Okay, I don't usually go off about stuff like this, but I'm going to talk a bit about why claiming that *all* protagonists *must* have agency strikes me as very patriarchal. 1/?

Yes, I know that active characters are interesting characters.

Yes, I know that characters who make their own problems are fascinating to read about.

That's not what this thread is about, though. 2/?

What this thread is about is the fact that I, and many other women, spend most of our lives navigating a world where we are forced to be reactive rather than active. We're placed in situations we can't control for the majority of our lives. 3/?

And then, when I try to represent situations like that in my fiction, I'm almost invariably told that I'm wrong. That my characters aren't active enough because they get put in situations that they did not cause or cannot solve on their own. 4/?