Plural MC characters

[brendon_oloughlin]

Continuing the discussion from How similar must plural MC or hand off IC characters be?:

Phew - Glad I found this! I just finished reading a script where I found it difficult to assign who the MC was as there were two candidates - a Husband and Wife. They really didn’t seem to be MC/IC - but together they seemed to be a very good MC.

Am I right in thinking that the relationship itself could be the Main Character? “The Couple” (collective noun) being the MC which has its own problem, its own viewpoints etc. From what we see of the relationship, we get the “inside look” at that relationship. Also, there seems to be a distinct Impact Character that exists outside the relationship (in the form of another couple) who seem to argue the other side of approach.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Can a couple be an MC in its own right?

Cheers all,

@chuntley

They would all share the story points found in the MC throughline, though you may not explore all of the story points for each of them but break them up to explore different parts of the throughline individually.

Shared MC’s is a difficult task to pull off unless they are collectively seen as a group and not a bunch of individuals. Doing them as individuals is challenging.

The point of the throughlines is to show the audience how it might approach the inequity at the core of the story from fundamentally different perspectives – different contexts. Anything that works toward that end MAY be effective if the audience is able to coalesce the parts into the organic ‘whole’ by unweaving and decoding the storytelling AFTER it has experienced the entirety of the work. Some audiences will go through the effort of unscrambling complex storytelling. Other audiences may not be interested in going through the effort; they may prefer more direct (read simple) storyweaving and storyencoding.

[chuntley]

Yes, you may have a couple (or a group) as a MC, especially as you described them above. But it is best not to think of them as husband and wife but as the married couple. When you separate them, the audience will try to see the as individual subjective characters.

(Note: The husband and wife may have different functions in the Overall Story throughline, but doing so may confuse the audience, so you would need to work extra hard to be consistent within the context of the throughlines, i.e. separate in the OS but a single unit as the MC and as one-half of the relationship throughline with the IC.)