I may be just over thinking this, but I think I have a problem with my WIP's Main Character, MC.
I'm no good with creating/remembering names so I'll just call him MC for the time being.
To put into perspective, the Story itself is about a Young Man (My MC), who is around 17 by the way who finds out he is a Magic User of all things(There's of course more to it than that) but the twist is that he is
Genre Savvy as TV Tropes calls it. Harry Dresden is
Genre Savvy, he makes mention of other works of fantasy throughout his adventures as a Wizard, but he's already like that after he has become a Wizard.
My story shows my MC was
Genre Savvy before he became a Magic User. I am not trying to clone HD or HP, my MC is his own man with more to him than I have mentioned here.
My angle is this: Most Main Characters who find out they are Wizards or whatever are swept off their feet by the magic stuff. HP for example is just in awe of everything around him.
My MC on the other hand is a kid with a sweet tooth in a candy store.
My 2 problems in particular are thus:
1. Every time I try to design my Main Character, he seems to become more and more like me. To be more specific, the character I
want is a Bookworm who has read a lot of Fantasy before he became a magic user. A way to word it would be, "If I became a Wizard, I would..." But, I don't want an MC who is an embellished Author surrogate/clone of myself because that in my opinion is unbelievably lame.
See Anita Blake for reference on this matter in my opinion (For those AB fans reading this, you may ignore this sentence
).
2. It seems like my MC is either too
badass,
powerful, ...infallible for his own good. I want him to be fallible. I want him to have the Sherlock Holmes moment at one point and be wrong (getting beat up for it as a result). But, if I beat him up too much, he ceases to be believable or likable since no one likes an MC who just gets beat up all the time and is always wrong.
On the other end of the spectrum, I don't want him to be too powerful and become "
The Most Powerful Wizard in a thousand years who speaks a hundred supernatural languages in a short amount of time with little effort from a prophesy set in time centuries before..."(Complete with own Harem) because that sounds awfully like a certain 15 year Starfleet Captain a lot of us know and hate.
But, I also want his schtick to be that because he's something of a Pragmatist that he's a Generalist of sorts. The other thing is that part of his arc is that although he's geek of Sci-Fi/Fantasy, he wasn't a good student before the magic came. The magic and the consequences of it light a fire under my MC's butt. Edward Elric is kinda like this for his State Alchemy exam, hitting the books and turning into a learning machine. Ed was trying to get his brother's body back and my MC has a similarly strong motivation. But, I don't want MC to be a master of everything in a short time.
I am not setting out to write a wish fulfillment book that seeks to give my High School/College Career meaning and make me look like a genius. I have a story to tell and I determined this to be the best character for the job, but the character design parts of my brain are not cooperating.
I have tried to remedy these problems by distancing the main character from myself (Different interests, aptitudes, age, etc.) and to "Beat the crap out of him" so to speak. But, it hasn't been working on paper.
He keeps becoming more and more like me and I can't nail down a power level and learning arc.
So, I need help. How can I remedy these 2 issues without scrapping my MC and starting all over again?