Character Development: Giant Style (Analyzing OOTS)

[Cozzer]

You know, it just hit me how much Miko's situation is similar to Tarquin's. Sure, one wanted to be an Evil dictator and the other wanted to be a champion of Good, but but were convinced they were the main characters (on the heroes' side and on the villains' side, respectively) of the story and fell because of it.

All of Miko's mistakes, in the end, were caused by her conviction that she had to be the one to solve all the major problems. Every time she made a major mistake, the fault in her reasoning was that she completely failed to account for the fact that maybe there were people more important than her in the context of the current crisis, and she should just have let these people do their job in their own way, providing support as needed. She tried to take the main characters' spot by force, just like Tarquin tried to make Elan the main character by force, because both of them believed that the actual main characters weren't good enough (for different reasons, obiviously).

At the beginning of her personal arc Miko was a hero, there's no question about that. A jerkish and unpleasant hero, sure, but there's plenty of them in the genre (or, well, in any genre). Her fatal flaw, in my opinion, was that being a hero wasn't enough for her. She had to be the hero.

It's just that in Tarquin's case, this narrative subtext is spelled out because when Elan and his family are around, the fourth wall might as well give up and go home.