Storycraft: The Bad Boy, the Best Friend, and the Goody Two-Shoes

hey folks David Stewart here it's time to do a little bit more story craft and today I'd like to talk a little bit more about character archetypes specifically three character archetypes that are primarily associated with secondary characters these are the bad boy the best friend and the goody two-shoes now before I dig into the meat of this little presentation let me say that these are starting points not past that you must follow of course I implore you to do any of these that you want to or not do any of them and do them your own way I'm just presenting patterns that I've observed in art over the years and the centuries even and not really trying to impress upon you a particular way that you have to do things if you're a creator so with that let's jump into the first one the bad boy the bad boy is a very popular character archetype again these are primarily associated with secondary characters because these tend to operate as foils to your main protagonist but there are plenty of stories where a bad boy is the main character so a bad boy tends to be very brash arrogant competent often handsome particularly if it's a male character sometimes cruel sometimes distant and very often nihilistic and the point of a bad boy character is to present a character that has a particular kind of growth art and so there's something that happens with most of these secondary characters just like a protagonist is that you have a type of growth art that happens in the character so the bad boy if you want to think of a great example I can't think of a better one than Han Solo from Star Wars han Solo starts off as a character who is a criminal he's a smuggler he is pretty nihilistic he doesn't really believe in the force he doesn't really believe that there's good or bad in the world he doesn't like the Empire but he thinks that the rebellion are mostly a bunch of idiots for trying to actually take down the order rather than just operate with it as a constant and you know be criminals within it and over the point of three movies he has several different girl arcs but the first one is probably the most profound he goes from a character that doesn't believe in anything to a character who finally does believe in something so he goes from a character that's mostly nihilistic and doesn't really care about the plight of the rebellion or anybody else besides himself very selfish character and at the end of Star Wars he comes back in he saves Luke thus allowing Luke to you know complete the mission blow up the Death Star and allow the rebellion to have victory over the Empire so that's a really important thing and he even has kind of a dark night of the soul right before the battle where he's packing up his money his reward for saving Princess Leia and Luke kind of rebukes him he says oh you know taking care of yourself that's what you're best at and Han kind of says like yeah may the force be with you like I'm gonna let me give you this Olive Branch act I'm not I don't want to be a bad a bad guy but I kind of have to be and then of course he decides to come back at the end and involve himself in the battle and actually commit to doing something that has moral consequences and then in the second movie he also has some character growth that's pretty important because he ends up having character growth that operates in opposition to Leia's and I'll talk about some of that a little bit so one of the things that you see really prominently with bad boy type characters even if there is a protagonist and you can have them as a protagonist but usually you have them as a secondary character because they're often if they're not like a friend of the protagonist like in Star Wars they are a love interest of a female so bad boys are primarily male characters but you could have a female character just most of those traits tend to be associated with males more often than females but for whatever reason the bad boy is very attractive as a potential mate for a female character and I think that has a little bit to do with with female fantasies where you have a bad boy tends to be like a an alpha male like like James Bond is a bit of a bad boy as a protagonist and the desired growth artist is to change this alpha male who's highly competent usually you don't have bad boys that are that are bad at what they do they're usually good at something that's part of where their arrogance comes from and transform them into something where they maintain the competence and the confidence and the sexually attractive parts of the bad-boy but they've also changed into a more responsible honorable male so you get kind of the best of both worlds that's a really really frequent thing that you see in romance plots Leia and Han Solo or a great one at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back there's some of this very this very kind of straightened dialogue where Han Solo is is is trying to get Leia to say that that she cares for him and of course she won't do it because she considers Han Solo you know a ruffian and nothing she calls him a you know scruffy had a nerve hurt or she insults him and then by the end of the movie she's come around to where she actually loves him because she's seen more of the depths of his honor because she's seen him change from the first movie and because he he has changed from a very rebellious harsh character to somebody who who was really very honorable so that transformation happens in the second movie and kind of finishes off in the third movie though in the third movie he doesn't really do a whole lot of groan a whole lot of growing but that's a great example and that same growth arc also happens in the solo movie to a certain extent you have a character who starts as Honorable and becomes less honorable through you know through the mechanisms of his life and then you know he at the end ends up kind of making a pro moral decision it's a little bit if you look at solo and the decisions towards into the movie they're a little bit early for the characters overall growth considering where he came from in the very first Star Wars movie but you still have that same repetition in that case you do have the bad boy as a protagonist now some of the movements of morals if you want to think about these in RPG terms usually a bad boy is not an evil character he's a chaotic character or a neutral character a character that doesn't really view good and evil as opposite terms but rather just those are things that other people are committed to and he's commit or to himself so it's really a character growth from selfishness to caring about other people rather than from evil to good so usually it's from neutral or chaotic to lawful or good and that's kind of the the growth art usually a bad boy is not is not as attractive if he's straight-up evil at that point you have kind of a redemption of an evil character it tends to be handled a little bit differently so let's move on next one is the best friend or the second banana the best friend character is one of the oldest in literature you see it even in Shakespeare you have you know Horatio and you have you have lots of different characters that are secondary characters you have a cashius tu tu tu Brutus you have Octavius the Marc Anthony right you have lots of these characters that are the best friend and they kind of operate as a foil to whoever is the protagonist and they represent a different set of character traits usually character traits that are a little bit less admirable than the main character so a great example for more contemporary sources that Shakespeare would actually be Lord of the Rings so Sam wise is the quintessential best friend he is very steadfastly loyal to to Frodo so he is a virtuous character he's in no way an evil character compared to Frodo he's just as virtuous as him but he's not as competent so he's not as intelligent as Frodo he's not as worldly he's not as understanding but he's very very loyal and steadfast and he's very personable as well he has an understanding of people that Frodo sometimes doesn't get here's you'll notice in the third Lord of the Rings movie it's Sam who really understands Gollum better than Frodo Frodo sympathizes with the Gollum struggle but Sam understands that Gollum truly is wicked and so his more simple understanding of Gollum is ultimately the correct the crown assessment and so what you see with the secondary characters is or you could think of like Friday from from Robinson Crusoe god there's so many the secondary character in this case usually tends to be say homely compared to the handsome Frodo you have a character who's maybe less smart than the protagonist another great example would be Sherlock Holmes and dr. Watson but that secondary character provides something that the protagonist lacks so if we look at Sherlock Holmes and Watson Watson's personable just like Samwise and Watson will often provide humanistic insights where Sherlock Holmes is very erudite and focusing on logic and things like that and and Sherlock will often comment that that Watson has made has allowed him to make an epiphany by viewing things at a different angle that is is atypical for Sherlock or you could look at this here's another great one is Spock from Star Trek Spock represents a real foil to the captain they're kind of opposites in some ways the captain's passionate Kirk is is very brash and he's very calm confident in himself Spock is more cautious Spock as logical Spock is detached and Spock allows Kirk to have some of his detached Ness and Kirk allows Spock to have a little bit more passion and a little bit more humanistic fall so they work kind of together to to supplement the the traits of one another and likewise the the best friend character tends to have a growth arc of his own that's somewhat related to the protagonist so while Samwise for example is is weaker than Frodo and in many respects his growth arc is is towards a more worldly virtuous and brave character and that really takes off when Frodo gets stabbed by shale of the spider and gets captured and Sam has to take the ring and has to take the sword sting as the defend Frodo has to rescue him and ends up really becoming the driving force at that final part of the narrative he really steps up to the plate and rather than being a follower has to be has to be really at the same level as Frodo rather than becoming rather than having a subservient relationship like Sam wise is photos assistant Sam wise is now photos equal by the third by the third act of Lord of the Rings and that's that's an important part of the growth arc of Sam wise and that's something that you can see in a lot of best friend characters as they kind of rise to the occasion you could think if you've read a wheel of time there's Rand and then there's his friends and his friends end up rising to be very important as well and so you tend to go from passive to active you know from a naive kind of character to a more worldly and erudite and a more intelligent and more well-rounded character and from somebody who starts at a lower status and goes up to a higher status so very often the life was Sam wise he's a gardener and he ends up being elevated if you look at the I guess some of the epilogues of Lord of the Rings he becomes mayor of Hobbiton he becomes this his family becomes the most prominent Hobbit family as a result of his growth not just because he has status from from destroying the ring but because he has changed and that's one of the important things about the real ending of Lord of the Rings is the hobbits come back changed in a way that shows to the audience and shows to the other hobbits how much growth and how much strength they've gained through their perilous journey let's move on to the third personality type that you see very often as a secondary character and that is the goody two-shoes you can look at the goody two-shoes a bit like an inversion of the bad boy but it tends to function kind of on its own a goody two-shoes if you're not familiar with this term because some people you know alright from the US a goody two-shoes as a character who's overly obsessed with following the rules so if we go back to those those role-playing game alignments a goody-two-shoes is always lawful now goody two-shoes could be lawful evil if you want to be creative but they're always subservient to Authority some level there there either are going to invoke the rules evoke a code that they live by they're generally a lawful character and usually a lawful good character and just like with the bad boy there's sometimes tensions between the bad boy and the protagonists in this case the goody two-shoes exists specifically to create attention over lawfulness so a great example of a goody two-shoes from very contemporary fiction would be Hermione Granger from Harry Potter which most most of you are familiar with right away from the beginning of the series she's introduced as someone who's too smart for her own good who studies harder than everybody else who is dedicated to following the rules without exception and she really has a lot of friction with her friends because her friends don't view the rules in the same way she does the rules are something created by Authority they don't have validity of their own and they're there mostly to keep them from from achieving what they want to achieve and so her character arc is a bit like an inversion of the bad boys and that's why these two kind of look like opposites is that a goody two-shoes goes from a perspective of being you know lawful to being a little bit more chaotic and and being a little bit more okay with bending the rules breaking the rules and tends to be more critical of authority by the by the end of the arc now it's not a true inversion it's not a true inversion because you're not moving from something nihilistic and selfish to something for the group the goody two-shoes really is moving from something that is systematized to something that is more for the group so it's still a positive growth it's still a growth towards something good but it's not necessarily a growth towards something lawful it's a growth towards being a little bit more lawful being a little bit more critical of authority and you can see that in the very first Harry Potter book if you read it or to watch the very first movie it's the same thing she goes from being a goody two-shoes to finally agreeing with her friends that they need to break the rules because there's such an imminent threat there's such an imminent danger at play in the final act of the that they need to break the rules and she's rewarded for breaking the rules and that's kind of her continual cycle Isaac you need two guys and if all the rules the rules are there for good reasons okay you guys have convinced me there's a good reason to break the rules and that's really how she ends up growing and so and oddly a part of the inversion very often you see the goody two-shoes as a love object for a male character and I think this has to do with a little bit of the inversion of of sexuality there the difference between male and female sexuality is that males tendo tend to tend to want you know there's an old saying like you want to you want a virgin at the wedding but like a demon in the sack so you wanna you want a woman who is essentially very pure and very forthright and very honest but you also want her to be a little bit more of rebellious for you by yourself so that's kind of the male fantasy is to have them again the best of both worlds to have a very exciting female companion but one who's also very loyal and one who's also very very moral and steadfast so to have both of those things and so that's kind of Hermione Granger and most goody-two-shoes characters if they're a love interest of some kind of protagonists they tend to move from an area where they are aloof and unresponsive to to a protagonist or to a male love interest to one where they finally accept the male love interest and have changed themselves to not have quite the same standards or to change their standards a little bit to allow this this male to to convince the the the kind of cold female to warm up so to speak so that tends to be a little bit of the of the the dynamics that they get that are at play there so their growth arc tends to be from cautious to a little bit more brave from a what you might call an Indian sense like a slave morality to a more master morality going from intent towards consequences and you tend to go from something where you're it's pure erudition like with Hermione gray meaning a very thoughtful character very smart to something that's erudition tempered with wisdom they gain experience and so they realized the limitations of knowledge a lot of times they lose confidence but that confidence allows them to operate better in the story and be more competent overall so hopefully this little presentation has been interesting for you all that is the bad boy the best friend and the goody two-shoes these are three very popular secondary characters you can use them in ways I've described I'd use that as starting points or avoid them entirely if you want to I tend to with my characters kind of pick things out of them so if you want to think about my books you wanna look at my book so a needle ash which is the last book that I came out with I have a best friend character that's that's in Jellico and he's Michaels best friend and he operates if it is a bit a bit as a best friend as a foil to Michael where Michael tends to be extremely ready to act Angelico's a little bit more cautious where Michael mmm is not quite as good with women Angelico's good with women so he he operates kind of as an opposite to Michael and by the end of course Angelico has has raised the status a bit so he's not so much a passive follower he's a bit of a leader he engages in the in the final battle with the with his with his friend Michael and and gains a little bit of status from that gains a little bit of independence and kind of comes and was owned a little bit as a as his own actor and the last and last third of the story so I tend to think like that I have you know in my Muramasa book I have Muramasa saying oh the the swordsmith he's a bit of a bad boy character but I use that as a starting point and I tend to tend to do my own things with them I don't try to be too strict in following exactly what other people do you kind of think about okay what they did how did it work how was it effective and can I do some of the same things in my story that's how I tend to approach it so hopefully you like this I will check you all next time don't forget to Like a comment and subscribe if you're interested in reading my books make sure you're on my mailing list DBS press.com slash list so you can get the books early before I come out with them and otherwise you can find them on Amazon or check DVS press comm and I should have links up to various places that you can buy them I think they're all wide now except for water of awakening water of awakening is the only Amazon exclusive left so hopefully that you know that might pique your interest into into looking into my fiction as well thanks so much and have a great great day you

Channel: David Stewart

Views: 22,713

Keywords: movies, star wars, books, fantasy, science fiction, writing, publishing, music, review, guitar

Id: Vc22NbMAfmY

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2018