I don’t think that’s actually true. Certainly in the two genres I’m the most involved in, which would be fantasy and mystery/thriller, you get 1st person at least as often as 3rd person. Omniscient 3rd is incredibly rare these days, though it does happen sometimes. James Patterson and Maxine Paetro’s “Private” novel is actually told using both 1st person and close 3rd person POVs. Kind of remarkable that they can make it work, actually.
I think it’s important to remember that a novel is, on average three or four times the length of a movie in terms of content. For me as a novelist, this is how that plays out:
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A novel often contains more than one storyform.
You can’t possibly read the Game of Thrones books (more properly called “A Song of Ice And Fire”) and declare there to be one MC throughline. Each book in that series is like three or four books threaded together, each with their own storyform. -
Those other storyforms may well be incomplete.
My rule of thumb in my own books is that the main storyform has to be complete. Often others might have an MC and IC throughline, but no discernible OS. I could be wrong about this, but I think that may actually be preferable: if you have three complete storyforms in a novel, it might be hard for the reader to feel like anything was truly central to the book. However if none of the storyforms are complete, then it’s going to feel like a bit of a mess. -
Novels can tolerate extraneous scenes better than a movie can.
I find a movie that suddenly has an extra scene between two characters that isn’t directly connected to the storyform can feel a bit odd – distracting even when you enjoy it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but given how much it costs to make a movie I suspect filmmakers prefer not to have scenes that don’t advance the actual story. In novels, however, there’s lots more room for “taking a breath”. If you just had 100,000 words of non-stop storyform-driven scenes, I suspect it would feel a bit claustrophobic.
This is just my perspective, and I’m often wrong about Dramatica’s inner workings, so take it with a grain of salt. That said, to answer your two questions directly:
- The MC of the novel as perceived by the reader is likely to be the one that fits in the complete storyform.
So if you’ve got three storyforms and one is complete (i.e. all four throughlines) and two are incomplete, then the MC of the complete storyform is likely to feel like the “true” MC to the reader.
Again, not sure if this is correct in Dramatica terms, but my experience both as reader and writer has always been that whoever ends up as the MC of the complete storyform feels like the MC of the novel itself.
Hope that helps!