Daokou Liyun（Shaoyun Liu）

On Christmas Eve in London, England, Chinese student Wang Tian gets together with some good friends for dinner and discusses an actual superhero event that recently appeared in London. The gathering of four turns from conversation to tragedy. The four became a world where wills hardened, and existence became fragile. Eventually, a new god is born … …

In the field of literature, the protagonist concept originated. The Greek classics defined the protagonist as the person whose tale of suffering is laid on the stage (Telias, 2018). In the chapter 'Definition of Tragedy' in Poetics, early in the ancient Greek period, Aristotle described a personal agent who 'embodies unique ideas, qualities, and character, engages in action, faces difficulties and resolves them'. This element of the narrative structure immediately assumed responsibility for influencing the plot, making important decisions and pushing stories forward. Meantime, numerous descriptions, e.g.  'person', 'single', 'important', 'presence', 'psychological essence', and 'privilege', entangled with most of the 'protagonist' appearances. In 1977, Roland Barthes analysed the protagonist (pp.104–106) in Image/Music/Text. He questioned the trap-like awareness often accompanied by the protagonist in narrative literature and untangled it from those descriptive words mentioned above. '... such privileging is far from extending over narrative literature.' (a, p. 108). He acknowledged possibilities for the protagonist and other narrative structures but did not propose solutions.

The question of 'how to de-power the protagonist' was first addressed by multi-protagonist cinema, but there need to be more de-protagonist films offering a new solution. The reshaping impact of the Covid-19 epidemic on the world and humanity, and the rapid development of Internet decentralisation ideas and technologies, provide the growing context and technological reference for de-protagonist film.

The three experiments I did at the WIP Show built up a database for this subject (De-protagonistic).