UAT, you’ve no doubt heard of the Sympathetic Protagonist.

UAT, you’ve no doubt heard of the Sympathetic Protagonist. That is pretty much to go to approach in Hollywood development circles in that it is the path of least resistance to woo the audience / script reader to embrace the Protagonist. Of course, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for character nuance, so a more helpful way to think of it is to discover what is compelling about the Protagonist. They can be an asshole like Miles in Sideways, but if they are compelling and written as complex characters, readers are likely to buy in and go for the ride with them.

No matter how you present a Protagonist, this dynamic of audience identification is critical. Seeing as the Protagonist is primary conduit for the audience to enter into the story, to experience the narrative through the POV of the Protagonist, it stands to reason we, as writers, want to shrink the distance between this character and the script reader / audience member. One way to do that is find points of connection between the reader and the Protagonist, whereby the audience identifies with the Protagonist. In doing that, we shrink the emotional and psychological distance between the reader and the character as represented on the script page.

You can extend this all other characters and perhaps most interestingly the Nemesis. Because if your Nemesis has in their own personality and experience dynamics with which the reader can identify, this creates a more nuance relationship to that character. They are no longer an IT, but rather a YOU. We cannot simply perceive them as black-and-white Bad Guys, but since we share something of our collective human experience, they become figures we can relate to. The basis of a more complex connection to a character we are supposed to despise or dislike.

So, yes, audience / reader identification is a big, big deal.