Cinderella: Writing “Flawless” Protagonists

It has often been pointed out that old fairy tales are not the most nuanced. The evil characters are just that — pure villainy. Our protagonist is the ideal of perfection. There are no antiheroes, broken protagonists, or even characters with any serious faults. While the conventional wisdom of modern storytelling is to allow your characters to have flaws, older stories valued holding up their protagonists as perfect beacons of morality and goodness.

The issue comes, of course, when contemporary writers attempt to retell fairy tales with modern storytelling conventions. The tradition of perfect protagonists is seen as being unrealistic, unrelatable, and robbing stories of their potential for nuance. More often than not these characters are hardened, flawed, or altered to more accurately portray what modern writers see as nuanced and fully fleshed-out characters.

So… is this a problem? Is it true that the original fairy tales fall short of their potential for nuance and relatability with perfect characters? Are modern storytelling techniques the solution? 

This week we’re exploring how to retell fairy tales with so-called flawless protagonists. And we’re doing so through the live-action remake of Disney’s Cinderella, which was released ten years ago yesterday and instantly lauded for staying true to the original story while enhancing the aspects that made it unique.

Cinderella

You would be hard pressed to find someone who does not know the basic plot of Cinderella. And for the most part, the live-action iteration follows it to the letter. Cinderella is a kind-hearted girl left to the care of her cruel stepmother after the death of her parents. Although afforded the opportunity to leave, the live-action makes a point of explaining why Cinderella stays with her step family — their house is the home she grew up in, the one where all the memories of her parents are. To abandon it would be to abandon their legacy to cruel people who couldn’t care less about those who lived before them. All she has of her parents is what is in that house.

So she stays. 

And that’s not the only aspect that the writers enhanced about the story. For one thing, Cinderella and the prince meet in the woods before the ball, and Cinderella decides to do everything she can to visit the palace and meet him again. This gives an extra layer of interest around the ball, because Cinderella has a personal stake in it now, rather than a general desire to spend a glamorous evening away from her chores. Her relationship with her parents is also illustrated beautifully before their deaths, giving their passing more weight. Rather than being names in a part of a backstory, they form the living, breathing influences of Cinderella’s past that make up her very identity and the reason she takes each of her actions.

Perhaps most powerfully of all, the stepmother’s motivations and past are made more and more clear throughout the movie. Rather than being a one-dimensional villain embodying pure evil, she becomes a desperately hurting and tortured soul, who was robbed of love twice and left with no one to comfort her but two self-centered and petty daughters. She sees in Cinderella everything she once was — youth, innocence, and goodness. So she decides to crush her, to show her the “truth” that it cost the stepmother so much to find: that happy endings are a lie, and death is the only resolution to life’s pain. 

But out of all the changes that were made to alter and enhance the story, one one of the things the writers refused to change from the original is the flawless perfection of the protagonist, Cinderella.

How to Write Flawless Protagonists

This Cinderella retelling has been praised again and again for its wonder, whimsy, and storytelling. Its success sparked the unfortunate trend of retelling nearly every Disney classic in live-action. It accented the power and beauty of the original — both the first cartoon and the ancient fairytale — through added themes and nuance that were uninhibited by the protagonist’s lack of flaws. In fact, Cinderella’s generosity, kindness, and pure goodness were part of what enhanced the beauty of the original tale. Too many Cinderella retellings bypass her goodness in favor of a more “interesting” protagonist, robbing the story of the theme that no matter how much evil you face, it is always possible to be good — and ultimately, that goodness will triumph. 

Although these “flawless” protagonists are difficult to write, as they are at a higher risk of becoming Mary Sues, they are critical to retelling fairy tales like this one. They are fully capable of demonstrating the nuance of reality. It is in fact because they hold so strongly to goodness that they show most powerfully how difficult maintaining that goodness truly is. And it is through that goodness that they are able to show the simple but powerful themes of tales told for hundreds of years: the very same stories that hold the truths the West was founded on. They argue that goodness will conquer evil, that appearances are deceptive, and that love is stronger than hate. We miss these themes when we change the protagonists for fear that the original tales are tired or their characters are too simplistic. When we enhance those protagonists, bringing them to their full brilliance through the power of modern storytelling techniques, successes like this retelling of Cinderella are made possible.

So how do we write protagonists like Cinderella?

1. Know What to Emphasize

One of the first things to understand is that each story can only emphasize so much. It is important to understand that books are not exhaustive portraits of your character, your world, and your themes. Each of these elements serve to support a narrow, specific message that isn’t always served by exploring every aspect of each element in your book. For that reason, it is possible to write “perfect” protagonists that still come across as realistic and attainable because, rather than having no flaws, their flaws simply aren’t emphasized. 

Since the point of Cinderella was to serve as a role model, a beacon of what goodness and resilience looks like in the face of evil, her flaws were overlooked for the sake of the story and making a more powerful point by emphasizing other parts of who she was. They gave her a Save the Cat Moment and introduced her as being kind and good, and then maintained that image throughout. No character ever made a speech about Cinderella’s endless perfection, and she never claimed to be flawless. Rather than painting her as intrinsically perfect, the writers just pointed out that her core characteristics are goodness, kindness, and generosity. 

When we expect stories to be complete, perfect images of reality, this can feel deceptive.

When it is understood that only so much can be emphasized, it follows that it is sometimes necessary not to emphasize a character’s flaws if it will make your message more powerful.

2. Give Them a Why

One of the most annoying parts of Mary Sues is that they don’t have a reason for acting the way they do. They’re perfect just because… that’s who they are. Since the original fairy tales often don’t give us an explanation for why the protagonists are perfect, these characters can seem like Mary Sues at first.

But they don’t have to be.

In this retelling of Cinderella, the writers made it abundantly clear why their protagonist strives so hard after goodness. She saw and admired it in her mother as a child and, as her mother died, she promised that she would always have courage and be kind the way her mother had. Her promise to both her parents to live in their memory, with their goodness and character on her mind, is what compels her to act the way she does. She isn’t perfect because she was born that way. She struggles with weakness and evil just as much as anyone else. But it’s the memory of the promise she made to her mother that motivates her to persevere where others would have given in, to show goodness to those who clearly do not deserve it. And it is that motivation that makes her so different from Mary Sues

3. Force Them To Struggle

I addressed this in more depth in an article on flat character arcs last summer. If you have a character who is not meant to grow or develop drastically throughout their arc, you have to ensure that they still struggle. One of the hallmarks of a Mary Sue is that they overcome challenges easily, and although they come across obstacles, those obstacles do not challenge them in any meaningful way. They fail to address the very core of who they are and what they believe. The truths they hold dear come across as weak because they are never challenged.

The same cannot be said for Cinderella

There are times throughout the story where she finds having courage and being kind almost impossible. She mourns for her parents, cries over cruelty, and desperately yearns for the kind beauty she grew up surrounded with. She longs for the ball, for love, for goodness, for compassion in those who mistreat her. There are times when it seems her burdens are too hard to bear, when everything she thought she believed is challenged, when she is brought to her very limit.

The only difference between Cinderella and other, more flawed protagonists, is that she endures past it. She does not cherish some deep misbelief that will only be rooted out through suffering and pain. Instead, that suffering brings out more fully the very real truths she holds dear. She reaches her limit, and then pushes past it. She grows stronger through suffering, but who she is most essentially, the girl she is at her very core, stays the same. Through it all she still believes in the power of kindness, each individual’s capacity to change for the better, and the potential of goodness to overcome any evil. Those beliefs make her struggle all the more compelling, nuanced, and real. They bring her story to a stronger point by showing that even true goodness can struggle without faltering, and strength is not possible without conflict. They show the themes of the original fairytale more powerfully than they ever could with a character who holds a flaw as a key part of their identity. Rather, Cinderella’s consistency throughout the turbulence around her proves the story’s truths as unchanging and ultimately timeless.

Let us know in the comments:

What “flawless” characters have you read or written about? What did the writer do to make sure you still related to them?