It's interesting that archetypifying (is that even a word?) a character means stripping away much of what is complex and multivaried about him or her, and reducing them to a singular facet that can then be used as a lens into psychological and sociological interactions.
One of the more interesting grad-level classes I took was on biography, hagiography (lives of saints), and sacred biography (founders of a religion). The further along that sequence, the more simplified...no, not always simplified, but unified, the presentation of the personality and their actions becomes.
For me, I see a parallel between mythic-class and much of the superheroic genre in a similar way to what you're describing. Much of the interest in comics for the roughly last twenty-plus years for me has (unsurprisingly) been in the boundary, the interface between the biographic/human and the superhero/mythic. A classic example that admittedly breaks my time marker is Peter Parker and his mundane life difficulties interfering with Spider-Man.
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Date: 2007-08-02 03:08 am (UTC)One of the more interesting grad-level classes I took was on biography, hagiography (lives of saints), and sacred biography (founders of a religion). The further along that sequence, the more simplified...no, not always simplified, but unified, the presentation of the personality and their actions becomes.
For me, I see a parallel between mythic-class and much of the superheroic genre in a similar way to what you're describing. Much of the interest in comics for the roughly last twenty-plus years for me has (unsurprisingly) been in the boundary, the interface between the biographic/human and the superhero/mythic. A classic example that admittedly breaks my time marker is Peter Parker and his mundane life difficulties interfering with Spider-Man.