Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
True, but it's a shame we can't get more of the lit-fic crowd and those they influence to realize that malignantly useless protagonists are not the height "realism".
I'm still unsure of how many authors you think are doing this or preaching this outside of strange corners of Deviantart.

Usually a "helpless" protagonist is meant to be an easy association for a reader entering a new world. They are disoriented, unsure, and learning a lot of information. The reader, incidentally, is in a very similar position. It's a pretty good way to ease a reader into a new world, and the character's arc will usually involve increasing mastery of their world. The two biggest examples I can think of come from literature for adolescents:
Harry Potter and Eragon.
Aside from subjective quality discussions, these two characters have "plucky underdog: the character arc" for the first book and improve from there. Using this sort of structure in TRPGs has been a thing since Gygax days.

Parallels to literary structures are not unwelcome, in my mind, because while TRPGs create (or imo should create) and Emergent Narrative, the language of story is already there for our use and it's not exactly a stretch in most cases. (We use terms like Character, plot, plot-twist, scene, dialogue, character development/growth, and others that far more often describe literary ideas.)

Sure, some low-talent writers substitute flaws for actually interesting character development. I'm just not sure if I've seen anyone declare in no uncertain terms that More Flaws = better characters anywhere but in edgy teenagers. I know people who personally prefer deeply flawed characters, but none that declared this as objectively better. I'm genuinely interested to know where you're finding these people that are supposedly everywhere.

(I suppose if you count dime-novel fantasy and the like then I could see Sentimentality being the real big pusher, leading to comically stupid flaws and characters who stagnate. But that's a different problem based on laziness, not perceived superiority.)