Main Character Syndrome

    I remember a very specific meme I came across during my early days of interneting, one that still traffics in my mind freely. "When I do something hilarious," the meme reads, "I think to myself, 'why do I not have my own television show?" 

    Something like this gets shared because the ideas expressed are familiar. A lot of us have wished our lived experiences could find validation like those of a tv character, someone whose weekly adventures we obsess over and whose snappy one-liners we dutifully greet with laughter. Even when they're failing, they're doing so in the most endearing way. I think a meme like this can stick in someone's mind because the appeal is very real. We all wish we could be the main characters of our own lives.

    I guess the more interesting question is ... are some of us, even subconsciously, living like this anyways? 

    A main character, or a protagonist, is the central character within a film, book, play, or some other consumable text. (We could get into debates about whether the “protagonist” and “hero” are always the same character, but let’s keep things simple for now.) "Main character syndrome” is a term assigned to a person acting with exceptional self-interest, as though they were the main character in a film and everyone else merely a background player. 

    The term has been used to describe a sense of entitlement—an expectation that one holds a special place in the cosmos and is therefore owed special treatment. Perhaps many of us have known a roommate or coworker who stands up to the supervisor the way Maximus stands up to Emperor Commodus. Maybe that coworker became really confused when the entire working management didn't start chanting “Live! Live! Live!” in agreement. Main Character Syndrome.

            I want to talk about how the film experience perpetuates these mindsets as well as how the phenomenon plays out within individual films. This is also just a chance for me to take a bird’s eye view on this weird thing we call storytelling and try to understand exactly how the act of passively gazing at a laptop screen could ever rewire a person’s worldview, self-perception, and value system to begin with. Because while I don't think any of us can truly overcome this mindset, we can and ought to aspire to be more than just a "main character." Combatting MCS isn’t a matter of underselling your own worth or autonomy, but rather a matter of acknowledging that society is comprised of crowds of main characters who all deserve their happy ending.

WandaVision (2021)

 

What is Main Character Syndrome?

            The term originated on Tik Tok and was originally played as a self-aware trend with users mostly just posting videos of themselves staring out the window morosely, main character style, with a sad song playing in the background. The motivation behind the trend actually had an empowering slant to it, “romanticize your life,” as it were, before it also started denoting soft-core narcissism. Dr. Michael G. Wetter referred to Main Character Syndrome as an “inevitable consequence of the natural human desire to be recognised and validated merging with the rapidly evolving technology that allows for immediate and widespread self-promotion.”

Symptoms of Main Character Syndrome (MCS) might include the following:

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

1.               An inflated sense of one’s importance, virtue, or suffering. A person with MCS probably buys into steep models of morality. People on their side are “the good guys,” and everyone else is either a background player or an antagonist.

2.               Assuming that one is exempt from normal mundanity because they are “destined” for greater things.

3.               Perceiving other people as supporting characters in one’s own story, lacking in complexity or nuance. No one understands them, and no one ever could, because they alone know what it feels like to be the bearer of the weight of the world.

    It must be reiterated that Main Character Syndrome is not a medically recognized condition. It’s mostly just something the internet came up with to identify annoying people. There are medically classified illnesses that overlap with some of the traits of main character syndrome (narcissism, sociopathy, etc.), but again, the medical community recognizes them as such. I doubt anyone takes this blog seriously enough to get genuinely confused, but just the same I want to cover that base.

               Main characters by design ask that we the audience see ourselves in them, but there is a danger inherent in identifying with them too much. Main characters onscreen are not a perfect reflection of ourselves or our relationship to the systems we inhabit. Main characters get away with a lot more nonsense than the rest of us could ever dream. They break the rules more, and when they do face consequences, they do so offscreen. There are narrative motivations for many of these features, and we’ll dig into some of them here in future sections, but as a baseline let’s establish that films generally employ heightened situations that don’t translate well onto real-life, and we would do well to not try to emulate them. 

Lady Bird (2017)

    Most of us pass through a phase where we suffer from MCS in our youth, our symptoms typically peaking during adolescence. This is partly because cognitive empathy, or the ability to take on the perspectives of others, doesn’t typically come online until early-mid adolescence. This mindset isn’t necessarily limited to teenagers, adults can definitely exhibit major MCS traits, but the behavior is emblematic of someone who sees their self as the center of this and every universe.

You see this attitude interrogated in My Best Friend’s Wedding. The film follows Julia Roberts discovering that she’s in love with her lifelong best friend the day he tells her that he’s marrying another woman. Even though the wedding is in two days, Julia Roberts sets out to sabotage the marriage to win him over. In her words, “This is my one chance at happiness. I have to be ruthless!”

    This film kind of functions like a deconstruction of the romantic main character, a particularly dangerous manifestation of MCS. This person watches onscreen romances, which are again heightened situations, and pursues their own ends with similar veracity. Films generally take it for granted that the main character’s romantic fulfillment is priority one, and whatever lines they cross will inevitably be forgiven in the long run because their love is true. This, of course, entirely discounts the agency and desire of the other party. Maybe some of us have known someone who’s been in a relationship with a person who believed they were an emissary of true love when they were just behaving selfishly. 

My Best Friend’s Wedding is a comedy, but it ends up taking its own premise very seriously. The film eventually confronts Julia Roberts with how acting in her own self-interest very nearly ruins the lives of two people, one of whom she purports to love, and it has her come to terms with the fact that she needs to honor her friend’s choice. The film has a really sobering moment when she finally lets go of her best friend. The film deconstructs the selfishness of her behavior while also forcing the audience to acknowledge that she is letting go of her chance for happiness with someone she loves.

            I’ve become increasingly fascinated with movies like My Best Friend’s Wedding these last several years, and I’m only beginning to piece together why. The term “main character syndrome” didn’t really exist in 1997, but My Best Friend’s Wedding is a fascinating example of a film where the main character has main character syndrome, allowing the audience to objectively view how our self-affirming biases can obscure the selfishness of our behavior. I think a lot of us know a person like Julia Roberts’ character, someone who’s sorely afflicted with MCS, and we probably have lots of thoughts about these people. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve all been in her shoes. Chances are some of us still have some latent MCS that needs to be addressed. 

I say that everyone probably knows someone with MCS, but this exercise will have the most impact if we use this is a reflective space to maybe ask when we have ever behaved selfishly and take a look at how we can live more authentically.

 

How Does Main Character Syndrome Work?

    So what do we mean by "heightened situations" anyways? 

    Storytelling employs metaphor and hyperbole in order to do justice to the emotional truth of a given situation. We relate to these extraordinary situations not because we’ve lived them exactly but because we resonate with the emotional truth from which the melodrama grows.

    Maybe you’ve never been tossed into the arena to fight twenty other kids in a televised fight to the death, but you understand the pressure Katniss feels to try to make it out of the Hunger Games alive without becoming a toy of the Capitol. After all, we’ve all had to navigate systems that try to make us compromise our values for social gain or even just basic necessity.

    The “Hunger Games” movies, and the books they are based on, are written for a crowd that is just discovering how to question power structures. That novelty is part of what makes this story so compelling, but it also makes it easy for the adolescent reader to see themselves a little too much in the story. Katniss overtaking a corrupt government that divides and oppresses an entire country is not the same thing as sticking it to your parents for enforcing curfew. (How many of us had to learn the difference growing up?) Viewers who don’t account for the metaphor filter are apt to internalize a melodramatic mindset.

    A person who believes themselves to be the main character in a story will view their own struggle as some grand Homeric conflict. Because this person is so sure that their cause is a righteous one, they feel comfortable in tearing down anyone who opposes their viewpoints or goals, often in flowery language. A person suffering from MCS is probably fluent in mic drops.

    Because in addition to embellishing scenarios, stories also tend to exaggerate the significance of this character. The main character is generally the only character who can ever resolve the conflict that is plaguing the land, especially in fantasy epics a la Star Wars. In stories that work, this is generally because the protagonist possesses some trait or characteristic that renders them uniquely suited to resolve the issue at hand.

    In How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup is the only one who can end the feud between Vikings and the Dragons because everyone else in his clan is so obsessed with conquering. They see dragons as just another enemy to be overcome. Meanwhile, Hiccup not only lacks this appetite for fighting, he also possesses a natural empathy that allows him to see himself in Toothless.

    In the above example, the film communicates a clear message that a hero is someone like Hiccup, someone who builds bridges instead of bayonets. But it’s worth noting that the film takes it as a given that Hiccup is the only person in the clan with such virtue. He eventually persuades the rest of his clan to adopt this mindset, but he is positioned as patient zero, the progenitor of morality in this universe.

    From a storytelling perspective, you want your protagonist to seem committed to their principles. One of the best ways to do this is to have your protagonist not only uncover these virtues on their own but also defend them against any and all who would dissuade them from their cause, which often sets the protagonist at odds with their entire community. As a result, movies like “Dragon” tend to take it as a given that virtue is something that only a few select people are privy to, usually the protagonist exclusively. It’s for this reason that even stories following exceptionally altruistic and egalitarian characters can’t help but nurture a sense of narcissism in the audience, a notion that they are the moral pillar holding up the world. (A phenomenon I discussed in my essay onthe “Beauty and the Beast” remake.)

    There’s a narrative purpose to this design, but it does create a blind spot. Many people—most people, even—have the propensity and inclination for goodness. Most people are working to better themselves. A marker of maturity is learning to take seriously one’s responsibility without assuming that they are the most important, intelligent, or righteous person in the room.

            Films are increasingly starting to recognize the limits of this storytelling, and there an increasing number of films that try to deconstruct “the main character.”

 

Main Character Syndrome Onscreen

As fan culture becomes more mainstream, media naturally becomes more self-reflective and referential. This encourages the exact metatextual eye that looks critically at features like what makes a “chosen one” anyways.

   This train arguably started with 2014’s The Lego Movie, an adventure film wherein an average joe, Emmet Brickowski, rises to the occasion to become the main character everyone needs. His teammates are all mind-boggled that this nobody could possibly be “the special” the prophecy referred to. After all, Emmet lacks any notable qualities we might associate with your standard chosen one. And yet, he has a way of outwitting the bad guys at every turn through sheer ingenuity. The big twist comes when we learn that the prophecy was entirely fabricated—there was never a “special.” This film puts forth the idea that while the “chosen one” story might motivate potential heroes to action, no one is inherently “destined” for greatness. Heroes are just ordinary chaps who one day decide to apply themselves.

              The Lego Movie is one of the most high-profile examples, but even media that doesn’t use the term directly can still deconstruct the nature and function of MCS.

    The Witcher is the rare action-adventure story that differentiates between the story’s main character and the universe’s chosen one. Our protagonist, Geralt, is a gruff monster hunter and outcast in his society, but destiny links him to Cirilla, a princess who has been marked to either save or destroy the world. Geralt becomes both a protector and a mentor to Ciri as he tries to prepare her to embrace her own destiny. This creates a unique tension within the series. There’s the external concern surrounding the possible end of the world and what role this princess is going to play in it, and there’s also the question of whether Geralt's protection will be sufficient. We’re experiencing the story through the eyes of someone other than the most important person in the universe.

The Witcher represents a fascinating inversion on the usual model, but it’s not necessarily one that I think every story needs to emulate. “Chosen ones” are just another bit of fantastical, exaggerated storytelling born out of an emotional truth. In our own stories, there’s tremendous pressure in the choices we make regarding work, love, and life to ensure we are impacting the world for the better. Onscreen, this often translates to our main character’s choices having extraordinarily wide repercussions. Indeed, the fate of the world might fall upon their shoulders alone. It’s an exaggeration, sure, but it speaks to a sense of urgency we might feel to ensure that we are making the most moral choices possible. All of us are “chosen” in our own way, and a good “chosen one” story can help model how one might rise to meet their responsibilities.

The irony with most “chosen one” stories is that, even though the term appeals to our sense of being the most important person in the room, the chosen one is inevitably called to set aside their own comforts for the wellbeing of the people who depend on them. For characters like Aang or Simba, being the most important person in their universe is a call for them to dedicate their life to serving their communities. This subtext is easily lost on viewers. Goodness, at the beginning, it’s lost on Simba, whose first musical number has him gushing about how being king is exciting because he gets to be his own boss.

   This narcissism also plays out in who we are willing to cast as a main character, and there are films that deconstruct that as well. See: Wreck-it Ralph. Like The Lego Movie, Wreck-it Ralph plays off our collective understanding of main character-ness in something like a video game to show how such systems play out in real life. Here, the titular character does not feel like the protagonist of his story, in no small part due to him being the bad guy of the arcade game in which he lives and works. He performs a function that everybody depends on but no one values, and Ralph himself is lacking in social grace, which leads to everyone in his community dismissing him.

Star Trek into Darkness (2013)

    Wreck-it Ralph touches on another truism guiding how we cast main characters in real life. We tend to reward people who project an ideal of what we want, usually what we want from ourselves. Casting agents are very aware of this, which is why they reserve the leading roles for only the hottest among us. And so popular storytelling implies that chosen one-ness is a privilege for those who look like they were carved from stone by Michelangelo himself. Even a movie like Free Guy tries to tell us that its protagonist is just an ordinary guy when we can clearly see that he is Ryan Reynolds. It’s easy to want to build up people who are naturally good looking or charismatic. But what about people who lack grace or charisma? 

    I'm thinking of Hot Rod, which sees Andy Samberg as an aspiring stuntman working up to perform a dangerous feat in order to raise money for his stepdad’s heart surgery. Rod’s chosen profession already positions him as the butt of every joke—he literally tortures himself onscreen for the entertainment of the masses. But this is also underlined by the way Rod is characterized.

    He’s entirely lacking in self-awareness, and his dream to be a stuntman is played as a childish fixation. The film's comedy is born out of a discrepancy between the hero Rod thinks he is and the clown he is made out to be. This is why a part of us takes sick satisfaction from seeing a doofus like Hot Rod invoking the soul of an eagle like he’s a Power Ranger, and a part of us takes even more satisfaction from seeing his body splatter against the running platform ten seconds later, proof of his stupidity. Even Rod’s mother seems to view him as needing to be coddled since she lets her son think his dad was actually a heroic stuntman all the way into adulthood, and it’s played for laughs when Rod discovers that his dad died a death most banal.

    There’s even a scene where Rod clues in to the fact that everyone is laughing at him and his delusions of heroism, and he has a bit of a meltdown, but the film still insulates him with an air of comedy. Rod is never really allowed to be seen as a complex character, and the audience never really feels bad for participating in the one-sided humor, the jokes Rod is always the subject of but never in on. The film displays, interrogates, and dunks on the attitudes of MCS by displacing it onto someone who was clearly not meant to succeed in life. He was not meant to do anything but entertain us with his larger-than-life stupidity. 

Modern Times (1936)

    The irony is that movies like Hot Rod are more honest about how “characters” who lack charisma or self-awareness are treated offscreen. Traits that onscreen might signify a heroic underdog (e.g. social awkwardness) aren’t always met with such enthusiasm in real life. Anxiety or social awkwardness signals a heart of gold in a lead character. They signal incompetency in job interviews. The treatment of characters like Hot Rod belays a certain attitude held against people who lack traditional “main character-ness.” Namely, that main characterhood offscreen is reserved for a select few. Not everyone gets it or deserves it.

    What’s so insidious about MCS isn’t even the way it nurtures narcissistic displays of melodrama. I’m more bothered by the way it excludes wide swaths of people from being seen as whole people with complex inner lives that deserves to be recognized, or as agents who deserve to take charge of their own narrative.

    So, what do we do about that?

 

Is There a Cure?

            The real catch with Main Character Syndrome is that at a mechanical level, it can’t ever really be overcome. None of us can literally experience life through anyone’s eyes but our own. The closest we can approximate is through the mediating power of stories which allow us to live in someone else’s world. 

Central Station (1998)

    The catch, of course, is that even once you step into the shoes of someone else, the “someone else'' is inevitably absorbed by our own self-affirming biases until we’re just seeing our own reflection onscreen. When you compound this with the built-in shortcomings of mass media, MCS is a little hard to rein in. Media is the best cure to self-centered thinking as well as its worst enabler, and so it mostly falls on the viewer to take responsibility for how they internalize the media they intake. Whether or not film becomes a space for empathy or narcissism is largely up to us.

            It’s not that none of us should ever see ourselves as the main characters in our life story, we just need to recognize that we all of us are the main characters in our life story, and it’s only when we commit to helping each other reach our happy endings that we hear the music.

    It's a Wonderful Life shows this principle at work. The entire film is carried on George Bailey longing for his own perception of a hero’s adventure, one that takes him far away from Bedford Falls and across the range of far-off lands, but George continually chooses to put off his own pursuits to help those around him. This all comes to a head at the end of the film. All his life, George chose to act not like a main character but a hero. Only a hero would have been worthy of the flood of support he receives in the final scene when all those he helped rush to his aid.

    Even in cases like Wreck-it Ralph, our aspiring hero finds fulfillment not through any external marker of herodom but by ministering to someone who needs him, by becoming a friend to Vanellope. Ralph’s community learns to not take him for granted, sure, but Ralph’s moved past the phase of needing this external validation or any status symbol. As Ralph puts it in the final scene, “If that little kid likes me, how bad can I be?

    In a world of main characters, choose instead to be a hero.

        --The Professor

But also, this is pretty great