It's a gift on stirring display here in a show where the "ship of dreams" itself (as a symbol of glorious aspiration, class-conflict and human hubris) is the protagonist rather than any of the teeming cross-section of passengers it deftly marshals.
Farmiga's work serves to suggest that the more women in front of and behind the cameras, as protagonists rather than wallpaper, the more interesting and complex a thriller genre can become.
For both men and women, engaging with women as narrators and protagonists rather than clumsy male fantasy objects means acknowledging that female perspectives are both different and valuable.
This is not to say films like Martyrs, Captivity or the forthcoming I Saw the Devil don't make me uncomfortable in the way they seem to revel in female suffering, but in my favourite kind of horror movies – dark fairytales such as A Nightmare on Elm Street or Pan's Labyrinth or The Orphanage – heroines embark on quests as protagonists, rather than passive victims.
His own experience and his observation of others lead him to believe children align themselves with the tidy, organized ursine protagonists rather than the unruly, delinquent human antagonist.
In an analysis of the game's story, Emily Short of Gamasutra called the decision to leave the protagonist blank rather than making a viewpoint character "brilliant", saying that it made the entire game work much better than it otherwise would.
The play instantly centers on a female protagonist out for justified revenge rather than a vaguely motivated male protagonist that makes all of his innocent female victims looks like fools.
Some seventy years after Shakespeare's Troilus was first presented, John Dryden re-worked it as a tragedy, in his view strengthening Troilus' character and indeed the whole play, by removing many of the unresolved threads in the plot and ambiguities in Shakespeare's portrayal of the protagonist as a believable youth rather than a clear-cut and thoroughly sympathetic hero.
Waugh's conversion to Roman Catholicism did not noticeably change the nature of his next two novels, Black Mischief (1934) and A Handful of Dust (1934) although, in the latter novel, the elements of farce are subdued, and the protagonist, Tony Last, is recognisably a person, rather than a comic cipher.
Properly described, these games would be called second-person shooters, as the protagonist in them is a broadly identifiable You, rather than a richly drawn I, a character speaking in his own voice.
