Why Are Main Characters Boring?

I recently re-watched the Lord of the rings trilogy and upon my latest viewing I couldn’t help but notice an aspect that never really caught my attention the previous times I’ve seen it. That is that Frodo is a pretty BORING character! And it's not just here, I’ve noticed in video games and even some of the latest big comic book movies to come out from this year. Even some of my favorite films of all time contain very boring main characters or main characters that are easily outshined by their counterpart.

So that begs the question, why are main character's boring?

The main protagonist of a story is who we follow when watching or listening to any story being told. In many ways they are what connects their world to the audience by allowing them to see through to their world. Many are stuck to a certain archetype that can limit some of the actions that the character can do. Such as having them make decisions that could drastically change their character or that would make you question about whether or not to follow them. In a way they can’t go that off the deep end that would ruin their character but that doesn’t mean you can spice things up a bit.

There is a formula into writing main characters that you can follow and stick with immediately as seen in many tv shows and movies, specially the ones that have you follow one person who is at the center of everything. Because we have to be able to follow them if not it becomes a rather clustered mess and the audience won’t ever make any connection to your film. This usually only happens in big budget films or larger casted films that force you to follow so many people but leaves so little time to know them individually.

I would say that it isn’t necessarily that characters are becoming boring as so much that their archetypes are just so over saturated at this point. If you think about it, almost every big budget trilogy of movies has that “chosen one” archetype. It works for a reason but the problem it is used so much and with little to no distinguished between them to make them special from one another. You can go from the lord of the rings, to the matrix, to even star wars and many more that all follow this template.