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There's a post going around tumblr from

prokopetz about the three types of protagonists, as follows:

1. Pursues reasonable goals with unreasonable methods

2. Has sensible plans, but tremendously fucks up the execution

3. Relentlessly competent in pursuit of goals that are objectively deranged

and every time it goes by I want to do it as "Tag your OT3". So, here (feel free to fight me on these):

Eliot is 1. Hardison is 2. Parker is 3.

Luke is 1. Han is 2. Leia is 3.
Rey is 1. Finn is 2. Poe is 3.

McCoy is 1. Kirk is 2. Spock is 3.

Joe is 1. Methos is 2. MacLeod is 3.

Sybil is 1. Vimes is 2. Vetinari is 3.

Cable is 1. Vanessa is 2. Deadpool is 3.

Mercy of Kalr is 1. Seivarden is 2. Breq is 3.

Ray is 1. Ray is 2. Ben is 3.

Thomas is 1. Peter is 2. Bev is 3.

Harrow is 1. Gideon is 2. Ianthe is 3.

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I am so totally in love with this idea that I started typing with my fingers on the wrong keys twice and had to rewrite to make it readable.

This list is hilarious and also is highlighting for me how much I love type 3.

There's something so compelling about a really intense, highly skilled person who makes you want to beat them over the head with the "pick your battles. pick… pick fewer battles than that. put some battles back. that’s too many" tumblr post.

Has Girl Genius been done yet? I think I'd put Gil as 1, Tarvek as 2, and Agatha as 3, but I'm open to arguments.

Accepted!

Also Arnie is 1, Usidore is 2, Chunt is 3.

I wonder if there’s something about the (magical) school story that needs a fourth kind of protagonist, because I can’t really make Buffy fit any of these, either.

I think it might be the broader category of Coming of Age stories. Coming of Age protagonists, I think, are sort of all inherently 2, because the metanarrative there is generally "I just want to be a normal kid and grow up but all of this plot is getting in the way!" But also a lot of the story tends to be about how they don't really get to make all of their own choices in a broader sense, so a lot of the time they are just dealing with stuff in their lives that other people have fucked up, and experimenting with what kind of protagonist they want to be.

(I mean, you can have kid characters who are other ones - literally everyone in Calvin & Hobbes is a 3 - but that's not a coming of age narrative.)

LOL LOL LOL

Harry Dresden is p much all 3 at least twice per book.

MCU - Peter Parker is 2; Tony is 3; not sure who is 1... Cap?

Yeah, it's tougher if you aren't working with a premade set of three you can compare against each other - I didn't list either of those fandoms because I don't have OT3s for them, just pairings + giant polycule.

But I would probably put Harry in 1? I'm a few books behind at this point, and also that's one where the scale changes so much over the series that what would be a reasonable goal to current Harry would've seemed objectively deranged to Book 1 Harry.

But if I was coming up with a plot for him, the initial goals would be things like "keep my family safe", "mildly annoy my favorite frenemy", "pay my rent". The methods he uses to achieve those things are so objectively deranged - "destroy an entire race of ancient immortal evil", "put an ordinary human on a level of power alongside the Queen of Winter", "fight God" - that it kind of obscures that those aren't, generally, his goals; those are ridiculous strategies for *achieving* goals like "get a good night's sleep."

Even when he's not being epic, he has goals like "get better at finding lost object for clients" that he solves not by, idk, learning psychometry, or making some street-level connections, no, he is going to hand-build an exact scale model of Chicago out of the original materials in his basement.

I don't think any of them would even argue with it! Well, maybe Mercy of Kalr. But I maintain that making Justice of Toren One Esk your captain is not a reasonable solution to any problem.

There's definitely a point in Murder Must Advertise where Lord Peter goes and has dinner with Harriet, and it's covered in a sentence or two without any details of the dinner itself because the narrator says it's not relevant to the story at hand.

However, I think -- I can't be bothered to actually get up and find my copy and find the reference -- I think it's at least strongly implied that Peter goes to the dinner as Peter, specifically because it's fairly late in the book and he wants to be himself for a bit.

Yeah, Harry's got some very concrete goals, but his methods include "zombify famous T. rex skeleton and ride into battle", "befriend ancient locus genii", and "snark at archdemon".

and he'll do things like decide he's gotta stop the BigBad - which is usually a deranged undertaking if you are a demigod, but Harry manages to be pretty competent at doing it. usually via #2 on the list up there. he does the combo plate a lot of times.

these are the 2 fandoms currently eating all of my brain, so they're all i've got.

i guess in the MCU, Strange might be 1... since he's kinda 'imma magic this problem away', which is a little odd for most things. Parker jacks up plans all the time, but somehow manages to pull shit off that shouldn't work. and Tony is epic'ly on the 'deranged idea' train, pulling things out of his ass that work.

i mean - there's Suits, but they don't really fit all that much. they've got 1 & 2 covered, but they don't usually hit #3. (Louis is the embodiment of 2 half the time, but in a stupidly annoying way that makes you wanna punch the showrunner in the teeth)

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