DPP: BSG and Archetypical Characterization

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Greetings and salutations, 'shipper nation! This is Amy, known on your internets as ninjamonkey73, and I'm driving the DPP bus this week. Sit back and enjoy the ride...

Let's get thinky about character archetypes!

I was going to try to summarize the wonderfully snarky and quasi-intellectual content I found over here at TVTropes.com, but there is simply too much and too many clickable links I followed. Go on over there and check out the list of commonly recurring character types in television. I'll wait...  *whistles Jeopardy theme to self*

I won't steal all the good ideas, but I will throw out a couple of quick examples to get the discussion going. Is there really any question that Kara fills the role of of the Anti-Hero? Did someone say father issues? Flashbacks to a dark and troubled past? This one goes without saying. Oh, and Tigh? Yeah, he's the Drunken Sailor! I especially like the reference to space being an ocean in that one.

But none of our beloved characters fall into just one of these archetypes, and therein lies today's discussion. Is Lee a Champion or a leader archetype? Or is he both and something else? Peruse the main list and tell us what you think!

Comments

[swamp-ariadne.livejournal.com]

omg, TVTropes is a black hole. once you get sucked in it is almost impossible to leave. (i think there's a page there for Tropers like myself who lost how many years of our life there...)

Maybe another question to ask is are any of our characters so original that they can be a Trope Namer, an original trope in themselves?

You can go to the BSG Trope page, and last I checked it's not as updated as can be hoped.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BattlestarGalactica

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

are any of our characters so original that they can be a Trope Namer, an original trope in themselves?

I love this question sooo much! I'll have to think about that one. :)

[swamp-ariadne.livejournal.com]

it seems unfortunate that Lee is already the poster child for Knight in Sour Armor. this might have been as early as the first showing of season 3.5

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

Where do you find the "common recurring character types" on that site? I've been looking around and can't find them.

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Is this what you're looking for?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CharacterizationTropes

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

Lee seems to strongly fit the "Knight in Sour Armor" as swamp_ariadne said above. This fits him perfectly.

I think Kara fits Hurting Hero pretty well.

Heroes are also not immune to personal tragedy and the memory of certain events and people can haunt them like everyone else. A Dark And Troubled Past can make them not even find peace in their sleep. The audience will love them for it, in that twisted and tender way they love The Woobie.

Different heroes handle this different ways. Some get dark and broody, some drink, some cease to care how they look. Some play the idiot, and some force a smile and crack bad jokes because if the whole world thinks you're happy, that many people can't be wrong. Can they?

Sometimes, the pressure gets too great, leading to anything from a Heroic BSOD, to a full-on Fallen Hero Face Heel Turn. Some heroes go Dont You Dare Pity Me, others are glad for a little comfort.

Still, heroes are heroes. They can and will rise above their weakness and pain and declare for everyone and the villain to come and see what they can do. And they'll do it, thus earning their happy ending.

She fits this pretty well, even if her ending was terrible.
She doesn't fit this perfectly well but it's hard to put Kara in a box. Out of the box is where she lives.

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I finally figured it out. :)

[eridani8.livejournal.com]

*Loves TVtropes*

This community being what it is, I'm interested to know how y'all would characterise L&K's relationship? Looking through some of the options on TVtropes, I'm somewhat undecided. They could be Star Crossed Lovers (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarCrossedLovers/), but then that doesn't really seem quite right. It's almost like they fit the Straight Will and Grace (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStraightWillAndGrace/), but instead of there being a lack of sexual attraction, they had totally abortively dysfunctional sexual attraction. There was definitely a lot of Will they or wont they (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitlekmxl4p7e1yni?from=Main.WillTheyOrWontThey), and I am sort of glad the writers avoided the cliche of a Last Minute Hookup (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LastMinuteHookup). I get the feeling that, regardless of how the viewership may have perceived Lee and Kara, the show's writers felt as if they had opened up a giant, unclosable can of worms with L&K and written themselves a Romantic Plot Tumor (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanticPlotTumor) and as a result we got the stupid, stupid events of Taking a Break. Either way, we got left with An Anchored Ship (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnchoredShip).

One thing that I think was an especially strong feature of BSG, was the way the writers tried so hard to avoid using standard archetypal figures. The main characters at least tend to overlap across multiple definitions and it made the plot interesting and difficult to predict. On the other hand, maybe that inability to predict came about as a result of writing inconsistency... hard to know, I guess.

I think characterising Lee as the Knight in Sour Armor (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KnightInSourArmor/) is mostly correct, but even he strays beyond the boundaries of that archetype from time to time. I'm thinking here of the Resurrection Ship arc where he seems more liable to give up, than fight the good fight regardless. Plus, I'm not sure that he dismisses the worth of the human race as a whole- he definitely seems to distinguish between the really bad guys, like the black market mafia on the Prometheus, and the rest of humanity at large. I don't think he sees humanity as inherently flawed or anything that extreme. So maybe he's just more of a straight up idealist, who is capable of a pragmatic point of view?