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The protagonist has spent a significant portion of the story bouncing around the tale like a pinball. He provides no plot impetus in and of himself, and has essentially spent the entire story thus far in a reactive state.
Whatever is going on in the world, be it war or intrigue or a Xanatos Gambit, just drags him along in its wake.
This is not a Designated Hero. Designated Heroes actually do things. They have impact on the world around them. Eventually they pick up the Plot Ball and move it around. Even the Little Hero Big War still has the hero do something important to affect the larger mess around her. The Pinball Protagonist spends a decent amount of time failing to actually have any effect at all. They aren't even lucky enough to be the Plot Ball.
This character is also not a narrator unless the tale is told from a first person perspective.
If the writing and tone of the tale all imply that the character is the protagonist, and yet they can be lifted right out of the story and have little to no impact on anything that has or will happen: then they're just a little silver ball in the cosmic pinball game of life.
If done badly, the reader is left wondering why in the hell the character is the protagonist. It can be done well. Perhaps the protagonist is like a vehicle or a touchstone for the reader, a way of exploring some strange new world or meeting interesting characters like Charlie did in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.
Many characters will have pinball episodes where they are simply overloaded with too many problems in far too short of a time frame to do anything effective.
Compare The Watson and The Ishmael. Also compare the Waif and Persephone archetypal characters, both defined by the ability to bear up under hardship (an undervalued heroic quality often Flanderized into a passive characterization). For a detailed overview on the use of passive heroes who get tossed about between situations with little control over their external destiny, try The Seven Basic Plots, especially the Rags To Riches plot and Voyage and Return; the passive hero is supposed to be undergoing Character Development, of course.
Examples:
- Pretty much the whole human race and indeed nearly the entire biosphere in every adaptation of the War of the Worlds.
Anime and Manga
- Most harem-leading males are pinball protagonists. The main characters of Ah My Goddess, To Love Ru, Rosario To Vampire, Sora No Otoshimono, Steel Angel Kurumi, Maburaho, and Rozen Maiden all have main leads with no ambition, aside from trying to live normally under ridiculous circumstances. To be fair, most harem shows don't have much plot to begin with, though.
- Until the climax of Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis, Kenichi and Tima spend most of their time wandering from one Scenery Porn locale to the next, occasionally getting shot at. Tima may also qualify as a walking Mac Guffin.
- Natsuru in Kampfer gets dragged around by other people and he just goes along with them in the end anyway.
Comic Books
Film
- Because of Adaptation Decay and Disneyfication, Mowgli in Disney's The Jungle Book spends all his time reacting to the other characters and doesn't instigate any plot events. This is totally ironic if you know the character from Rudyard Kipling's original stories.
- The Dude abides.
- The Beatles for much of Help! This is partially Lampshaded: Ringo Starr is told he can remove his Clingy Mac Guffin if he commits one courageous act—and when he does, much later, it's the end of the film.
- The protagonist from the 1966 B-movie The Wild World Of Batwoman is a perfect example of this. The protagonist is pretty much like Charlie from Charlie's Angels. She does show up from time to time, but she has her batgirls do all the work. A review can by Agony Booth can be read here.
- Slevin Kelevra from Lucky Number Slevin is apparently this during the beginning of the film, before the Kansas City Shuffle and Slevin's true intentions are revealed
- Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Though Janet does get up to do something halfway through the plot - that 'something' being Rocky.
- Jen of The Dark Crystal spends much of the film's first and second acts commenting on how he has no idea where he is going or what he is looking for as various characters comment on prophecy and destiny and the like. In an example of this trope being done well, it serves to show the audience the wonderfully imaginative world of the movie, and the fantastic special effects of Jim Henson's Creature Shop
Literature
- Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (Meggie spends a lot of her time just reacting to things the adults do. On the rare occasions she tries to affect things her plans are thwarted, stalled, or rendered useless.)
- But in the end, she saves the day by reading out loud a modification to the original story that turned the Big Bad's Dragon good.
- Even so, her father could have done it just as easily.
- The entirety of The Crying of Lot 49 is like this, although that is because it is about a person just exploring a secret organisation, being told to go to another part of the organisation, and then going there - she only begins to take initiative right at the end, with the eponymous auction of the title.
- Fanny from the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park, due to the emotional abuse she's suffered for eight years living with her rich aunts and uncle, basically feels she has no right to her own opinion or happiness and thus lets her aunts and cousins push her around for most of the novel. Naturally, this makes the two times she stands up for herself all the more impressive and the other characters all the more shocked.
- Several times I've seen this accusation thrown against those three classic young heroines of literature: Alice, Wendy and Dorothy. Susan Sto Helit is described as an aversion of this.
- In the case of Alice, it's mostly because of dream logic. The next time you remember a dream you had, note that you didn't actually control any of your actions in it... (Be quiet, lucid dreamers.)
- And its not like any of the other characters Alice meets do anything either, the entire book is just one brilliantly written conversation after another.
- Well, except for the Queen of Hearts.
- And in the case of Dorothy... does nobody read the other books in the series?
- Interesting how it's these three specific characters who come together for the webcomic Cheshire Crossing. They're anything but passive pinballs in that.
- Jurgis in The Jungle. To the point where nobody cared except about the meat stuff.
- When I read The Island of Doctor Moreau, it struck me that Richard Prendick does nothing but get thrown overboard, land on an island and watch more interesting people do experiments.
- Heck, all of H. G. Wells’s protagonists follow the "touchstone for the reader to explore a strange new world" mould. The vast majority don’t even have names.
- Terisa Morgan of Stephen R. Donaldson's Mordant's Need novels (The Mirror of Her Dreams, A Man Rides Through) acts this way through most of both books. (This is deliberate. She has a cripplingly low level of self-confidence thanks to an oppressive father and passive mother; the narration makes an analogy to a princess imprisoned by a curse.)
- Shasta/Prince Cor in The Horse and His Boy, has very little control over the plot, being surrounded by stronger personalities (including the titular horse) for most of the tale.
- In Hitchhiker's Guide Arthur Dent started out as this. It's made explicitly clear that he's the main character early on, yet it takes awhile for him to take an active role and not just react to events around him.
- Augusten Burroughs in Running With Scissors. Particularly the movie version. It's an autobiography, but still...
- Both Bella and Wanderer tend to fall into this during periods of action (which admittedly are in the minority in the slow, conversation-heavy books.) They're both Extreme Doormats, so it makes sense from an in-story standpoint, but it's one of the reasons Stephanie Meyer's works are so polarizing.
- Beverly King in L.M. Montgomery's The Story Girl is there purely to observe the more interesting characters around him. Then again, they are very interesting characters.
- Cosette in Les Miserables. Yet Victor Hugo assures us that she has the soul of a gypsy.
- Kino from KinosJourney tries to be this type of character; being a Traveller, one is not supposed to pass judgement or meddle in the affairs of the places they visit and is only there to observe objectivly. However, various circumstances typically get Kino wraped up in the affairs of the places she comes to and forces her to act, whether she wants to or not.
- In many ways, Richard Papen from Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History qualifies as this.
- Destiny Unfulfilled, a Harry Potter critique argues that Harry was an understandable Pinball for the first few books and an unrepentant Pinhead in the last ones. Namely, that the innocence Rowling wanted Harry to keep prevented him from ever taking the role
of protagonis A Real Man!
- The Saragossa Manuscript (both the book and the movie). Alphonse van Worden has various bewildering or scary things happen around him and to him, and is told lots of stories. A number of critics have suggested that the entire seemingly-random plot is a show staged for van Worden in an attempt to convince or convert him.
- Almost all of the main characters William Gibson writes would qualify, but Case in Neuromancer is a cut above the rest: it's difficult to name one decision made in the book that's solely his.
- In Excession, most of the plot is driven by starship A Is and other superpowerful Minds while the protagonist, diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen is sent by his mysterious bosses on a journey to the GSV Sleeper Service to find the one person who may have knowledge of the Excession, but it becomes apparent that she isn't even there, and his whole trip occurred because the Eccentric ship wanted him to reconcile with his ex-girlfriend, which has no impact on the story. And then the Excession leaves with no real explanation.
- The main character of The Sharing Knife is somewhere between this and The Ishmael. In terms of plot, almost everything that happens is because of her primary love interest, with her dragged along for the ride. When fighting starts, said love interest is impressive even for a member of the resident Superior Species, whereas she's physically unsuited to combat and mostly stays out of the way. As with Twilight, it seems she's there as the reader's romantic stand-in.
- Geralt, in the saga. Mostly because the setting is populated with dozens of wizards, nearly all of them Xanatoses of various degrees. Hell, his person isn't even important to the plot.
Live Action TV
- From what I hear there was a long period when virtually everyone on Lost was like this. They'd have little fits of trying to do something, only to be completely stymied, and then they'd go "Oh... no..." and sink back into frustrating helplessness.
Theatre
- The play Oliver is like this, he's an orphan, gets passed from orphanage, to a funeral home, then gets kicked out and gets picked up by the thieves guild, then is taken in by a rich old man. It's a musical, and the characters mostly sing around him as well.
- The book version is no more proactive.
Video Games
- Vaan of Final Fantasy XII, along with being The Scrappy. Originally the main character was going to be someone else but Japanese focus groups preferred a Bishonen protagonist.
- He even at one point admits, out loud, that he's not the important one of the group and that he's just tagging along on everyone else's quests.
- The characters in Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy III (The original NES version anyway) were also like this, being nameless Heroic Mimes.
- The protagonists in Studio Key's visual novels are justified in their general pin-ball status in the games, because that's the whole point of the genre. But as these games have recently been turned into Anime series en masse by Kyoto animation, the fact that the boys simply bounce from girl to girl helping them resolve issues can be bothersome.
- Arguably, Kage was like this in Zone Of The Enders Fist of Mars, until character development and plot events forced him to stop playing Naive Newcomer and actually do something constructive.
- Many story-heavy games with scripted events and heroic mimes.
- Jack from Bioshock is an excellent example — not only does he rarely speak, he also plays a nearly negligible role in the story for most of the game.
Webcomics
- Rice Boy. The titular Rice Boy is kind and meek, so when he's told that he's fated to fulfill a prophecy and save the world, he has little problem stepping up. But he's ignorant about the larger world, and has no idea how he's supposed to do the job, so he spends the majority of the story bouncing from one source of exposition to the next, following their instructions.
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