My partner recently started playing Octopath Traveler 0, the latest in a line of Square Enix RPG’s, as well as the latest entry in a trend that I find completely exhausting: The passive player character. Tell me if this sounds familiar: You spend a few minutes on a character creation screen, making your personal avatar that will experience the story in your stead. You can expect this character to evolve throughout the course of the narrative. You expect that this character might experience growth and change.

And then the character’s peer shows up. And that is the real protagonist of the story. That is the person speaking on your behalf. That is the person that anyone talking to you cares about. You and your character may be along for the ride. You might even be so lucky as to be addressed in the conversation. But this is not a story about you and never has been.

Passive protagonists in games frustrate me to death. I put all this effort and work into making an avatar. The game builds up the narrative as this epic adventure. And to be fair, it is an adventure… But it isn’t mine. At best, I’m a chauffeur to these characters and at worst I’m a tag-along in agony.

We’ve had protagonists in games since we’ve had the ability to characterize with either text or voice. However, even if a protagonist didn’t have a voice with which to speak to other characters, they were still the ones driving the plot. The actions of Link, Gordon Freeman, or Samus Aran always drove the plot, even if they didn’t speak up for themselves.

As silent protagonists fell out of fashion (for better or for worse), writers didn’t seem to know what to do with their main characters. The player character has become something that is either a complete character on their own (Clive Rosfield in FFXVI, Jill Valentine in Resident Evil) or entities that are completely designed and controlled by the player (Tav in Baldur’s Gate 3 or V in Cyberpunk 2077.)

Both of these avenues are fine. What isn’t fine is pretending that the game is going to be about the player and then having the whole thing be about the player’s friend.

It happened in Pokemon, most egregiously in Sun and Moon, where your character takes a backseat to Lily and all of her problems. It happens in Octopath Traveler 0, where your childhood friend Stia may as well be your character for all the impact you have on the narrative. It happens in MMORPGs constantly, with Final Fantasy XIV springing to mind, in which you are the (admittedly well-paid) gofer for the real protagonists, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

I saw someone say that the silent protagonist demonstrates a weak storyline, and I can absolutely understand that argument. If your protagonist is silent, they are not voicing any input into the story and, even if you are acting on the protagonist’s wants and needs, you’re probably not going to know it. I’m not saying “All silent protagonists suck,” but unless you’re deliberately trying to fake out your audience, they’re easy to screw up and demonstrate that the creators didn’t really care about what you were doing during the duration. The fake-out protagonist sucks in a similar way. It’s a silent protagonist with a bait-and-switch. “You thought you were going to have impact on this story, and you were wrong: It’s about this character that we made and decided it needed an accessory, which is you!”

I badly need for protagonists to start taking action again. I don’t think I’m always going to agree with the actions of an actual character-protagonist. I think Silent Hill 2’s James Sunderland is a moron, but he’s a compelling moron. Zagreus in Hades makes choices that I completely disagree with most of the time, but his motivations are enough to keep me going, even with a format of game that I don’t usually like. Note that: A strong character can overcome distaste for format.

This does apply to other sorts of stories too. I have made the argument that part of people’s distaste with “Canon x Reader” fanfictions has less to do with a distaste for Canon Foreigners in general, and more to do with the fact that a reader-protagonist is either unimmersive or poorly motivated. A lot of the valid blowback against Twilight (at least during the time when Twilight was relevant to me, which was 15 years ago) has to do with Bella Swan’s shallow characterization. She wanted nothing, so she wasn’t engaging (until Book Two where she started being motivated and, therefore, became hilarious and more interesting to read about.) But at least Stephanie Meyer didn’t decide that the solution to that was to make Jessica the new lead.

An active leading character is not the end of the world, but a constant deference to the side-character who accompanies that character can mean the end of engagement. The most frustrating part is that the fix is so easy: Ditch the custom protagonist and just make the side-character the main lead from the get-go. It’s less dishonest and more streamlined. If I was invested in the world and my role in it, denying me the ability to engage with the world means losing my investment in the story and, by extension, the game.