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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 think this is tough partly because the fact that Harry Potter is a deliberate uneasy mix of high fantasy and school story means it's often quite confused about the various levels of stakes, and also because Ron and Hermione never quite reach the level of protagonist in their own right, which is what these descriptions are really meant for. They spend most of their onscreen time helping Harry with his goals, not pursuing their own, so defining them based on their own goals means extrapolating a ways out from canon.

But I would probably say Harry is 2 (he goes into most of the books with a plan of keep his head down, learn magic, spend time with his friends and win the Quidditch Cup, and fails miserably every time), Hermione is 3 (well often more like "relentlessly competent at using objectively deranged methods", the relentlessly competent and the objectively deranged are more relevant than the goals, but her personal goals tend to be things like "Take every single class that is offered even if that is more hours than there are in the day" or "teach Rita Skeeter a lesson"), and Ron is a tolerable 1, in that he does things like achieve "make friends at school" by befriending the Savior of the entire Wizarding World, etc.

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.)

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