“In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are.” Characters’ construction in Chernobyl

There are many different heroic and anti-heroic characters’ building strategies, in particular, when it comes to referring to historical events and their fictionalization. In this regard, the comparison between the different ways of constructing the protagonists’ figures in television series such as Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) and in the movie, Chernobyl 1986 (Netflix, 2021) directed by Danila Kozlovsky, is significant. Both products refer to historically occurred and documented events relating to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster; but the forms of representation of the same events in the two different audiovisual narrations diverge. While the TV series claims a supposed correspondence to occurred historical events, however without proposing the series as a documentary or a docu-fiction, in the case of the Russian film the intention of fictionalization is clearer. As a matter of fact, the movie is a ucronia in which one imagines that historical events have gone differently than in reality. Therefore the questions are: how are the various heroic or anti-heroic identities constructed in the two narratives? Why are they represented in a particular way, and what is the function of these representations? Which cultural clash is taking place through these two different representations? And last but not least, which cultural representation can the viewer derive from the interaction of these two different narratives?