{"id":2854,"date":"2025-04-20T16:47:14","date_gmt":"2025-04-20T20:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=2854"},"modified":"2025-04-20T16:47:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-20T20:47:14","slug":"main-character-syndrome-as-experienced-by-a-side-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2025\/04\/20\/main-character-syndrome-as-experienced-by-a-side-character\/","title":{"rendered":"Main Character Syndrome, As Experienced by A Side Character"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cGeryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts.\/
\nEven when they were lovers\/
\nhe had never known what Herakles was thinking.\u00a0 Once in a while he would say,\/
\nPenny for your thoughts!\/
\n<\/em>and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish\/
\nhe\u2019d eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago.\/
\nWhat Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked.<\/strong>\u201d (p. 132)<\/p>\n

Down to their colloquial name, the \u201cLabors of Heracles\/Herakles\/Hercules\u201d are inseparable from the demigod himself.\u00a0 He is the one who was cursed by Hera, he is the one who pledged to redeem himself by performing labor for a wicked king, and he is the one who triumphs over all twelve challenges.\u00a0 Narrativizations of the original myth focus on Herakles\u2019s heroism and ingenuity, and on how he inspires unlikely collaborators.\u00a0 Everything centers around his personal struggle against all of the monsters he must fight or fool, including the king.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, not much time at all is spent in the minds of the monsters.\u00a0 This is on purpose, of course \u2013 the original purpose of the myth is to tell long-suffering Herakles\u2019s story, and the creatures he encounters are little more than creative obstacles.\u00a0 King Augeus (the owner of the immense and never-before-cleaned Augean stables) and Queen Hippolyta (leader of the Amazons and owner of a very cool belt bequeathed to her by her father Ares) were given the most dialogue in their sections of Herakles\u2019s story, presumably because of their humanity.\u00a0 The Nemean Lion, Lerynaean Hydra, and Cretan Bull, however, are unquestionably just things to be overpowered.<\/p>\n

Originally, Geryon is a three-bodied giant.\u00a0 His first action in the myth is to attack Herakles (after the hero first kills his herdsman and two-headed dog), and Herakles promptly kills him with a poisoned arrow.\u00a0 The rest of the myth is devoted to how exactly Herakles manages to transport his cattle.\u00a0 Nobody focuses on Geryon\u2019s humanity because he is there to serve a purpose \u2013 specifically, he is there to further Herakles\u2019s growth and development as a hero.<\/p>\n

In Ann Carson\u2019s novel Autobiography of Red<\/em>, she writes of how it may feel to be caught in Herakles\u2019s orbit.\u00a0 The reader never gets the sense that Herakles cares about Geryon in particular.\u00a0 Herakles seems to prefer having a person to have sex with, or to bounce his adventurous ideas off of.\u00a0 Sometimes he is kind in a romcom-male-lead sort of way: putting Geryon\u2019s hands under his own shirt when he notices that they\u2019re cold, or bringing Geryon along on volcanic adventures. \u00a0Still, he never convinces the reader that the person accompanying him needs to be Geryon.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t seem to try to do so, honestly.\u00a0 Over and over, Herakles shows that he doesn\u2019t truly see Geryon, that he wishes Geryon would express himself a bit more \u201cnormally\u201d (read: detachedly) instead of being so emotionally caught-up in their relationship, that he doesn\u2019t understand why Geryon makes so much art about captivity, and so on.<\/p>\n

When Herakles separates himself from Geryon near the story\u2019s middle by offhandedly remarking that Geryon should be getting back to his own house, it doesn\u2019t seem as though he\u2019s particularly broken up about it.\u00a0 This cavalier separation deeply hurts Geryon, and though he continues going through the motions while time passes, his thoughts are never too far away from Herakles.\u00a0 When Geryon eventually happens to reunite with Herakles \u2013 as though his story is connected to the other man\u2019s by a tether \u2013 Herakles has another partner, because of course he does.\u00a0 Herakles flirts with both Geryon and Ancash, persuades them to help him steal a tiger sculpture, and leads them around South America as he pleases, all the while never really seriously engaging with either of them.\u00a0 He must have charmed Ancash somehow, but the reader would be forgiven for assuming that Herakles just happens to get people to fall in love with him because of a protagonist-aura he emits.\u00a0 He\u2019s so used to getting his own way, to having people around who will do him favors and assist with his dreams, that he never puts much effort into maintaining positive relationships.\u00a0 Herakles just seems to believe that things will work out for him \u2013 and so far, they have.\u00a0 Even at the end of the story, when Ancash figures out that Herakles and Geryon had sex while Herakles and Ancash were still in a relationship, Herakles notices exactly why Ancash is upset, then looks back to Geryon and asks, \u201cVolcano time?\u201d\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t really seem to think that this will have negative ramifications for him \u2013 he\u2019s just moving on to the next part of his adventure.<\/p>\n

Even though the reader inhabits Geryon\u2019s mind throughout Autobiography of Red<\/em>, it becomes clear that Geryon\u2019s story is uncontrollably tied to Herakles.\u00a0 He can\u2019t seem to help but care about him for the vast majority of the novel, even when Herakles demonstrably doesn\u2019t care at all.\u00a0 Similarly to how Herakles in the Greek myth only encountered Geryon long enough to extract what he wanted and then exit, uncaring of the damage he did to Geryon, Carson\u2019s Herakles is always looking through Geryon to his own, singular future.\u00a0 Everyone around him is just a supporting character, there to be used and then discarded in favor of the next opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGeryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts.\/ Even when they were lovers\/ he had never known what Herakles was thinking.\u00a0 Once in a while he would say,\/ Penny for your thoughts!\/ and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish\/ he\u2019d eaten … Continue reading Main Character Syndrome, As Experienced by A Side Character<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}