Archetype Fatigue

[mark_asphodel]

Eh.  This post was originally about something else altogether but I think this is a better issue than what I was originally banging on about re: "archetypes" in FE-land.  OK, so we've all seen fans going on about how they like X type of character.  Maybe it's mashing all alleged Devoted Knights[*] together so that Kent equals Seth equals Geoffrey equals whoever the hell, or maybe it's glomping all Angsty Wyvern Riders collectively[**], or all "Navarres" or all the "Julians" or... eh, whatever.  Y'all know what I'm talking about.  

And that, at least in 'fic, leads to the characters in question being blurred and mushed and just not themselves.  I'll never forget the 'fic I read that was allegedly about Navarre wherein the author deliberately used the characterization of FE7!Karel for Navarre because they knew Karel and didn't know anything in-depth about Navarre himself.  OK, we've talked about this phenomenon more than a few times.

But, actually... isn't the opposite kind of the case, if you're actually into the characters and not just the niche they fill?  I think what I've found, personally, is that if I latch onto a particular Pegasus Sister Trio, or a particular Angsty Wyvern-Riding Turncoat, and so on, then the other ones of that type just don't DO it for me.  I mean, I might have some (or a lot) favorable bias toward them, but it's just not the same intensity of feeling.  And the clone characters may be good characters, but they're just a little too similar along Axis X and a yet a little too different along Axis Y when compared to the character I actually love.

It's like the Dick York/Dick Sargent thing in Bewitched, in a sense.  Yeah, superficial resemblance.  Yeah, playing the role and reciting the dialogue.  But I liked Dick York better, dammit, so please bring Original Darrin back and send this impostor packing, stat.  And some people, somewhere, liked Dick Sargent better.  These people are wrong, but whatever.

But I think this gets to the heart of why I just can't work up any enthusiasm for, say, the FE6 Pegasus Trio sisters or other characters who strike me as too much the New Darrin when held up against a character I actually like.  I lovelovelove Palla-Catria-and-Est.  Something about the FE6 girls just feels kind of hollow to me, whereas the FE7 Peggies have moved enough along the "same" and "different" axes that I like them a good deal better[***], and then by FE8 we still have three Peggies but only Syrene's hairstyle hews all that close to the template.  

(And you can argue that green-haired sisters Syrene and Vanessa are evoking Mahnya and Fury instead, but they are most certainly NOT replicants of Mahnya and Fury.  Syrene and Vanessa are, um, Syrene and Vanessa.)

Anyway, I don't know if anyone else gets their hackles up when confronted with the New Darrin phenomenon in Fire Emblem, but I'd sure like to hear it if you do.  Because it does seem to explain why I just can't warm up to some characters even though, working off a characterization/archetype checklist, I "should" be crazy about them.

Note: This is one criticism I cannot level against FE13.  Chrom and Cordelia aside, I don't think there was anyone in FE13 who really set off my New Darrin radar.  And if there was, I've mercifully forgotten it. 

* Usually "all the ones they know about," as in nothing pre-FE7 and nothing from the Archanea reboots.  This is probably a good thing, at least for me.  

** Ditto.  They're not gushing over Dean.  

*** Mostly Farina's doing.

Comments

[raphiael]

Sometimes I feel obligated to like a character because they're "my type", and then I feel kind of bad if I don't. Like I'm being unfair or inflexible or something, the way I feel about people who are still whining about Eirika purely because she's not Lyn. Usually I can step back and realize I've got something I like in everything, so it's not that. I can definitely relate to this.

I sort of feel this way most strongly about Heath, I think? I'm not sure why I like him, but I do. Cormag's interesting, but I don't feel super attached to him, and I feel pretty much nothing toward Jill or Haar or Zeiss, etc. When there's an "archetype" that interests me, it's usually not the surface stuff, the stuff people point to for "archetypes" - it's a shared thing that makes me want to look deeper. Like my "shaman bias" is really more of a thing for people playing with forces way beyond their reckoning and being interested in how they deal with that. That kind of thing.

And sometimes the eye-rolling at archetype repetition gets turned on its head. At first I was all "I've killed this guy already before, IS" at Pelleas, but then he surprised me. The similarity to older characters is interesting to pick at, still, but for me it's easier to really get into someone when they're notably different from someone I already know. I expected to like Levin when I got into Jugdral, because I already liked Elphin, but I didn't really get into him until the whole second-gen thing, because it was so not what I'd seen before.

[amielleon]

I think that explains a lot about your fondness for Laurent. If you want the "researcher" in FE13, that's Miriel and Laurent, and Miriel sounds like she's regurgitating a thesaurus. The dark mages, by contrast, have a decidedly shamanic* aura to them.

* Which is ironic considering that this isn't the game in which they're actually called shamans.

[raphiael]

Huhh, it might be that. I can't deny liking nerds. But I also kind of have a thing for the sort of organic-feeling "shamanic" magic -- it's something I really dig in Saleh, for example, and Pelleas isn't exactly getting his magic from research and nerdery from what we see.

I guess I feel like where FE13 talks about dark magic, it's often magic willingly doing things that skeeve me out, rather than that whole sense of ancient beyond-human-comprehension supernatural force. (Henry's talks with Ricken kind of hit on that scary-force thing, which is why I like them). I like Henry well enough, probably a bit more than Lleu now that I've put thought into him and definitely more than Salem or Niime or Sophia, but I feel like it's for reasons outside what makes me usually like dark magic characters. If I were to write something with Henry, it probably wouldn't be my usual ethical/moral/emotional picking at dark magic; it'd be completely elsewhere.

Thinking about it, the few times I've felt surges of interest around Erk, it's when I remember the Pent support where Pent's like "hey this stuff can and will kill you so don't be dumb".