Shyan's Share: The Protagonist Problem

From Shyan: This is a brief essay by Ada Palmer (historian) and Jo Walton (author and poet) considering the ways we write stories framed around individual protagonists versus collective action, the recent history of how these types of stories have evolved, and the implications that saturation of the first type of narrative has and can have on people's self-perception and responses in crises. It gave me new angles to understand the dangers of having this focus on a protagonist in so many of our stories, especially in connection to imposter syndrome and responses to the COVID pandemic (the latter had just started when this essay was published).

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-protagonist-problem/