How do you feel about protagonists who struggle on their journey to success?

[AYM]

One caveat - while a struggling protagonist USUALLY makes for a better story, the protagonist needs to have some victories; if all they do is struggle and fail, you have a bad soap opera. There is a market for that, of course, but ... I'm not part of it, and I doubt I'm alone.

This is very exhausting if you are a binge reader.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I absolutely can’t stand stories where the protagonist only ever loses or takes Ls up until the very final moments of the story. In theory it should make the final victory seem all the much better, but more often it only annoys me.

I rarely make it to that point. For example, we started watching a British import called: "Sanctuary: A Witch's Story" or something like that (an AMC/BBC America thing) - it was a lot of fun at first, but every time it looks like the MC is resolving something, either she makes a mistake, a mistake from her past turns up to undo it, or someone else throws a monkey wrench into it and everything gets worse instead. It is ... well, as someone else said, more exhausting than entertaining at that point (and was why I bailed on the remake of "Dark Shadows" in the 1990s - gorgeous sets, gorgeous cast, mostly great acting, but for every step forward, two back... got annoying).

 

[beast_regards]

If the protagonist never struggles in the anime or manga, it is usually because he is overpowered in the very explicit way - has powers no one has, operates on the different scale than everyone else, etc.

Struggle often isn't the point.

In western web novels, the protagonist is de facto overpowered, but not explicitly overpowered - he isn't technically supposed to have all the powers, but he is so competent and genre savvy that all challenges are negated before they occur. The protagonist is supposed to struggle, in theory, but never does in practice, because he is "smart".

There is the point in the story having no struggle.

If you compare it to the game ...

- the conventional protagonist learns from failures again and again
- the anime protagonist starts with the end game statistics and items
- web novel protagonist already read the manual / guide and is recording the perfect play through

 

[Bosniarat]

Failure should always be an option. I'm one of those people that hate the idea of an unkillable enemy or unkillable protagonist. You are going to fail at times, no matter how good you are, and its not about be relatable but having something to build off of. If you are perfect in everyway, it makes little or no sense and I can see the book suffering from it. but at the same time, the constant losing or getting beat up and never getting any better, just seems a bit silly.