please take a high school english class
to elaborate –
a protagonist the the main character that you follow through a story. here are some examples of protagonists:
harry potter. katniss everdeen. nathan drake. indiana jones. bella swan.
you follow these characters through the story. the focus is on them and their development.
you can also have multiple protagonists, as seen in pretty much all of star wars
protagonists don’t have to be heroes. dexter morgan is not a hero, but he is still a protagonist.
an antagonist is the person/people/etc in opposition to the protagonist. they can still be a large part of the story, but it is not their story. here are some examples:
voldemort. darth vader. president snow. loki. the joker.
antagonists aren’t always villains. bucky barnes is an antagonist in catws because he is working in opposition to the protagonist, but he is not in control of what he does and therefore not a villain.
in context of tfa, rey and finn are the protagonists. they are the ones that we follow through the story. we see their relationship blossom, we see their development, we see them grow and change. we are rooting for them. we follow the story through their perspective.
kylo ren is working in opposition of them. he is trying to stop them from getting bb8 to the resistance. we don’t see his development, we don’t see his story.
like. this is very simple writing 101 kind of stuff. this is so simple that it shouldn’t even have to be explained. so what if kylo ren isn’t a protagonist – why does it bother people so much that he isn’t? there’s nothing wrong with admitting that an antagonist is an antagonist.
To expand on these excellent points, a protagonist furthers the story goal while an antagonist opposes it. The story goal is the desired outcome in which the story leads the audience to make an emotional investment. The goal in The Force Awakens is for the Resistance to find Luke Skywalker before the First Order does. This is what we see the major characters sacrifice for, what they agonize over, what drives characters to dare and fight and grow.
You can like and root for the First Order all you like (though I have to wonder, like…why) but the story goal is not for them to destroy Luke Skywalker and bring order to a lawless galaxy. We don’t get to see First Order characters’ hopes and fears over Luke Skywalker, their personal weaknesses for the most part, or their being motivated by their antagonism to the Republic to overcome those weaknesses and perform great deeds. The one villainous character we see undergo change is Kylo Ren, but his fall to the Dark Side is not depicted as character growth that furthers the story goal. Rather his decision to kill Han hinders the story goal and causes horror and grief to the characters we follow the most closely. That makes him a classic antagonist, just one who is more conflicted than the others.
I mean this confusion is just disturbing, quite aside from making me fear for the state of English literature education. How could someone watch TFA and believe that the story goal is for the First Order to take over the galaxy, as though that was where the story focused its development and dynamics? Like Finn and Rey and Poe’s struggles are outweighed by the few scenes where the FO leadership plot and bicker and Kylo feels sorry for himself?
And if that’s not the understanding of the story goal, if these Kylo stans correctly understand the story goal and that Ren opposed it, the assertion that Kylo is a protagonist becomes just plain wrong and self-contradictory. To think he is a protagonist you either have to misunderstand TFA’s story goal or misunderstand what a protagonist is. He’s a great and fascinating antagonist, there’s no need to twist the story and character to say otherwise.
L.J.'s Obsessions 