Tragic hero

The tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy, a stock character whose flaws cause their downfall. The lineage runs to Aristotle's Poetics, which records the requirements with some strictness: the hero's misfortune should come "not through vice or depravity but by some error of judgment," the change of fortune should run from good to bad rather than the reverse, and the hero should be virtuous without being eminently good, so the fall produces pity and fear instead of the satisfaction of justice. Aristotle built the description out of the dramas available to him, Sophocles' Oedipus above all, and Greek tragedy remains the reference implementation.

The archetype has held its shape across media: Macbeth and Othello; Kullervo from the Finnish Kalevala, which Tolkien adapted; and modern figures such as Jay Gatsby, Boromir, Eddard Stark and Anakin Skywalker. The engine is the pair the hamartia and hubris entries name, an error or flaw entangled with the very greatness that made the hero capable. The edge case is instructive: Michael Corleone is sometimes argued into the role, but under traditional conventions he fits the antihero better. Against the Byronic hero, the Romantic variant built on mood and misery, the tragic hero is the classical original; the genre that carries the type is tragedy.