How To Create Relatable And Lovable Protagonists

How To Create Relatable And Lovable Protagonists: The characters are a crucial element that can influence whether a viewer will love or detest a film, series, or tale. To care about the plot, your audience must adore and identify with the characters. This is a typical error that many screenwriters make. Don’t waste time trying to make your characters likable to the audience or readers. Such “angle-like” characters end up being uninteresting and formulaic. Regardless of whether your main character is a mother, a teacher, a police officer, a drug dealer, a serial murderer, or even a robot… They must be relatable so that viewers would want to support them and keep watching to find out what happens to them.

This is a common mistake many screenplay writers do. Don’t waste time on making your characters do good things so that the audience or readers like them. Such “angle-like” characters turn out to be flat and predictable. Whether your protagonist is a mother, teacher, police officer, drug dealer, serial killer, or even a robot… They should be relatable so that the audience would root for them and feel the urge to continue watching to see what will happen to them. The following screenwriting strategies could be used to help the characters in your script seem more relatable:

Make Your Characters Grey

Your characters shouldn’t be pure good or pure evil black or white. They ought to be grey. You want to make them as human as you can, which is why. Therefore, even the protagonist should have weaknesses to let readers identify with him or her better. Characters who are exclusively nice or evil are flat and appear highly manufactured.

Show Their Passion

Give the characters a cause to be enthusiastic about in order to make them seem more human. Passion can be shown for a cause, a loved one, a dream, a family, a job, etc. Most of the time, the character’s enthusiasm is evident in the screenplay in the shape of the character’s objective. However, what we advise is to depict this enthusiasm and convey it in the script so that the reader will understand it clearly and identify with the character.

Give Them Personality traits

You undoubtedly thought about your character’s attributes when creating them: kind, OCD, introverted, humorous, honest, cunning. Try to maintain the character traits you allocated in the script, and to make the character more relatable, demonstrate and uphold these traits. Again, this will give the character a more human quality.

Give Them a Backstory

A tragic or intriguing history, in most circumstances, makes the audience care more about the character and piques their curiosity about how this backstory affected his life. That is as a result of their increased empathy for him and knowledge of him. This is how you may make the audience feel a strong emotional connection to the character.

Give Them The X Factor

Make your protagonist different from other characters. Give him some x factors that makes him more likable. It can be anything, animal love, girl’s respect, elderly care, and in some cases he / she can be problem solver (Good in studies or hard working).

Show Them Struggle

This may be the tried-and-true method for getting the audience to care about and fall in love with your characters. People enjoy watching personalities on television at their most vulnerable. Before they accomplish their lofty objective or get beyond the major impediment, they want to see them go through hardship in their lives.

Make them Take Action

Adorable characters do things. These events ought to advance the plot and impact the character arc. The audience would grow impatient with the character and would not like him if he constantly ignores or complains without doing anything.

Let Them Learn

Learning from mistakes is one of the crucial factor for any character to develop through the journey they embark. This is not just true for books or novels, but this also true for movies and web series. Any protagonist is not born perfect, rather they learn and grow throughout the story, by making mistakes.

Also Read: 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2022