Archer's motivation comes from the voices in his floor.
A character’s motivation is central to who they are. You could say it’s what motivates them.* Without it, characters won’t do the hard work a plot requires of them. Motivation is especially important to protagonists. If the main character doesn’t have a strong motivation, readers will have nothing to identify with. It also comes across as contrived if a protagonist is willing to suffer all the hardships of their mission or quest without a strong reason to do so.
Despite all that, writers often fail to establish strong motivations for their characters. Let’s look at seven of the worst offenders, each failing in their own special way.
1. James Holden, Leviathan Wakes
At the start of the Expanse book series, James Holden is just your average ex-navy officer turned freighter XO, plying the Saturn ice trade lanes. You know, normal stuff. Meanwhile, the Asteroid Belt colonies foment violent revolution against the hegemony of Earth and Mars. The obvious choice of motivation for Holden would have been to give him some strongly held opinion on the political turmoil that’s ravaging the Solar System.
Instead, Holden’s central motivation is that he believes all information should be made available to everyone immediately, with no thought for context or consequences. That isn’t his only motivation, but it’s what drives the story. The first major plot event is Holden finding a Belter freighter that’s been attacked, and its crew has been killed. While on board, he finds a piece of tech with obvious Martian markings on it.
From there, Holden broadcasts to the entire system that he’s found a piece of Martian military gear on a dead Belter freighter. Holden makes his transmission without adding any context, like that they don’t know how the piece of gear got there, that the obvious markings are highly suspicious, and that there are extremists on both sides who’d like nothing more than to see tension boil over into war. Never mind that Mars had no reason to attack a civilian freighter. Because political tensions between the Belt and Mars are so high, many people automatically assume that Mars attacked the freighter, and the situation begins to spiral out of control.
Holden repeats this stunt a number of times throughout the first book, broadcasting inflammatory information the moment he finds it. He comes off as a caricature of a freedom-of-information advocate. In fact the main point of his actions seems to be so the other protagonist, the cynical Detective Miller, can tell Holden how naive he’s being and that sometimes information has to be kept from people for their own good.
Not only does Holden’s core motivation make him look stupid, but it also ends up being an argument for a form of authoritarianism. This is extra irresponsible in an era when governments all too often conceal vital information from the public in the name of security and safety.
The Expanse TV show handles Holden’s initial broadcast much better. In the show, Holden himself is convinced that Mars attacked the freighter. When a Martian warship approaches, he makes his broadcast to ensure that Mars can’t just kill him and his crewmates to cover up the evidence.
2. Chandra, The Fire’s Stone
Chandra the wizard is one of three protagonists in this novel about getting a magical McGuffin to keep a volcano from erupting. The other two protagonists have very strong motivations. One is motivated to save his country, the other is motivated by a magical compulsion, and both have their blossoming love for each other.*
So how does Chandra’s motivation compare? It turns out she has more than one. A lot more. At the start of the story, she leaves home because she doesn’t want to go through with an arranged marriage. That’s fine, but it doesn’t have anything to do with her adventure to retrieve the McGuffin. Then she’s motivated by curiosity about the McGuffin itself, but her feelings are never shown to be very strong. Not the sort of thing that sends one on a dangerous journey into enemy territory.
The final motivation we’re left with is her friendship with the other two protagonists, but that also falls apart. For one thing, at the start of the story she barely knows them. Even when she gets to know them better, they’re consumed with their love story. Chandra feels like such a third wheel that she’s in danger of breaking away entirely and becoming a unicycle. To be clear, she didn’t need to get romantic with the others to have a strong connection. She could have bonded with them over something platonic, like their shared desire to save people from a volcano. Unfortunately, nothing like that happens until far too late in the story, and even then it’s fairly weak.
And those are only the motivations that are directly related to the plot. Chandra is also motivated by disappointment in her father, but it’s not clear what that motivation is getting her to do. She and her father have little interaction after her first chapter, so there’s no resolution on that front. Even weirder, she’s motivated by a desire to avoid sex because she thinks it’ll weaken her magical powers. This motivation is never addressed either, and it’s mostly forgotten about by the end.
So instead of one or two strong motivations, Chandra has at least five weak ones. None of them make her an identifiable character or provide her a strong reason to be on the quest. It’s no wonder she’s sometimes left on her own for entire chapters while the other two characters go off and have their own adventures.
3. Bo, Lost Girl
In this urban fantasy adventure, Bo is a succubus who grew up among humans, never knowing that there was an entire world of magical creatures out there. These Fae* divide themselves into two groups: Light and Dark.
The Light Fae, while not perfect, are generally considered to be the good guys. They believe in living peacefully with humans and spend considerable resources on capturing Fae who abuse humans. The Dark Fae, on the other hand, are portrayed as mustache-twirlingly evil. Naturally, Bo chooses to align herself with the Light Fae because—Oops, I’m sorry, actually she declares that she’s going to remain neutral, even though she clearly shares most of the Light Fae’s values.
Bo’s motivation for this is, at best, a case of stubborn contrariness. She’s told she has to choose either Light or Dark, and she refuses to pick either because she’s a beautiful and unique snowflake. That’s not a very sympathetic motivation for the main character, which makes it hard to like Bo.
The writers then undermine Bo’s motivation even further by having her hang out and work exclusively with Light Fae for several seasons. She even goes on a few missions for the Light Fae leaders, and she clearly expects the Light Fae to help her when she’s in trouble.
Because of her close association with the Light Fae, Bo comes across as someone who wants the benefits of joining a group but not the responsibilities. She’s basically one of those people who loves to benefit from union-negotiated contracts but refuses to pay union dues.
4. Kathryn Janeway, Voyager
At first, Captain Janeway’s motivations seem straightforward enough: she’s a stickler for the Prime Directive and Starfleet regulations. She’s perfectly willing to give up chances at getting her lost ship home or even let entire planets die in order to avoid breaking the rules. That’s not a great motivation for the hero, but at least it’s clear.
But within the first few episodes, another side of Janeway emerges. Sometimes, she’s perfectly willing to violate a hostile species’ border in order to get home a little faster, and at times she’s happy to get involved in someone else’s fight. At one point she even trades bioweapons to the Borg, the Federation’s most dangerous enemy, to get home faster.
There isn’t some turning point where Janeway goes from a rules stickler to an ultimate pragmatist. These episodes are all mixed together in every season of the show. At first, Janeway’s motivation seems nonsensical. She claims that it’s so important to get home that she’ll risk war with aliens to cross their territory, yet she has no problem stopping for days or even weeks to study some new stellar phenomena. At the same time, she deems it a waste of time to stop so the Doctor can attend a conference on space-borne pathogens.*
But slowly, a pattern emerges. Janeway’s willingness to break the rules or stop and explore correlates almost exactly with how much conflict it generates. Violate a dangerous species’ territory to save a few months on a 70-year trip? That has the potential to get Voyager blown up, so absolutely. Help some robots correct a flaw in their programming that stops them from reproducing? Well if she said yes the episode would be over and her Chief Engineer would have nothing to rail against, so Janeway is not into it.
This rule applies even in stories where Voyager has a chance to get home. In one episode, Voyager finds some Ferengi happily exploiting the inhabitants of a bronze-age civilization. Nearby is a wormhole back to Federation space, but it’ll collapse soon. Janeway’s not willing to leave the Ferengi where they are, and fair enough, they’re causing a lot of harm. But instead of simply grabbing them with a transporter, she concocts an elaborate scheme that ends up taking so long that Voyager misses the wormhole. Her reasoning is that just taking the Ferengi by force would cause unintended consequences to the people the Ferengi were exploiting.
In another episode, Voyager discovers a Borg wormhole* that also leads back to Federation space. This time Janeway’s all about rushing the wormhole as soon as possible, even though in doing so she’ll be letting the Borg get a good look at some extremely advanced technology she picked up from the future.* Remember that the Borg’s special skill is adapting new technology as their own. Suddenly she has no concern for the unintended consequences of her actions.
What we’re left with is a captain who makes decisions based on what is most likely to get people killed. Obviously this wasn’t intentional, but it’s what happens when the writers get lazy and just assume their main character will drive the story no matter what kind it is.
5. Jonathan Archer, Enterprise
And you thought Janeway was the worst Star Trek had to offer, hah! Meet Captain Archer, a man as confusing as he is immature. Nothing about Archer’s motivation makes sense. For one thing, he really hates Vulcans, to the point where his microaggressions become straight up normal aggressions. His motivation for hating them? Because they didn’t give his father the advanced tech he needed to finish a human warp-five engine. He’s mad because there wasn’t Vulcan tech in the first human warp-five engine. That’s an impressive feat of mental gymnastics.
The real failure in Archer’s motivation is the way he chooses what to explore. Essentially, he does this by finding whatever planet or phenomena the Vulcans don’t want him poking at and setting a course right for it. In one episode, he decides to visit a secluded Vulcan monastery, even though he hates Vulcans and is bored by everything about them. He seems to do this only because the Vulcans don’t want people visiting their secluded holy place.
Another time, Archer passes up the chance to explore a rare cluster of neutron stars in favor of a visiting pre-industrial civilization. He does this over his Vulcan science officer’s objection. Keep in mind that humans have met plenty of alien species so far and that Archer isn’t an anthropologist. There’s nothing special about this civilization other than that the Vulcans don’t want him poking around there.
Once Archer finally reaches the thing he wants to explore, his methods for doing so also seem designed to go against whatever the Vulcans would do. When visiting a strange planet for the first time, it would make sense to gather data on it first, right? To make sure there’s nothing dangerous down there? Ah, but you see that’s Vulcan policy, and Archer isn’t gonna let the Vulcans tell him what to do! Then of course his landing party nearly dies from a toxin they didn’t know about because they didn’t do any preliminary data gathering. Small price to pay as far as Archer is concerned.
Where Janeway’s motivation unintentionally comes across as trying to get her crew killed, Archer’s motivation is racist contrariness, and I think it’s on purpose. Someone in the writers’ room probably thought it would showcase the human spirit, but instead it just makes Earth’s first explorer look like a petulant child. Fortunately, Archer does get a little better as Enterprise progresses, but it wasn’t enough to save the show from early cancellation.
6. Merlin, Merlin
In this BBC drama, Merlin has two main motivations. The first is help his noble but somewhat clueless friend, Arthur, and that’s reasonable. The second is to keep King Uther Pendragon alive, and that’s where the show runs into trouble.
You see, people are always trying to kill Uther. He has enemies everywhere, and keeping him alive is a full-time job. On the surface that doesn’t sound like a terrible motivation for Merlin, and it wouldn’t be except that Uther is one of the most awful people who has ever lived. For one thing, he treats Merlin very badly, at one point making him drink a cup of wine Uther suspects might be poisoned. For another, Uther is a terrible king. His “diplomacy” skills anger other monarchs to the point of war, and he’s not even that good at fighting.
But all of that pales in comparison to Uther’s real crime: he executes anyone with the ability to use magic. Literally anyone. Casting a spell to increase the year’s harvest or cure a sick loved one is enough to earn the death sentence. The show is very clear that Uther had children killed, too, when he purged magic from Camelot, to the point where calling him Fantasy Hitler doesn’t feel like an exaggeration. Even Merlin himself isn’t safe. If Uther ever finds out that Merlin can use magic, Merlin will be dead within the hour no matter how many times he’s saved the kingdom.
Not only is Uther heinous on a moral level, but his genocidal policy towards magic also puts Camelot at a serious disadvantage against its neighbors, none of which have sworn off magic. This is the king that Merlin keeps defending, often killing others in the process, even though almost every one of Uther’s enemies has a legitimate reason to want him dead.
And Merlin’s devotion to Uther is never properly explained. There’s some noise made about Arthur not being ready for the throne, but that’s clearly not true. Arthur is brave, charismatic, and an able commander. He’s not perfect, but he’s miles above Uther.
Really, the reason Merlin keeps defending Uther is that the writers have trapped themselves with their own premise. Merlin is super powerful, and if he could practice magic openly, there’d be no challenge. The only way for the writers to create conflict is for Merlin to do all his magic on the sly so he won’t be killed by evil king Uther. Unfortunately, they failed to think of a good reason for Uther to keep his throne.
7. Fitz, Assassin’s Apprentice
Moving away from television but staying in the realm of fantasy,* we have Fitz. Of all the characters on this list, Fitz is unique. He doesn’t have a nonsensical or irritating motivation. In fact, he has no motivation at all.
In the first few chapters, Fitz might as well be a camera on a cart for all the emotion he brings into the story. Everything is very well described, except for Fitz’s reaction to it. As the book goes on, Fitz does start to have the occasional emotion, but he’s still extremely passive. He almost never goes out and does anything for himself.
Instead, the story is a series of other people deciding that Fitz needs an upgrade in his status and Fitz going along with it. First, it’s decided that he’s going to apprentice with the stable master, and he’s fine with that. Then the King decides that Fitz will train as an assassin, and Fitz thinks that’s okay. Then a noble woman decides that Fitz needs an education, and he accepts it without complaint. Finally, the King announces that Fitz will also get trained in magic. This time Fitz is a little miffed because his schedule is already crowded, but he’s doesn’t feel strongly enough to say anything, even to his friends.
At no point in the first two thirds of the book does Fitz demonstrate any strong desires or wants. He does demonstrate romantic interest in another character, but it’s not strong enough to get him to do anything. He just drifts through life, accepting everything that happens to him, rarely having any desires worth mentioning.
Fitz is written this way to be a blank protagonist, someone the reader inserts themselves into so they can vicariously live the adventure. Blank protagonists can’t have too many personality traits, or else the reader can’t easily insert themselves. Harry Potter is another blank protagonist. His only distinguishing features are generically positive traits like bravery.
But Harry Potter works because he has a clear external conflict: Voldemort keeps trying to kill him. Assassin’s Apprentice, on the other hand, has very little external conflict for Fitz to play against. It’s a character-driven story, but Fitz has no character to drive it. As a result he’s deadly dull, and it’s a long wait before anything interesting happens.
A bad motivation will sabotage your protagonist, and a bad protagonist will sabotage your story. If your protagonist has a nonsensical motivation, it will anger readers until they write long posts about it on the internet. If your protagonist has a poorly defined motivation, or no motivation at all, that’s even worse. Readers will get bored and put down your story, never to mention it again.
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I’m surprised Shadow from American Gods didn’t get namechecked here. Like Fritz, he is an utterly passive character with zero motivation.
You’re probably right but it has been a loooooong time since I read American Gods.
The easiest way to resolve the problem with Merlin’s powers would have been to have him develop them over time, instead of giving him all of them at the beginning. There still could have been some mix-up and he’d ended up as Arthur’s servant.
Uther’s very unwise policies on magic have a huge impact, not just on Merlin. Morgana wouldn’t have taken the path she has taken, either, without Uther. She had to leave Camelot behind, because she was born a witch and thus in mortal danger. Otherwise, why would she have turned against the man who basically raised her like a daughter?
I’d say the Arthur we see a the beginning of the series wouldn’t have made a good ruler, but he’s learning quickly and having Merlin around teaches him a few valuable lessons about humility and treating people better. Towards the end of the first season, he could have ruled Camelot, especially with a few good advisors at his side.
I actually liked the show. It was interesting. Too bad that Arthur died in the end, though.
IIRC the reason usually given in-universe is that if Uther is killed by magic, Arthur – who for no readily apparent reason has an entirely rosy opinion of his father – will end up another Uther. Of course, that doesn’t explain why Merlin also lies to Arthur to conceal Uther’s culpability in his mother’s death, instead blaming it on the magical world which, oh right, is Uther’s whole motivation in the first place.
Someone in the writers’ room probably thought it would showcase the human spirit, but instead it just makes Earth’s first explorer look like a petulant child.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that this was partly down to Scott Bakula, but for the opposite reason: that he wanted to suggest that Archer really wasn’t up to the job he’d got mainly by vitue of being the son of the engine’s inventor.
If so then it was a complete success, but still not good for the show I would argue.
1-I have to agree the show handles it better, Jame’s motivation in the TV series feels ok, but what you describe in the novels (i haven’t read them) surely feels off and annoying (mostly because he keeps doing it over and over), that said i think the writer was trying to make a point about freedom-of-information, cause you might call it a caricature but fact is there are freedom-of-information advocates who act exactly like that all the time in real life … they just reveal sensitive information with no regard for context, timing or even fact-checking them in the name of freedom-of-information … which obviously leads to disastrous effects.
2-Agree about stacking up weaker motivations, it seems law of addition of mathematics doesn’t apply to motivations, even if you give a character ten weak motivations it won’t make things better or make the character believable, whereas a single strong motivation can do that, it’s indeed quality over quantity here.
3-Ok, i actually think i understand Bo’s motivation, just because your views align with a certain group doesn’t mean you have to automatically join them, some people just like to live and operate solo, they don’t like the baggage that comes with being part of a big entity or group (varies depending on the group but it an be anything from routine, bureaucracy, hierarchy, .. etc), so sharing the same basic ideals with said group means it’s ok to work or co-operate with them in times of need but it doesn’t in any way shape or form compel anyone to join said group automatically, that’s why free-lancers exist in real life (and in fiction).
4-Well, there is no arguing she is just a terrible captain, or a terribly written one, not much difference.
5-Same as no.4
6-I suppose that’s a great example of writers writing themselves into a corner, or into a stone (pun intended), they build the relations between the characters and their power levels wrong from the start and now they are stuck with it during the whole thing trying to make it barely function.
7-Ah, blank protagonists, as it is evident writing a story with a blank character is a lot harder than it first seems, cause while there isn’t any specific motivations or complex personality you have to give them there also has to be something in place of those missing things, and in case of Harry Potter it’s the interesting world and the central conflict with he-who-should-not-be-named, there doesn’t seem to be any of that in Fitz’s story.
On James Holden, I read his freedom of information thing to be about his character strength and flaw. He was meant to be an idealist in a pragmatic universe. What made him likeable, his honesty and integrity, was also the thing that made him a loose cannon that couldn’t be trusted.
As the series goes on this becomes part of his larger character arc, since he has to learn greater diplomacy and pragmatism. I.e. he becomes less naive.
I also saw that freedom of information standoff between Holden and Miller as a comment upon Wikileaks and the need for transparency but the problems with it. As you said, Oren, needing context for the information.
Some parallels could certainly be drawn between Holden and Wikileaks (although it’s hard to argue now that the Wikileaks doesn’t have an obvious political agenda), but I think the danger lies in people thinking the answer to Wikileaks is to just accept that governments and other authority figures should be able to hide critical information from us “for our own good.”
Yeah, in the time when the book was written Wikileaks was still cool. Back before it became as much about Assange’s ego as releasing important information to the public in a vetted manner.
And yes, it is too easy to think either ideal is good. As you said, give everyone all the information without context or understanding and anything can look bad (e.g. what the numpties did with the “Climategate” emails in terms of cherry picking). On the other end you have politicians, military, etc, covering up major incidents that people have a right to know about (e.g. military killing innocent people, torture black sites, etc).
While later seasons make a big deal out of Bo being the “unaligned succubus”, the pilot does show her clearly picking a side, humans. Bo refuses to join the light not because she disagrees with their politics but because she can’t accept their cavalier attitude towards human life and she does frequently come into conflict with the light over their treatment of humans.
Obviously Bo breaks in favor of the light in almost any conflict that is purely about dark/light politics, but the light’s casual predation on humans motivates Bo’s refusal to formally align herself with the light.
Janeway could have been a much better character if they’d picked a characterization and stuck with it, instead of the writers being at war with each other to such a point that Kate Mulgrew herself suggested that Janeway was genuinely mentally ill.
I’d love to see a remake of Voyager that fixes the problems of the original. Make Janeway consistent, either make Neelix useful or kill the annoying git off, stop screwing over Harry Kim, and STOP SPAMMING THE BLOODY RESET BUTTON.
Of course, as SFDebris pointed out when talking about Archer in Enterprise, at least Janeway was capable of making decisions.
I don’t think Fitz is so much a blank protagonist as a victim of oppression who is denied agency. He starts out clearly traumatized, as a six year old amnesiac. That’s… a pretty good basis for not having motivations. He’s kept isolated and separated from other people, because of his status as a royal bastard and his mentors take care, for various reasons, to train him to NOT have ambitions, lest he become dangerous. He looks too much like his father, an abdicated prince, and could be used to play havoc with the royal succession. His foster father keeps Fitz out of sight and reprimands Fitz for letting the king notice him, because he’s afraid of what the king will do with him. Later, his assassin mentor works at coaching him away from any inclinations toward wanting nice things, because it might make him susceptible to corruption or compromise. At one point Fitz does express an interest in a normal job offered to him by someone unaware of his secret assassin training, and the assassin teacher tells him he’ll be out of pocket and too dangerous to be allowed to live.
Fitz is a blank slate because people MAKE him that way. In later books it’s pointed out that because of his early traumas he is wary and suspicious of others, and that, plus his isolation keeps him from forming bonds. It’s also mentioned that the king liked him and trusted him because of his lack of ambition, as opposed to his highly motivated mentor (and never mind that the mentor was the king’s half-brother and closest confidante).
So that stuff all has a reason in the case of Fitz and is well-lampshaded in the story. Of maybe Robin Hobb (actual name, Meagn Lindholm) should not have tried to appropriate a formative male experience.
Just because there’s a reason for it in the story, that doesn’t mean it’s good.
Lol, I somehow never read to the bottom of this comment and for years didn’t notice “maybe Robin Hobb (actual name, Meagn Lindholm) should not have tried to appropriate a formative male experience.”
That’s, uh, quite a claim to make. I had no idea that being an unwanted royal heir and training to be an assassin was such a widespread experience to men and men only. And it’s even weirder to come at the end of a comment defending Assassin’s Apprentice from a much less serious critique.
Cannoli isn’t allowed to comment here anymore because underneath all the fanrage, he demonstrated some truly dangerous far right tendencies, but I think I’m gonna miss silliness like this.
If I say my characters motivation is to fulfill her duty – would that be blank? She wants to serve the government to maintain peace in the world she’s living in
That’s not a bad starting point, but you’ll probably want a little more as the story goes forward. If she’s trying to avoid the start of a brutal war, that could make for a stronger motivation.