MISS DERMARK'S LITERARY RAMBLES: sophie

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domingo, 4 de mayo de 2014

ARCHETYPE TIPS FOR FICTION

Reason

Just as his title suggests, the Reason character is present in the story to provide a voice of logic. He is:

Someone who is fundamentally logical.
Someone who makes decisions based on logic, not emotions.
Someone who acts in logical ways.

EXAMPLES

C-3PO in Star Wars, Hamm in Toy Story, Inspector Gordon in Batman Begins, Herod (!) in Claudius the God... the Tin Man, Alice Liddell, Stannis Baratheon, Lloyd Asplund, Kristian in "The Ringstetten Saga", the Clever Princess and her intellectual equal in "The Snow Queen", Juan Carlos Ruiz in real life, Elinor Woods in my Hogwarts fics,

Emotion

If you’ve guessed that the Emotion character is pretty much the opposite of the Reason character, then it’s a gold star for you. The Emotion character is:

Someone who is fundamentally emotional.
Someone who makes decisions based on emotions, not logic.
Someone who may be negatively emotional (e.g., angry) or positively emotional (e.g., compassionate)—or both.
Someone who acts in emotional ways.

EXAMPLES

Mr. Ping in Kung Fu Panda, Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair, Melanie in Gone With the Wind... Many a character in the Game of Thrones series: Jaime Lannister, Brienne Tarth, Renly Baratheon (foil to Stannis), Loras and Margaery Tyrell, Theon Greyjoy... Luna Lovegood, the Cowardly Lion (foil to the Tin Man), most leads in "The Ringstetten Saga" (all three arcs, and except Kristian), Sandra Dermark (overlaps with Reason), María Calzada, Marian Woods in my Hogwarts fics, Kyle Glenriver (overlaps with Reason) in the selfsame fics (both foils to Elinor Woods)

A recent bible for creating fictional characters happened to fall recently into my hands.
I identify myself mostly with this character type/archetype:

The FREE SPIRIT: eternal optimist, she dances to unheard tunes. Playful and fun-loving, she travels through life with a hop, skip and a jump, always stopping to smell the flowers and admire the pretty colours. She acts on a whim and follows her heart, not her head.
Motivated by following her heart.
Virtues:
-sincere
-upbeat
-imaginative
Flaws:
-impulsive
-meddling
-undisciplined

4. Free Spirit—motivated by following her heart
· Virtues
· sincere
· upbeat
· imaginative
· Flaws
o impulsive
o meddling
o undisciplined - See more at: http://amberargyle.blogspot.com.es/2008/10/8-master-archetypes.html#sthash.yUr5l5P0.dpuf

The free spirit archetype is a quirky, talkative, charming, and unpredictable individual.

The free spirit character archetype will lighten a serious story, add comedy to a light tale, and just the right amount of unpredictability to any plot. Some well-known free spirits include Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe in Friends, Meg Ryan as Kathleen in You’ve Got Mail, and Emma in Emma by Jane Austen.

The Free Spirit is Eccentric

Following normal conventions is boring to a free spirit. Life should be lived with a splash, is her motto. Her eccentricity shows in her quirky habits, her unusual clothing, her hobbies, and her interests.

She may be an astrologer or an artist. She might be an actor or entertainer. Whatever she chooses as her career, it will be something where her creativity can shine and where the lines of convention and norms are blurry.

The Free Spirit is Talkative

The free spirit character archetype loves to talk. She is one of those characters that will chat about anything and everything, charming some people and irritating others, but everyone still thinks she is adorable.

Her charm lies in the fact that she can tune in to others’ feelings and be empathetic. Her empathy sometimes makes her think she knows more about how people are feeling than they themselves know, and she often sets herself up as a matchmaker.

At the same time, her ideas sometimes appear so far-fetched that others don’t understand her. This comes across humorously. She finds enjoyment in the littlest things, and shares them by telling endless tales.

The free spirit goes with the flow like a leaf floating on the surface of the water.

Free Spirit Relationships

The free spirit is sincere, upbeat, and cheers everyone up. Because she is so much fun to be around, she always receives invitations to parties and events. People don’t take the librarian seriously because of her unusual ideas and habits. Yet she can be highly intelligent, which makes these relationships frustrating for her.

In romance, the free spirit is most likely to fall for a character that is indulgent and patient. Even though he may not understand her process, he sits back and enjoys the show. The free spirit paired with the warrior will lead to humorous escapades (Rapunzel and Eugene, Anna and Kristoff, Liselotte and Gerhard/Hedwig and Alois/Katinka and Gustav Adolf).

Free Spirit Role in Stories

The free spirit serves equally well as the antagonist or the protagonist in a novel. As a protagonist, she injects humor, good feelings, fun, and excitement to the plot. As the antagonist, she is the person who makes everything go wrong for the hero/heroine.

The free spirit is always lighthearted, no matter what role she plays. She brings a ray of sunshine to even the darkest of stories, but she shines with her brightest light in comedies.

Katinka and many other of my female OC:s (in fact, most of them! Think Réna/Ilona, Hedwig, Ulrika) are Free Spirits as well, while the lead male roster in my works tends to consist of dark and conflicted Romantic heroes (Gustavus, Katinka's POW beau turned spouse, for instance).

Fictional examples: Luna Lovegood, Pinkie Pie, Madeline Hatter, Pippi Långstrump, Phoebe Flower, Ty Lee, Sophie in The Misfortunes of Sophie (more details here: http://al261200.blogspot.com.es/2014/04/hyper-girls-in-fiction.html)...

The dark form of the Free Spirit character is the Lunatic. A good idea would be pitting these two characters against each other as enemies:

The LUNATIC: the unbalanced madwoman, she draws others into her crazy environment. The drum to which she marches misses many a beat, but to her, it is the rest of the world that is out of step. Don’t even try to understand her logic – she is unfathomable.

A more complete personality typology listed me as a Mercurial. Think of a person with mercury poisoning (AKA Mad Hatter Syndrome): http://www.ptypes.com/mercurial.html

viernes, 18 de abril de 2014

HYPER AND ASPERGER GIRLS IN FICTION

Most hyperactive characters in fiction (reflecting the gender ratio of the disorder in real life) are obviously male. And, when energetic girls like Luna Lovegood, Pinkie Pie, or Ty Lee -who, like yours truly, also are the rare kind of extroverted Asperger's- show up on screen, they appear in a lead role, but not one of the most important (they're either featured as "major supporting characters" [Luna, Ty Lee], or share the spotlight with the rest of a team in which they're not the leader). Or so I thought.

The books are not called Luna Lovegood and Whatever Features
(I wish they actually were!).
Notice her reading upside down in her Establishing Character Moment.

A deconstruction of a lighter shade comes with Luna Lovegood's Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies, which have left her an easy target of teasing and ridicule amongst the other students. (In example, she tells that the Ravenclaw kids prank her by hiding her stuff and forcing her to search for it all alone). Consequently, Ginny Weasley had been pretty much her Only Friend at Hogwarts until her 4th year at the school... However, neither of these facts bothered her significantly, and she does what she can to live her life at the fullest.

It is also heavily implied that behavior (and that of her father's) is a coping mechanism for her mother's death.

Ty Lee is just the Perky Female Minion (hyper girl who happens to be a lieutenant in the evil organization), or PFM, in the enemy ranks. Like most other PFMs, she is good at heart and performs a heel-face turn at the end of the day, leaving and betraying Azula in The Boiling Rock.
Like Harley Quinn, now in the spotlight as part of that Suicide Squad...

Harley Quinn deconstructs the Perky Female Minion into Cute and Psycho after helping the Joker torture Robin, showing us that she was just another psychopath. Batgirl conveniently forgets that the only one of Joker’s potential victims Harley defended in the series was Poison Ivy and Arkhan Asylum's inmates. Harley was perfectly okay with The Joker torturing and killing Harvey Bullock, Charlie Collins, Sid the Squid, Carl Francis, Thomas Jackson, Batgirl's own father Commissioner Gordon, etc...:

Batgirl: How could you help Joker do it, Harley?

Harley Quinn: Okay, so he roughed the kid up a little. But I'll make it right.

Batgirl: Yeah, you're Mother of the Stinkin' Year!

Pinkie is the Element of Laughter. The comic relief and upbeat one of the mane six, but not their leader.

"Party Of One" deconstructs Pinkie Pie with her role as the Genki Girl. When people (well, ponies) start making up excuses to avoid her birthday party, and discovers them trying to do something without her, she extrapolates that everyone has gotten tired of her and gets clinically depressed as a result.

No hyper girls in lead roles, all of them restricted to the roles of the comic relief and the PFM. So I thought, until I met a couple of works or three that changed my mind on the subject.

France, nineteenth century, The Misfortunes of Sophie (Countess of Ségur).

Sophie is a gentry girl with dozens of wacky ideas and outrageous pranks, born and raised on a noble estate and "terrifying" all of its residents (parents, pets, friends, or servants). Making cold tea with clovers for leaves? Leaving a wax doll in the summer sun? Stepping on quicklime to take a shortcut? Passing out from too much cream and bread? Sophie does all of this and more! Her intentions are always good, but she gets always into scrapes...

Sophie, based upon the author's own childhood experience (she was a real-life "Sophie"!), became so popular that she wrote a sequel, The Model Girls. In which Sophie, unfortunately, loses her kindly parents in a shipwreck, when sailing to Louisiana, and gets a guardian who happens to be the textbook definition of "wicked stepmother." Does such a Dickensian turning point break her? Not even the least! In fact, the stern and somewhat sadistic Madame Fichini meets her Waterloo: the more she whips Sophie, the more pranks her defiant ward, afraid of the whip at heart, carries out. Snatching pears from a nearby orchard, keeping orphan hedgehogs as pets (Madame has a valet drown them in the garden pond), getting accidentally drunk on Madame's wine (she goes a little too far)...

In the end, Sophie's friends and servants discover that she is rebelling against her guardian, finally convincing Madame Fichini to give her ward painless punishments.

Sweden, 1941, Pippi Långstrump (Astrid Lindgren)

Pippilotta Virtualia Rullgardina Crossminta Ephraimsdaughter Långstrump.
Crown Princess of Curlycurly Isle, on top of that!

Astrid Lindgren has also created some other book series about hyperactive girls, like Maddikins or Lotta on Troublemaker Street, but Pippi remains the only one to attain international fame. Why? Because Maddikins and Lotta were normal girls who didn't make such a fuss in their home communities. And they were muggles without any special powers.

Margareta "Maddikins" (Madicken) Engström.

Lotta riding an oversized bike. With Oinkers, her favourite stuffed pig.

Pippilotta Virtualia Rullgardina Crossminta Ephraimsdaughter Långstrump (that's her full name, if you wonder!), on the other hand, has the strength of Hercules and the wit of Odysseus, an angel for a mother and a pirate captain for a father, a spider monkey and a speckled horse for pets, an impressive estate and treasure chests choc-a-bloc with pieces of eight. She's seen everything, learned on her travels how to do magic and to walk on her hands... and how to give the local Maths teacher, Mrs. Pryzelius, more than a disturbance. She's also helped in the arrest of criminals, leapt down a waterfall inside a keg, and most lately discovered that she's actually royalty (her father has been crowned king of Curlycurly Isle, which means she is...)!

I have seen Pippi many times on TV and on stage in Sweden, and I have even got a ragdoll of this freckled redhead, energetic and willful enough to storm the Bastille on her own!

USA, 2010, Phoebe Flower book series (Barbara A. Roberts)

I recognized myself in the titular character. A strawberry blond girl who makes trouble at school, at home, and on the streets. The people of her rather provincial local community (where she was born and raised, and she still lives) take for granted that her parents' divorce (she lives with her mother) is the cause of her impulsive behaviour and her excessively cheerful personality. But Phoebe Flower is always well-intentioned, meaning to cheer the others up or lend them a hand. One day, she is diagnosed with ADHD, which changes her perception of herself as well as others' percepton of her. Now Phoebe must learn to control herself and face the challenges ahead, while appreciating her own warm nature.

I wish these Phoebe Flower books were someday published in Spain!

There is even the Free Spirit archetype, which describes a hyperactive female!!:

Virtues:
-sincere
-upbeat
-imaginative
Flaws:
-impulsive
-meddling
-undisciplined