hushicho at 10:35PM, Sept. 22, 2022

It is important to note that any kind of character like Tony Stark must be handled well, or else you get to the point where Marvel did -- they had ruined the character so thoroughly in the comics that it was only the reinvention of the movies that made him even usable again for a brief time. Characters don't have to be necessarily significantly flawed or incomplete, any more than anyone else, but they should be interesting, they should be fun to watch develop as a person, and their story should be anything we care about or want to see. It's easy to misstep and just add a bunch of flaws or bad qualities. Everyone wants to write the funny asshole, but most of the time they're not funny enough and just end up being an asshole.

Ozoneocean at 6:17PM, Sept. 22, 2022

One of mine is Matthew McConaughey as Dirk Pitt in Sahara (I like billions of protagonists but this one just came to mind). He's already a bit of a cliche action hero type but not actually an action hero... It's the events that force him to be one and show us what he can do. Dirk Pit has such a stupid name, it reminds me of my Ace Kinkaid character and he's such a classic cliche -without being tongue in cheek at all or winking at the audience, it's plays and executed perfectly straight. I love that.

marcorossi at 1:30AM, Sept. 22, 2022

I think that the difficult part in this kind of structure is that, if the idea is that the hero has to evolve, s/he must be characterized by some defect; owever on the other hand readers will not easily root for someone who is mostly a bad person, so there is some balance to strike. In some sense, the readers have to see the protagonist from the outside (to see his/her defects), but also have to see the world from the eyes of the protagonist, to build emotional response.

TheJagged at 1:29AM, Sept. 22, 2022

Thinking about it... I'm not sure i have many favorite protagonists. I usually find myself ruling more for the villains, ha. If anything anti-heroes are where it's at. I like a character that sticks to his own moral code, the true neutral types. Geralt from Witcher might be an example. Characters that prefer to stay out of other people's affairs, only when comes push to shove, they will pick a side. Peferably wichever side seems like the most sane.