One of the phrases that’s been popularized in online storytelling discussions in recent years is the “sexy lamp test.”* This test is applied to a female character to judge whether the storyteller has given her an adequate presence in the story. A character fails the sexy lamp test if she can be replaced with a sexy lamp and nothing in the story would change.
The sexy lamp test is a check for character agency. Character agency is critical to audience satisfaction, and neglecting it is one of the most common mistakes in stories. I first mentioned the concept six years ago, and now I’m back to give it the dedicated and updated examination it deserves.
What Exactly Is Character Agency?
In short, a character has agency if they make choices that change the outcome of events. What does and doesn’t count can get a little confusing, so let me clarify for you.
- A character who is forced to do things has no agency.
- A character who does what they are told has no agency.
- A character whose choices don’t matter has no agency.
On the other hand, a character who is threatened but chooses between two meaningful options – like flee or fight – has agency. That is, assuming those choices matter. If it feels like the monster would have killed them regardless of whether they chose to flee or fight, they have no agency. For a character who’s been eaten to have agency, the audience must get the impression that they were eaten because they either made an error in judgment or chose to risk their life to protect something else.
Agency is different from whether a character is reactive or proactive. A character who is hunted by a monster and must choose what to do about it is reactive, but they still have agency. If you are writing a thriller or horror, your protagonist may be reacting to threats for most of the story, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have character agency in those scenes.
Why Characters Need Agency
Baked into the psychology behind every story is the need to watch characters face problems and either succeed or fail based on whether they take the right actions or make the right choices. When characters succeed without making the right choice, it feels like they just got lucky and don’t deserve their success. Similarly, it doesn’t feel right if terrible things happen to a character when there’s no way they could have avoided it.
So foremost, the main character must have agency when facing problems, or the resolution for that problem won’t be satisfying to the audience. Does the main character need agency in every single scene? Not quite. It’s okay to open your story with your character being whisked away to a strange world against their will, and there may be other infrequent times when you can forgo agency to establish a problem or raise tension. But generally, a main character should have agency all the time.
What about the other characters? For the most part, yes, they should also have agency. That’s what characters are for; their job is to be the actors that drive the story. People without agency feel more like objects than characters – hence the sexy lamp test. If you need some people in the background just to kill off or you have a baby around to be a damsel, then they may not have agency in that case. Generally, people without agency are pretty minor characters, which is why using the sexy lamp test is an appropriate way to judge the significance of a character’s presence.
How Agency Is Neglected in Stories
While neglecting agency for side characters will make them feel superfluous or useless, a protagonist who lacks agency is even worse. Unfortunately, this is surprisingly common. Generally, the issue comes in two forms.
A Female Protagonist Is Directed by the People Around Her
The sexy lamp test is primarily about female characters for a good reason. Storytellers are much more likely to remove agency from women than men. This probably stems not just from plain old sexism but also from specific gender stereotypes.
In general, men who depend on other people are looked down on. They are often expected to come up with solutions and solve problems by themselves – even when they are not qualified to do so or they could use help. This real-world expectation is bad, but it’s helpful in storytelling because protagonists need to be the ones solving problems.
On the other hand, women are expected to listen to others and collaborate rather than solve problems independently. That means as soon as the storyteller isn’t sure how to get their female protagonist where they need her to be, they react by making a more knowledgeable character tell her what to do. This isn’t the right answer, but it doesn’t feel wrong to storytellers like it would for a male character.
This same thing can happen with child characters. Children have fewer skills, and realistically, adults should solve their problems for them. This can lead to stories where child protagonists are along for the ride instead of being heroes.
If your protagonist is a child, you’ll need to work on getting all of the adults out of the way. For a woman protagonist, it often helps to make her more proactive. If she doesn’t have the information she needs to solve the problem, what steps can she take to get it? Give her goals that she actively pursues. You may also need to remove the characters who are telling her what to do or make those characters as powerless as she is.
It’s okay for someone badass to help your protagonist in a big fight, but the protagonist must make a significant difference. If they aren’t strong, make them clever. Maybe they identify a weakness in the enemy or talk their way out of it.
The Storyteller Doesn’t Want the Problem to Be Solved
Sometimes the storyteller wants a problem to last for a while, but they don’t know how to properly plot that out. So instead, they make their protagonist do things that make no difference or just do nothing at all. Often, the narrator will repeat over and over again how the problem is just impossible to solve. (It is never impossible to solve.)
Take these examples in popular fiction:
- In my critique of The Name of the Wind, author Patrick Rothfuss has his over-candied protagonist sit on his hands while his village is threatened by giant spiders. The reason Rothfuss does this is that the first fifty or so pages of the book are just an elaborate framing device. He’s planning on addressing the giant spiders much later, and he doesn’t know what to do with his protagonist in the meantime.
- In Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the early point-of-view characters is Maya, who is the leader of the Russian delegation on the journey to Mars. Her point of view includes long reflections on how all the astronauts are scheming and forming political factions, but even though Maya’s social skills are supposed to be her strong point, she doesn’t try to resolve the social problems on the ship. Robinson doesn’t want them solved; he wants to show off his political pseudo-philosophy.
- In Wanderers by Chuck Wendig, a bunch of people come down with an illness that turns them into zombies that march ceaselessly forward instead of eating brains. One of the main characters, Benji, works for the CDC and is trying to discover how the illness works so he can cure the zombies. But of course, if they were all cured right away, there would be no story. So instead Benji flits about uselessly, making no headway on the story’s big mystery.
On top of the dissatisfaction of watching a protagonist do nothing, problems that drag on without progress become boring or frustrating to audiences. So if you have an issue like this, it’s important to come up with forward steps your protagonist can make. They don’t have to solve the whole problem to give the character agency and the story momentum.
- The protagonist could do something that buys everyone time. This would have been a good solution for The Name of the Wind. The hero might use a rare resource to shield the town, but it won’t last forever, and he can’t replace it when it fails.
- The protagonist might accomplish things that seem good at the time but ultimately make the problem worse. In Red Mars, Maya could have schemed with the other characters. She might win some battles and only belatedly realize she’d widened the divisions between the colonists.
- The protagonist could find ways to mitigate the damage the problem is causing. Maybe in Wanderers, instead of finding the root cause of the disease, Benji discovers how to change the zombie’s actions in a useful way.
Once the protagonist makes some progress, restore the story’s tension by having something else go wrong, raising more questions, or tightening the deadline for solving the problem.
Agency makes characters feel a little larger than life. While our actions don’t always matter in the real world, they do in our stories. By watching the impact of character actions, we know whether that character is a hero or a villain.
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How about this: Female MC is whisked away against her will in the beginning, but fights and succeeds in mitigating a certain horrible side effect of the whisking. Single-handedly beats Big Bad in the end.
It’s a good one.
To give her agency, her refusing to go along with what her kidnapper had planned would already work. It gives her the agency. A damsel, for instance, who is actively trying to escape or at least make life harder for the kidnapper is already on an agency, even if she’s been damselled. That’s how a lot of male characters kidnapped to force the hero to an action handle it. They’re not sitting around with their hands in their lap, but instead they’re trying to do something, even if it fails.
What about gaining agency as the story progresses?
Specifically, my FMC has depression and her character arc is about healing and recovery. The story starts at her lowest point…just after she found out someone close to her committed suicide. Since I have depression myself, I know that surviving with it is a rough and tumble road on the best days but an inciting incident can cause a rapid slide before even the best support systems know what’s going on.
Since the world is a fantasy one (not your typical neurodivergent tale) her home is covered in frost and ice mirroring the cold, numbness of deep depression…so when she’s found she has a literal hypothermia matching her internal feelings.
She really has no choice as to what happens to her for about the first few chapters. Then, once she is able to climb out of the worst of it (with the help of medication and an amazing support system) she starts making small choices for herself. In the beginning, it’s mostly agreeing to what others suggest…but as time goes on, she is able to not only make her own choices but to be a hero which inspires a career choice.
–Bri
Your character gains and shows agency, so I’d say you’re in the green.
Since you’re goal is to depict depression, you may make choices to do that that override storytelling considerations.
However, while I can’t say whether it’s a great fit for a depression depiction, I can tell you that the way that storytellers generally handle this kind of arc is to make the character reactive at first, and then proactive later. It sounds like you already have an element of that in your story. Basically, if you want to in the beginning, you can give her limited choices in response to circumstances outside her control. Maybe she chooses between two options given to her by caregivers. Those responses do not have to make things better, or create a large change, as long as it feels like they matter to the outcome of events in the story as a whole. For instance, maybe she asks a person to stay with her, and their presence matters later.
If you decide not to give her agency in the beginning, keeping that period short will help minimize the damage to reader engagement.
First, thanks to Cay Reet (you always seem to be the first to comment on my questions…I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I sure have. :) ) A lot of this was insecurity…but I think I’ve got it..I think…
Now onto Chris Winkle’s comment.
It seems like my biggest obstacle would be the physical recovery. Irl, hypothermia would need hospital care…but this is a magical world (and besides, the regular healer is missing) so I can have her caregivers speed along the physical aspects a bit so my FMC can get to the emotional recovery (frozen solid and unconscious characters have no agency lol).
Not to ridiculous extremes, but tone it down to “bad case of flu” in comparison so she’s able to do things like lean into her grandfather when he arrives and tell her family that she’s “sick of chicken soup.”
These weren’t things I originally had planned…but your comment helped me think about the best ways I could turn her from zero to hero in smaller steps as opposed to all at once…so thanks for that. :)
–Bri
Sounds like you’re on the right track. :) Just to clarify what I said, if you need more time to pass in the story so she can realistically recover, you can summarize how time passes for her. It should be fine if she doesn’t have agency in summary, as long as it’s just a recovery montage and nothing plot critical happens during that time (which is not something you want to summarize). It’s when you get to full scenes that audiences will need a conflict to stay engaged, and then they’ll expect the main character to have some agency in that conflict.
We might live in a similar area of the world – I’m usually up earlier than Oren or Chris, because I’m a couple of hours ahead of them timewise, being in Europe.
Nope, I’m in the US…I do have a tendency to do late nights or early mornings…because of a skewed internal clock. *sigh*
–Bri
* A character who is forced to do things has no agency.
* A character who does what they are told has no agency.
* A character whose choices don’t matter has no agency.
So most of the protagonist you play in most modern Call of Duty campaign mode?
Your Wanderers example doesn’t really work. Benji tries multiple ways to examine, direct and protect the walkers, all in search of cure. That’s a signifigant amount of his time on the page, while also trying to stop people who care less than he does from destroying them. Protecting the walkers is a bigger problem than figuring out the cure. You also have to ignore the fact that a pretty blatant part of the premise is that the characters are stuck in a totally alien scenario
I had a client with a child who was luggage for the first 7/8s of the story. They made no decisions, and were no more a problem than a piece of luggage. (I came up with the term before I heard about the sexy lamp.) Then in the last 1/8 of the story the boy becomes the central figure whose decision resolves the conflict. I argued that the boy needed agency from the beginning, even if it was limited. He could wander off, complain about collecting wood.
Since then I’ve seen quite a number of luggage characters (including some villains). I keep saying you want the reader to care about the character, they have to matter to the story.
Maybe I should bookmark this to send people to who don’t want to listen to me…
Shelby Mahurin’s Serpent & Dove didn’t hit the right notes for me, and after some reflection I realized it was because the FMC lost all agency at about the 1/3rd mark. Up to then, she had been making decisions and driving the plot, but once she agrees to marry the MMC to hide her identity, nothing she does matters. It’s subtle, because she’s still doing things, but none of them impact the overarching plot. It finally clicked for me at the end when she decides to run away to avoid capture, and ends up being captured anyways. Literally nothing would have changed if she had sat there and done nothing, much like a sexy lamp (or a fancy snow globe).
I call that ‘Brunhilde-ing,’ based on the German epos ‘Niebelungenlied’ (NOT the ring of the Niebelungen, much, much older). Brunhilde is the princess of Iceland and has grown up in a society of warrior women. She will only marry the man who can beat her in a wagon race and so far, all suitors have failed and been killed. Gunther, one of the Niebelungen, also wants her and he brings Siegfried along who owns an invisibility cap. Siegfried helps him cheat and (after more stuff happening) Gunther marries Brunhilde. After the wedding night, she loses her strength and her warrior ways and becomes a regular wife. I’ve always hated it when that happens.
Yeah, that’s pretty bad. I really don’t think Mahurin meant to remove her protagonist’s agency, or even realized she’d done so, which is a rather sad commentary on how conditioned we are to give the most active roles to male characters.
Mentor characters could potentially take away agency from the protagonist if the storyteller isn’t careful. I imagine female characters are especially vulnerable to that.
While mentor characters can be guilty of that (as they can be guilty of taking agency from every other kind of character they’re a mentor of), I don’t think they’re the biggest problem with female characters. It’s much more common with female characters that love interests take their agency away, turning the active character with a goal into an hanger-on who is only there for the ‘romance’ and nothing else.