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One of the most pleasant aspects of the livejournal world: one discussion leads to another, with aspects you'd never have thought of on your own. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astrogirl2 continued her line of thoughts on John Crichton and hero archetypes
here;neuralclone pointed out
here that while the Wise Old Man/Young Hero version of the mentor/protégé relationship got increasingly battered in recent years as far as genre is concerned, we've got presentations of successful mentor/protégé bonds which grow instead of lessen... but not exactly where you'd usually expect them. She offered Scorpius and Braca, as well as Londo and Vir, and talked about parallels which had not occurred to me before...
Simultaneously,andrastewhite in her comment to yesterday's ponderings reminded me of the extremely ambiguous origins of the Merlin prototype, comparing the Merlin of old to a combination of the rising Trickster and the falling Sky God. This in turn made me think of the Trickster-as-Mentor, something which does come up in pop culture more than once in recent years. The first example I thought of was Methos on Highlander: The Series, who certainly fulfils just this position for the show's hero, Duncan MacLeod. Of course, the advantage of having a Trickster character in a mentor function, from a narrative pov, is that he/she is a wild card, a character which does not follow fixed parameters and whose lessons, while necessary to the story, might not always be good ones. I'm not using the word "good" in a moral/ethical sense here; to use a Farscape example, certainly Harvey qualifies for the Trickster position in John's life, but in his earliest incarnation as the chip-driven neural clone he also caused John to kill Aeryn, which imo has a lot to do with John's later obsession to save Aeryn at all costs, including the rest of the galaxy. Even Scorpius in a way could qualify for the Trickster archetype, though he is more a shadow self, which is not mutually exclusive; in any case, he and John are agents of change for each other, a function usually inherent in Tricksters.
Trickster-as-Mentor: Wednesday (aka Odin) in American Gods by Neil Gaiman certainly qualifies as well. Many fanfic writers, fascinated by Tricksters in TV shows, make the mistake of whitewashing them and giving them solely beneficial intentions towards the hero. Not so Neil Gaiman. Wednesday is a fascinating character, and certainly Shadow becomes not just your ordinary hero but a more real, feeling, and sovereign person through Wednesday and his machinations, but at the same time, Wednesday's aims are as wrong as it gets.
Speaking of Neil Gaiman: I finally acquired a copy of the first issue of 1602 and...
( cut for spoilers )
astrogirl2 continued her line of thoughts on John Crichton and hero archetypes here;
neuralclone pointed out here that while the Wise Old Man/Young Hero version of the mentor/protégé relationship got increasingly battered in recent years as far as genre is concerned, we've got presentations of successful mentor/protégé bonds which grow instead of lessen... but not exactly where you'd usually expect them. She offered Scorpius and Braca, as well as Londo and Vir, and talked about parallels which had not occurred to me before...
Simultaneously,
andrastewhite in her comment to yesterday's ponderings reminded me of the extremely ambiguous origins of the Merlin prototype, comparing the Merlin of old to a combination of the rising Trickster and the falling Sky God. This in turn made me think of the Trickster-as-Mentor, something which does come up in pop culture more than once in recent years. The first example I thought of was Methos on Highlander: The Series, who certainly fulfils just this position for the show's hero, Duncan MacLeod. Of course, the advantage of having a Trickster character in a mentor function, from a narrative pov, is that he/she is a wild card, a character which does not follow fixed parameters and whose lessons, while necessary to the story, might not always be good ones. I'm not using the word "good" in a moral/ethical sense here; to use a Farscape example, certainly Harvey qualifies for the Trickster position in John's life, but in his earliest incarnation as the chip-driven neural clone he also caused John to kill Aeryn, which imo has a lot to do with John's later obsession to save Aeryn at all costs, including the rest of the galaxy. Even Scorpius in a way could qualify for the Trickster archetype, though he is more a shadow self, which is not mutually exclusive; in any case, he and John are agents of change for each other, a function usually inherent in Tricksters. Trickster-as-Mentor: Wednesday (aka Odin) in American Gods by Neil Gaiman certainly qualifies as well. Many fanfic writers, fascinated by Tricksters in TV shows, make the mistake of whitewashing them and giving them solely beneficial intentions towards the hero. Not so Neil Gaiman. Wednesday is a fascinating character, and certainly Shadow becomes not just your ordinary hero but a more real, feeling, and sovereign person through Wednesday and his machinations, but at the same time, Wednesday's aims are as wrong as it gets.
Speaking of Neil Gaiman: I finally acquired a copy of the first issue of 1602 and...
( cut for spoilers )
