How does a story end when Protagonist and Main Character are not the same?
I know that Story Goal is primarily a concern of the Protagonist in the Overall Story throughline. However, I tend to struggle when trying to map some of the Dramatica story appreciations to the beats of 'other' story paradigms -- terms like: Inciting Incident/Catalyst, Break into Act 2, Point of No Return, rising conflict, Final Crisis, Climax.
In Dramatica, my understanding is that there is a Moment of Truth that leads to a Leap of Faith that leads to the Climax. These get tricky for me when the Main Character (the character through whose eyes the audience experiences the story) is not the same as the Protagonist. Is the following true:
- Story Goal (same term for other paradigms)--refers to Protagonist's goal?
- Moment of Truth (analogous to Final Crisis in other paradigms)--refers to the Main Character?
- Leap of Faith--refers to the Main Character?
- Climax (same term for other paradigms)--refers to the Protagonist's effort to reach goal?
If so, it seems that the Moment of Truth and Leap of Faith (both related to the Main Character's effort) are not connected to the Goal and Climax (which are related to the Protagonist's effort). This feels like a problem to me.
Yes -- The Story Goal is the protagonist's goal.
Yes -- Climax refers to the protagonist's final effort to achieve the goal, generally against the greatest resistance and/or odds.
Yes -- The Moment of Truth and Leap of Faith both refer to the Main Character, and can describe the same moment. My take is that both the Moment of Truth and Leap of Faith are 1) the conscious awareness of the choices (Moment of Truth) and 2) the decision to try a different path (Leap of Faith - Change).
That said, you can have stories where the character is changed over the course of the story, which would be a non-leap of faith story, and then the Moment of Truth is the test to see if the Main Character has changed his world view, or stayed the course and remained steadfast to his world view.
