i borrow happiness from tomorrow

thenk you

( Also, if you're busy or don't feel like thinking about all this bullshit feel free to ignore it, I'm in an overly chatty on the internet mood lately 😆)

hellooooo. I'm glad you liked the original post. the 3 best pieces of media I can think of that take a compelling important non-main character and make them the main character are 1) Better Call Saul 2) Torchwood and 3) Moriarty: The Patriot. I won't talk about MTP cos I've only watched 3 episodes and from what I've seen/know it protagonizes (word I'm making up for the sake of brevity) Moriarty very well. As for the other two (BCS and Torchwood), they successfully protagonize an eccentric important side character and do so extremely well, at least imo, by building a *new* kind of story that suits them as the main character, while also maintaining some mystery by having the audience not be in their pov all the time. I think Jack Sparrow-ing/Jack Sparrow syndrome happens because writers keep the same kind of story the character was a side character in except now they're the main, but you can't have both. A shift in perspective (you go from looking at this character from the outside to looking from their pov) requires a change to the storyworld. HOWEVER, you also have to toe the line of making sure that world feels connected to the main story. It's tough and rare it's done right.

To answer your second question, I think this problem is prominent with a lot of trickster/mastermind/court jester characters because those archetypes by nature are not really compatible with protagonist functions. The audience has to be outside the pov of Tricksters, etc for them to work, but for a protagonist to work (typically) the audience has to be mostly inside their POV. When you're on the outside of a character and they're so mysterious and compelling, they're usually quite popular, especially if they're secretly driving the plot and written well. Tumblr historically loves these kinds of characters because they're so easy to mine for fanfiction due to their mystery. Also, there are plenty of spinoffs about less flashy and eccentric characters but these spinoffs usually use those less flashy prominent characters because they're basically a blank slate (The Other Bennet Sister is a good example of this) you can do anything with.

Seventeen years old isn't a woman, that's a little girl, esp considering Olivia is half asian which means she ages slower, a 17 year old half asian girl is more like a 13-14 year old white girl, bc white girls have no collagen and no natural SPF so white girls are basically middle aged adults at 22. But j agree very much yes I hate Taylor Swift