Throne to him. As a combatant, Souma^note even though it's his surname, it becomes his regnal name due to Name Order Confusion that wasn't corrected in time is merely a passable crossbowman (though he can magically puppeteer inanimate objects to some extent), but fortunately he attracts a Battle Harem of martially talented women who do their best to stay between him and any aggressors.
• Subaru Natsuki from Re:Zero really only has his "Return by Death" ability going for him, but he's noted to be one of the weakest protagonists in the plot. Word of God says he would lose in a duel with almost every other protagonist; Subaru can't even resort to magic to fight effectively. As a result, really only having his ability to count on, he uses a great deal of guile, trickery, and Save Scumming in order to escape his doom. Despite these odds and how over his head he is, he very much gradually develops into a hero in his own way.
• Nero Wolfe: Even though the detective genre doesn't oblige the main character to be a physically strong fighter, Nero Wolfe still stands out. Wolfe absolutely hates leaving his house and doesn't touch anyone unless it's absolutely necessary. His personal assistant Archie, however, is an active character, taking part in fights and shootouts when necessary.
• The Saint's Magic Power Is Omnipotent: As the eponymous Saint, Sei Takanashi is a supernaturally talented alchemist and healer, but she has no fighting abilities at all besides conjuring barriers, and relies on her Knight in Shining Armor Love Interest Albert Hawke and his subordinates to protect her on missions to purify miasma swamps.
• Spice and Wolf: Protagonist Lawrence is an Intrepid Merchant and while he carries a dagger for self-defense, he has little fighting abilities. In dangerous situations, he mostly relies on talking his way out or outsmarting his opponents. Deuteragonist and female lead Holo does that actual fighting when it's needed and she enjoys teasing him about playing the role of Damsel in Distress at times.
• George Smiley was created by John le Carré to be a literary foil to James Bond. While Bond was a Badass field agent who traveled the world, Smiley was bookish, spent much of his time at the office, and rarely confronted his enemies physically.

Live-Action TV

• Sadakatsiz: Asya Yilmaz is an average mother with no combat capability or even training in some sort of sport. When faced with a thug hired by her aggressive ex-husband or kidnapped by one of her patients, she doesn't defeat them by besting them in combat but by being a Guile Hero. Being an emergency medic helps her remain calm under stressful situations and come up with a plan. She relies more on manipulating or negotiating with people. For example, while she does smash a vase on the thug's head, her winning card is stealthily calling for help. When kidnapped, she stalls (giving the police time to figure out the culprit) by making them think she's going to do what they want, she just needs time to set it up. This also prevents the kidnappers from murdering another woman.
• Jake and the Fatman: District Attorney Jason "Fatman" McCabe is a corpulent fellow with a knack for sniffing out chicanery. Most of the detective legwork is done by his associate, Jake Styles, who gathers evidence and makes observations based on what "Fatman" needs to cement a criminal case. In fact, "Fatman" rarely leaves the comfort of his office chair, using deductive reasoning only to piece together how any given crime was committed.
• Chuck: The titular protagonist is the page image for a reason. Chuck Bartowski was an everyman and nerd who accidentally downloaded the Intersect into his brain and got pulled into the world of espionage. Despite proving to be well in over his head, Chuck frequently resolves matters through his quick thinking and ability to plan ahead; he's not bad in a fight, but generally leaves the fighting to his far more experienced partner Sarah Walker.

Toys

• Transformers: Before the Michael Bay films, this was how Bumblebee was portrayed. In episodes of The Transformers where he plays a big role, he uses his guile, small size, and guts to get out of jams. This was carried over to the Choose Your Own Adventure-style books of the time where he's the main character: Bumblebee has little to no combat ability (his actual function is Spy), and so has to avoid combat as much as he can.

Video Games

• Black Isle Studios and its Spiritual Successor company Obsidian Entertainment loves this trope, to the point of arguably being a genre-wide Trope Codifier for Western RPGs.
  • Fallout has historically made this a viable playstyle for all of the Fallout games developed by the original creators, a major contrast to the Bethesda-made games. It's entirely possible in Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas to beat the game without killing anyone yourself, or even without killing anybody period, through a combination of Speech checks to talk down enemy encounters as they appear. While the earlier Fallout games put equal emphasis on the Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth angle of the games, the "Diplomacy" one was easily the most popular one, and it's hard not to see why: the most famous moment from the first game involves plainly and reasonably pointing out to The Master why his plan of making everyone a Super-Mutant to evolve humanity is doomed to fail through simple biology, which out of guilt of everything he's done to reach this point, gives up and kills himself by self-destructing The Very Definitely Final Dungeon you're in as soon as you escape. These are so baked into the founding DNA of the Fallout series that a few fans have taken issue with the fact that every Fallout game after Fallout 3 makes a Pacifist Run impossible.
  • Planescape: Torment, being a Deconstructor Fleet of the entire Western RPG genre, naturally runs into this trope. There isn't a single encounter you can't skip, with the Nameless One being able to defeat even the final boss without so much as raising a sword.
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has this too. While there's more than enough ways to brute force the game, generally agreed that the most satisfying way to beat the game is with no combat at all. The final boss can be easily defeated with words as much as combat.
• The Persona series has had this trend as a result of the third game with the resident Mission Control characters, as they are Support Party Members who can't fight in combat but have impressive analyzing abilities. While they aren't the de facto main protagonists, as main characters in a series with Supporting Protagonists and an Ensemble Cast, they count regardless:
  • Fuuka Yamagishi, the Mission Control of Persona 3, is one of these. Physically speaking, while the other members of S.E.E.S. are physically adept at combating Shadows, Fuuka is a shy, grungy nerdy girl who is introduced by being a bullying victim of a girl posse. Then she ends up in Tartarus by accident, and shortly after summoning her Persona for the first time while surviving ten hours in the vitality-sapping dungeon, she allows you to see the strengths and weaknesses of the Boss Shadows that just wiped the floor with two of your allies. Even though her Persona is not capable of combat, she's still a critical ally to S.E.E.S.'s efforts in Tartarus and a valuable member of the team.
  • Rise Kujikawa from Persona 4 is in the same boat as Fuuka, and pulls off a similar feat of endurance to her. Right after facing her own Shadow, she immediately takes over as Mission Control when the next boss shows up, while also not wearing the glasses everyone has that makes them immune to the TV World fog's vitality-sapping properties, and she had just gotten her Persona, whereas everyone else could barely stand after getting theirs. Just like Fuuka, she is crucial to the investigation of the Yasoinaba serial murders despite having no combat capacity herself. That said, she partially subverts this trope come Persona 4: Arena Ultimax where Rise's Persona evolves into a combat-capable form, but that's more of a Necessary Weasel given that it's a Puppet Fighter Fighting Game by default.
  • Futaba Sakura of Persona 5 may not do any sort of fighting either, but like Rise and Fuuka before her in being her group's resident Mission Control, she ends up being exceptionally useful through her analysis abilities, immediately taking over in the second half of the climax of Futaba's Palace, against Cognitive Wakaba. She is also an exceptional hacker whose skills prove vital to the Phantom Thieves in many of their heists. This talent ends up proving crucial in the climax of the story, where she literally hacks into the broadcasting system to go especially loud at sending a Calling Card to Masayoshi Shido. It works.
• Pokémon has this as the rule rather than the exception with its human characters, with pretty much all of the fighting done by the titular Pokémon instead. Which is probably for the best; it's highly unlikely guns or swords would do anything to giant monsters who can level mountains, especially anything a 10-year old can put out.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Mark from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, generally agreed as the first Avatar in the series, is the Non-Entity General and point-of-view character of the actual protagonists, Lyn, Eliwood and Hector. They have no known canonical appearance or combat abilities, but their skill with strategy is canonically so great that if you score high enough by the end of the main campaign, Bern and Etruria will outright go to war over Mark's hand as their personal tactician.
  • Kiran from Fire Emblem Heroes is another example of this, being another Featureless Protagonist that summons legendary heroes from past Fire Emblem games to aid them in battle. However, they are playable as a combatant in Mjölnir's Strike mode, but they are not playable otherwise and generally their ability to fight in that mode is a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation.
• Fate/Grand Order has Ritsuka Fujimaru, who stands out even compared to all the other protagonists of other Nasuverse media; both Shikis (Shiki Ryougi and Shiki Tohno) have Mystic Eyes of Death Perception and are trained assassins, Shirou Emiya can conjure swords on a whim and has a Future Badass self, Ayaka Sajyou is a skilled Dark Magical Girl who knows powerful old-school Magecrafts, and Aoko Aozaki outright has access to the Fifth Magic. Ritsuka, meanwhile, never goes beyond being passable at best at the art of Magecraft themselves and almost entirely relies on their Servants summoned through the game's gacha system to do their fighting for them.
• In Outlast, it's expansion pack Whistleblower and the sequel Outlast II. The main protagonists Miles Upshur, Waylon Park and Blake Langermann are incapable of fighting back against enemies and have to rely on running and hiding to escape should they be spotted.
• The Amnesia series of games have this as a core part of the series' gameplay. Unlike many Survival Horror games of the time, fighting the various monsters within the depths are outright impossible, with the game's choices being to outwit, outsmart, and outmaneuver them rather than try to fight. As a result, each protagonist fits the bill of this perfectly, with the trend only being broken with Amnesia: The Bunker, being the first in the series to allow the protagonist to fight back.
• Played with in Subverse, but otherwise mostly played straight. The game features two distinct combat modes: the Turn-Based Tactics ground combat and the Shoot 'Em Up space combat. The protagonist (known only as "The Captain") is a brilliant pilot who fights personally in space combat but is a complete amateur in hand-to-hand and leaves ground combat completely up to his Battle Harem. In the few cutscenes where he is shown with his boots on the ground, he is either hiding in cover or getting his ass handed to him.
• Monster Rancher usually doesn't even have your human character on the field — you mostly just raise your Mons and stay the heck out of the way.
• Limbo: The game casts you as a little boy wandering through a dark, dangerous world. He has no combat experience whatsoever, so to survive the horrors the world throws at him, he'll need to think on his feet and outsmart his opponents to survive.
• Citizens of Earth: The Vice President of the World never lifts a finger to fight any of his battles. Instead, he recruits various people he meets on his journeys to do the fighting for him. Subverted in the final battle against the Misery Machine, which the VP fights all by himself.
• Black the Fall: You're an engineer in Commie Land who decided to abandon his work station and take a stroll across the blighted countryside. You have no combat experience, so your best chance of survival relies on your wits, your laser pointer, and your Robot Buddy.
• Pyre has its Absurdly High-Stakes Game Rites with all the clever athleticism and power you'd expect...and none of them are the Reader, who is both more of a coach to the Nightwings and is implied to have a Career-Ending Injury falling to Downside even if they aren't explicitly noted by the player as disabled.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa generally features this with (most) of it's mainline series protagonists. Makoto Naegi and Kaede Akamatsu both have no combat capabilities to speak of, having to contend with superhumans, athletes, and superhuman athletes who are generally impossible for them to kill, being in a Deadly Game Whodunnit Battle Royale and all. Of course, Kaede is executed for murdering another classmate at the end of the first chapter, but Shuichi Saihara takes over to fit the bill just as nicely for this trope as she did. Hajime Hinata seems like he qualifies for this trope more than anyone, but his true identity as the superhuman-among-superhumans Izuru Kamakura, who is very much perfect at everything, including combat, disqualifies this, especially when Hajime gets his memories back and merges the two personalities come Danganronpa 3. Ironically, it's Makoto's little sister, Komaru Naegi, who completely averts this trope; given they use a hacking gun to defeat the Killer Robots let loose on Towa City, they are more of an Action Survivor than this trope.

Webcomics

• In Fate/type Redline, Kanata is an Inept Mage who's way out of his depth in a Holy Grail War and can't contribute to fighting. He mainly gets by through protection from Tsukumo and Saber, who have a vested interest in his survival as Saber's Master. He tries to subvert this by getting proper lessons in magecraft from Tsukumo and learns that he possesses his family's Magic Crest. He starts graduating to sn Action Survivor when he learns how to disarm magical traps, with the implication the he has far more potential than he ever dreamed of.

Western Animation

• Wander over Yonder: The titular protagonist Wander is this, being an Actual Pacifist Love Freak who generally has his pacifism extend to almost suicidal degrees of naivete. Despite this, he generally leaves any fighting to Sylvia; his magnetic charm and firm belief in redemption ends up turning over a great deal of people to his cause, and his cunning often peeks out from under the lazy idiot disguise. Being a Badass Pacifist, he has a tendency to rely on his wit to get him out of scrapes.
  • The episode "The Wanders" reveals more on this; it shows that Wander is a pacifist because of a specific key aspect of his personality — a lonely, helpless, and frightened child, representing how helpless he was in his childhood himself, which is why he wants to help everyone. Without this aspect, Wander is a daring and heroic action-packed hero who seeks to vanquish evil, even Lord Hater.

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