yujiri.xyz

Protagonism

What's a Protagonist?

Protagonism used to take its name directly from my values. During my late teen years, I believed in 8 "cardinal" virtues with 4 sub-virtues each. One of the 8 corresponded to my current value of Agency, and I considered it the holiest. Since I had to split each of the 8 into 4 distinct sub-virtues to fit the pattern, I ended up attaching direct moral value to a lot of things I don't anymore but that were closely related to values like Agency. One of them was Adventurousness. I was also coming at it from a virtue ethics mindset rather than a consequentialist one, so part of my problem was that I was trying to describe morality in terms of what makes a good person rather than what makes a good action.

Consequentialism

So I saw it as close to the center of my "religion" that a Protagonist was a protagonist of a story in a very deep sense, *the* story, even. If God watched the human chronicles as a story, Protagonists would be the protagonists.

The name started to make less sense after my axiology matured. For a while I rationalized it as a *sentiment* that Protagonists are protagonists rather than that being explicitly a moral value, and the illusory yet outstanding *appearance* of a fundamental difference between people like me and "normies", but I'm not sure I feel that way anymore, so now the name, and concept, is probably just a historical artifact.