What does characters having agency mean to you?

[Agent Z]

I often see critics of stories in regards to agency of the characters in the stories they read or watch. Sometimes, I've found myself agreeing with their stances, other times not so much. Anyway, what does character agency in fiction mean to you. Please feel free to give examples.

[Zelena]

Well, I didn’t understand what you meant by “character agency”, so I made a little search and this is what I found in
What is character agency? By Meg LaTorre

In short, character agency is when a character (usually a protagonist) is more proactive than reactive to situations in a story.

For me, villains and dubious heroes are the characters with the “higher character agency”: they always plan something, they are not satisfied by the world the way it is. They want to be important people and as they don’t have a lot of moral, they are not afraid to displease and to hurt. How many bases do they have built, cities they have founded…

The heroes are there to stop them, so they react to their plans. It doesn’t mean they cannot have ideas or initiatives but their main goal is to restore harmony. They have usually lesser character agency.

[PCN24454]

It's hard to say. The way you say it, it sounds like character agency is "characters' ability to make choices for themselves". When I say choices, I don't mean video game choices where it's A or B; I more mean deciding where they want to go in the plot.

They aren't just following someone else's orders to make something happen.

[kjn]

Making decisions and choices, where the specific choice made is not forced upon the character by outer factors, and where the decisions are meaningful in their impact on the story.

In some cases, these decisions might be really obvious to us as readers, because not making the specific decision would go against everything the character stands for (see eg the No Man's Land scene in the Wonder Woman movie, and later on when she is told by Ares to kill Dr Poison). But it should always be presented as a choice to the character that they make for themselves.

Both the examples above are heroic, byt agency does not necessarily imply big heroic moments: they are just common within the genre we work with here. Logan has a great such example, when Professor X is buried, and Laura takes Logan's hand as daughter and father.

[DrNewGod]

If we're talking about comics, agency seems more conspicuous in its absence than its presence.

I'd submit that the Silver/Bronze-Age pre-Hawkworld Hawkwoman (Shayera Thal) was a character of great agency. Yes, she was the partner in titles and features that didn't bear her name. Yes, on average, her partner usually got the more heroic moment. However, she was almost never depicted as someone for Hawkman to explain things in order to show how smart he was. She was depicted as the one coming up with solutions or making bold actions almost as much as her partner. She was almost never written as the designated hostage, or team Weak Link. Even though she was a supporting character, she was a supporting character who had a story of her own.

In comparison The Fantastic Four's Invisible Woman (nee Invisible Girl) debuted shortly after Hawkwoman, and the contrast is embarrassing. Pretty much, until Byrne got hold of her in the early 1980s, Sue was there to be rescued, and make her partners look smart and bold.