My husband the other day told me that he likes prologues that have nothing to do with the story. This boggled me, and I realized that I'd been thinking around this topic a fair bit lately without approaching it directly.
"Really?" I said. "Because I hate that. It's like I've been tricked. I get emotionally invested in this first character and then they never show up again."
Maybe this is left over from my high school English class where we learned that a book teaches you how to read it, what to expect, and then spent the year analyzing the first lines of everything we read. Or maybe it's from college where my Film Studies class said that the first scene teaches you how to watch a movie. Or from grad school, where they said that a video game teaches you how to play it, the internal rules, the implicit expectations.
"I like seeing the story from different characters' points of view," he explained. "Especially from characters that aren't involved. It gives things a sense of perspective."
He pointed out that this happens a lot in movies. The first scene will focus on the bad guy, showing just how awful they are and what their evil plot is, when the good guys won't be able to see it for themselves (and therefore it wouldn't come into the story if you stuck with their POV) until much later. Sometimes the first scene will focus on the victim of a crime: it'll show the event that sets off the rest of the story, even though the main characters aren't involved in that sparking event and aren't called in until later.
These make sense and don't bother me that much. But I find they are more common in movies than they are in books (or maybe that's just the kind of books I read). It's narratively efficient to show things this way. But in a movie, the prologue will be just a few minutes, where as in a book, reading it can take twenty minutes or so. 20 minutes out of a movie would be a sizable chunk of time. So it makes sense to me that I'm more upset about prologues in books, where I've already sunk a decent amount of time only to find out this is not the character I should care about.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a book I ready recently, did this. The book starts from the POV of a book rep from a publishing house, come to sell the winter collection to a small book store on an island. The rep has her own problems and back story outside of this set up, and it looks like shes the person we're going to get to know for the span of this book. I assume she's going to learn something about small town island life, or wax poetic about books, or something will happen to her at this meeting that will set off the rest of the novel. (At some point, I must have read the back cover of this book and then just completely forgotten it by the time I got around to it on my To Read list.) About ten pages in, she leaves the book store and the POV shifts to the owner of the book store, who is the actual main character of the book. Bah! Why? I liked the sales rep and this guy was kind of a jerk. The first time I tried to read it, I didn't make it too much farther into the story before turning to something else. Turns out she comes back later as an important character, and that the book makes a note (in a kind of lampshading, wink-wink way) that in novels, sometimes they follow random side characters for a few pages to flush out that they're fully developed. So there's a reason, but I didn't get far enough in the first attempt to learn that.
I've also been thinking about it with respect to my own work. I've been working on this beginning for way too long, which is silly because I'm positive that once I have a full draft, I'll end up completely rewriting it and making it so now there's an explosion or something instead. But one of my earlier attempts focused on the rival from down the street instead of on the main characters responding to that rivalry. It made it seem like the rival was going to be the main character, even from the first few paragraphs. When I switched over to the people I really cared about, the jump was jarring. So I refocused even though this was on a much smaller scale than a misleading prologue.