Subverting the Anthropic Principle

I was just thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know), and, well, there's the Anthropic Principle that seems to give Plot Armour to the heroes of whatever story, and often this is treated as inevitable. Same with villains losing constantly because they only need to win once, and other contrived forms of keeping characters alive because "otherwise, there would be no story" or "otherwise, the ending would be depressing".

Then I thought of two pretty interesting stories: A Song Of Ice And Fire Jojos Bizarre Adventure, and Gantz. All of these have pretty unstable casts, people who seem to be building up to become "the true protagonist" are killed willy-nilly, but a plot that remains engaging nevertheless.

I also saw the Bad Ass and Super Loser tropes, and this got me wondering about superheroes being Instant Expert at using their powers, showing extreme courage, intelligence, and skill, getting away with inhuman things even though those aren't things affected by their powers...

There's also the Aesop Index and how people's expectatons that the story has a lesson in it are managed...

So I wondered, how does one go about building a story where the protagonists change regularly, so that you can never say who's the hero, where the apparent odds are actually a good estimate of how things will turn out, where strokes of luck are balanced by strokes of misfortune, rather than veering to either extreme, where both cynicism and idealism can be a weakness but also a virtue: it all comes down to being a good judge of character of who you're dealing with, and having a keen eye for the human factor... and that should never be foolproof. There should be moments both good and bad.

Basically the idea would be to reflect a story that could actually happen in a realistic setting (superpowers and other fantastic elements aside, such as proper diction) while still presenting interesting events, that, while open to interpretation for one lesson or another, don't push one on you, but don't lead to actual confusion or silliness, encouraging measured thought instead. The characters should be compelling, but realistically fallible (not tragic, not hypercompetent, just realistic: Known Unknowns and all that), and their lives and deaths can be meaningful or meaningless, dramatic or anticlimactic...

The challenge is to still keep, though all that, an interesting series of events, that people will want to follow, even though plots and characters shift from here to there.

I'm not sure if the Anthropic Principle is what you're really talking about here.

So... if I understand this properly, you're challenging writers to show more realism?

One way is to make something outside the cast the 'main character' as such: maybe the place, the culture, the town or the country. That way, a protagonist one minute can turn antagonist the next. Or just get killed off, but the story just runs on, as they were only pushing a part of it.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking of.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not just the AP. But it still all boils down to challenging the elements people expect in a tight story, without stopping it from being a story, and a good one at that.

Just thought of a better idea: make the place a symbol of ideals/ beliefs/ views that the characters are supposed to uphold (or, at least, initially agree to). These would substitute as the personality of the guild /building/ city/ country (depending on how you want the dynamic to play out) without even needing an AI avatar or anything. How well the walking-talking characters uphold these or try to influence them either for selfish or genuinely unselfish ends would also drive plot.

Also, the background as to why those ideals were thought up at all would be interesting, especially if there are several interpretations as to how they happened, and no guarantees as to the "truth" of any of them.

edited 6th May '12 6:34:12 AM by Euodiachloris

I quite liked Global Frequency for this sort of thing. It's a bit 90s despite being published in the 00s, but it's basically an Anyone Can Die superhero story, but with New Media instead of superheroes. It has a few recurring characters but they're mostly facilitators, the actual 'heroes' are just whoever happens to be in the right place at the right time with the right skills, although since said heroes have a tendency to die more often than not, 'right' is subjective. And sometimes they screw up and have to just carpet-bomb everything. It's pretty good.

It can get a bit preachy and unnecessarily 'gritty' sometimes, but other than that I think it did a pretty good job of averting and deconstructing a lot of traditional superhero tropes while remaining entertaining.

edited 6th May '12 7:43:20 AM by Kesteven

Warren Ellis is a fucking genius, but Spider Jerusalem should have died a thousand times over since Transmetropolitan started.

Well, i my self have toyed with something like this, much shorter scale mind you.

I always saw it as a revolving view point, your character goes forward, a few characterizations to make you care/love/hate the character kill him off or put him on a bus, then swap to a nearby character and have them take up the mantle the dead, and or bused one.

I think there's a fine line to draw when revolving casts come into play, though. If it's too obvious that you're working with a revolving cast or a certain character is going to die, it'll dissuade your audience from caring about the characters or getting attached. And if they do get attached, you run the risk of pissing them off when you stop spending time with a certain character, even if that character gets a happy ending. And even if the way the characters work out is all right, I sort of feel like constantly changing protagonists and similar things like that can easily ruin the flow of a story.

Not saying it can't be done, mind. But I'm of the mindset that "realism" of this sort (in quotations because Reality Is Unrealistic) is best if it actually helps improve the story or characters, and that some narrative concessions are so commonplace, and so basic, and even so wrapped up into the very way that we tell stories that actively seeking out to break or subvert them actually messes with my suspension of disbelief more than the tropes themselves do.

Personally, I feel that reality will always be more interesting then fiction because it doesn't follow tropes. So striving to imitate that is a good thing.

Of course, it can be a matter of taste; I wouldn't advocate making what the OP proposes a universal rule of storytelling. Revolving casts do carry some major risk, and I don't intend to use one. But I think the general idea of striving to make fiction more realistic in the area of behavior and probability can only ever be a good thing.

Actually a revolving cast is Older Than Dirt: Look at Homer's work, or The Bible. Unbuilt Trope anyone?

Being Older Than Dirt doesn't automatically make something "correct" or even easy to work with, though. Tropes grow and change as fiction itself has changed, and things that were once commonplace grow discarded, for various reasons.

Perfect example from Homer: The fact that certain things such as the ocean, or Athena, are always referred to with specific epithets and descriptors. Back in the day, such repitition was essential to making sure bards and poets could remember the darn things, given how long epic poems were and are. They had to be simplified in that manner for memorability's sake. But these days, overuse of epithets or constant repitition of the same descriptors for the same thing, every time, is generally considered a bad thing and a sign of lazy writing.

Hence, also, why I said that I don't think it's impossible to do right. One of my mantras is, there is pretty much no single piece of writing advice that is true in every single situation. The rules can always be broken. It's just that it's not something I particularly go for, along with my reasons for disliking it.