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39 Intermediate Ar Archetype Character

Archetype

A familiar character pattern, such as the mentor or rebel.

What it is

An archetype is a character pattern your reader already knows. You write "her old sergeant" and a shape arrives: experience, impatience, a debt of some kind, probably a death coming. You've spent four words, and the reader has built a person out of everything they read and watched before they opened your book.

That speed is the whole value, and the whole danger. The reader built that person, not you. If you never add anything, the character stays theirs: generic, borrowed, familiar in the bad way. Readers who meet only the silhouette call the book thin, stock or cardboard, usually without being able to say why.

People use three words here as if they meant the same thing, and keeping them apart is the most useful thing on this page. An archetype is a pattern of function. It describes what a character does in a story: the one who teaches, the one who guards the threshold, the one who brings the news, the one who wants what the lead wants. It's neutral. Think of it as a slot on an organization chart, not a personality test result. A stereotype is a flattened generalization about real people, used as if it were characterization. The word came out of a print shop, where a stereotype was a solid metal plate that printed the same impression every time. Walter Lippmann borrowed it for Public Opinion (1922) to describe the fixed pictures people carry in their heads about groups they've never met. "Cliché" came from the same trade, as French printers' slang for that same block. Both words mean the thing that reproduces identically forever, and that's the whole accusation. A stereotype isn't a starting point. It's a substitute for looking. A trope is a recurring device or situation, and usually not a person at all. In classical rhetoric a trope was a turn of phrase. The modern sense is a convention an audience recognizes and a writer can lean on, and it caught on around the wiki TV Tropes, founded in 2004, which defines tropes as the devices and conventions a writer can count on already being in the audience's mind. Enemies to lovers is a trope. Only one bed is a trope. The grumpy innkeeper is an archetype. The difference matters for sales, because romance and romantasy marketing now sells on tropes, which name a situation, while craft books sell archetypes, which name a person. A book can be strong on one and empty on the other.

So an archetype is a job, a stereotype is a prejudice wearing a character's clothes, and a trope is a situation readers came for. When a reviewer says "stock characters", they mean archetypes left unfinished. When they say "stereotyped", they mean something worse, and you should take it seriously.

There's a second mix-up, and it causes most of the bad advice on this subject. The craft words for archetypes come from three unrelated places that get mashed together:

Mixing the three up costs you something practical. If you believe archetypes are personality types, you'll build characters out of adjectives. If you treat them as functions, you'll ask the only question that helps: what does this person do to my plot that nobody else does?

So how do you turn an archetype into a person? It takes one move, done properly. Add a specific, concrete detail that the pattern doesn't predict, and then make the story need it. You need both halves. "Unpredicted" alone gives you a quirk, like the assassin who collects thimbles, and readers see through quirks right away, because the story never uses them. "Needed" alone gives you a plot device. Together they give you a person: the detail contradicts the silhouette, and the plot can't go on without it.

Why it matters

Archetypes are the fastest fair shortcut in character work. If you publish three or four books a year, you can't build every walk-on character from scratch. An archetype gives you a working minor character in a sentence, and that's all a bailiff, a rival barista or a suspicious aunt needs. The skill is knowing which characters can stay at that level and which have to be finished. Anyone whose choices change the plot has to be finished.

They show you which jobs your cast hasn't filled. Lay the pattern names across your cast list and the holes show. Nobody is refusing your lead anything, nobody knows more than she does, nobody brings news. Or two characters are both the loyal friend, and neither is needed. Use this to find problems rather than as a casting call, because you don't have to fill every slot. Supporting cast covers how a cast gets built.

They carry a lot of the reader promise. Genre readers come for familiar figures as much as for events. Cozy mystery readers expect the amateur with local standing and the professional who resents her. Romance readers expect a certain flavor of hero. Giving them the expected figure isn't a failure of imagination. It's the deal you made with them. What readers won't forgive is the figure showing up empty. See reader promise.

They keep a long series from repeating itself. Across ten books you'll need many mentors, many rivals and many betrayers. If your only tool is "the mentor", book six reads like book two with different hair. If your tool is "the mentor function, filled this time by someone who doesn't want the job", you have room to work for years.

They explain a particular kind of bad review. "Cardboard", "stock", "I've read these people before", "I couldn't tell the two brothers apart." Those aren't complaints about the prose, and rewriting sentences rarely fixes them. They're the reader noticing that a pattern was never turned into a person.

They protect you from the opposite failure. Writers who've been warned about clichés sometimes overcorrect and end up with characters who have no recognizable function at all. Nobody teaches, nobody opposes, nobody wants anything the lead wants, and the result reads as shapeless rather than fresh. Archetypes are the skeleton that makes a cast readable. You're meant to put flesh on it, not throw it away.

Real-world examples

Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928): the archetype as a job, not a person

The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp studied around a hundred Russian wonder tales from Alexander Afanasyev's nineteenth-century collection, and he asked what stayed the same across them. His answer became the founding idea of this whole subject. What stays the same is the function, an action defined by what it does to the plot, while the characters who carry it out change. He set out thirty-one functions and grouped them into seven "spheres of action", each with a performer: the villain, the donor or provider, the helper, the sought-for person and her father, the dispatcher, the hero, and the false hero. The English second edition was translated by Laurence Scott and edited by Louis A. Wagner. The University of Texas Press published it in 1968, with an introduction by the folklorist Alan Dundes.

Two details in Propp will do more for a working novelist than any list of character types. One character can fill several spheres, and several characters can share one. The wise woman who arms your hero is a donor. If she also travels with him, she's a helper. If she turns out to be working for the other side, she was a villain all along. Nothing about her personality changed, only her function. So when you ask "which archetype is my character?", you're asking the wrong question, because the answer can be three, one after another.

Propp was also describing this one set of tales, not all of humanity. He said so. He was mapping the shape of one genre in one tradition. Every later scheme that claims to describe all stories everywhere is claiming much more than Propp ever did, on much thinner evidence.

Three vocabularies wearing one word: Jung (1919), Campbell (1949), Vogler (1985)

Almost every confident statement you'll read about archetypes is a claim about one of these three and an assumption about the other two.

Carl Jung took the word "archetype" from older usage and, in 1919, applied it to what he'd earlier called primordial images. His archetypes aren't characters. They're inborn tendencies with no content of their own. You can only detect them through the images and feelings they produce, and he insisted their number was open. Writers who say "the Jungian archetypes" and then list twelve aren't quoting Jung. That twelve-part scheme comes from Carol S. Pearson, who described six archetypes in The Hero Within (1986) and expanded to twelve in Awakening the Heroes Within (1991). The scheme reached its widest audience through The Hero and the Outlaw (2001), which Pearson wrote with Margaret Mark. That one is a branding book. It sorts the twelve by four motivations on two axes, for people positioning products. As a marketing framework it's perfectly reasonable. It's neither psychology nor craft, and calling it Jung's is the most common misattribution in this field.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published by Pantheon Books in 1949 as the seventeenth title in the Bollingen Series. He borrowed the term "monomyth" from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Campbell was a Joyce scholar and had co-written A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in 1944. The book gave the craft world the words hero, herald, shadow and threshold.

Campbell's idea is also disputed, and it's only fair to say so. The folklorist Barre Toelken made his case in The Dynamics of Folklore (Utah State University Press, 1996). He argued that Campbell could only build his single pattern by picking the stories that fit it and leaving out equally valid ones that didn't. Alan Dundes was blunter, in an essay collected in Grand Theory in Folkloristics (Indiana University Press, 2016). He treated the idea of archetype as the most damaging idea amateurs have ever brought into serious folklore study. Comparative mythology as a field has mostly moved away from very broad universal categories. None of that stops Campbell's vocabulary from being useful to you. It does mean you can't write "this is how all human stories work" in an author's note without being wrong. The Hero's Journey page covers the dispute too.

Novelists use Campbell's words at all because of a memo. In 1985, Christopher Vogler was working as a story analyst at Walt Disney when he wrote a seven-page document called "A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces". To prepare it, he spent a week in New York with a friend watching film clips, and then he let it loose inside the studio. It spread by fax, out of Disney and across town, before it was ever a book. Vogler expanded it into The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, published by Michael Wiese Productions in 1992. The 1998 second edition was retitled …for Writers, a third edition followed in 2007, and a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2020. His set of archetypes, which is Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally and Trickster, is the one most craft books are quietly copying.

The copying usually drops Vogler's own instruction. He asks readers to treat these as flexible character functions rather than rigid character types: masks, worn for a scene and then handed on. Obi-Wan Kenobi is the mentor and then, for one sequence, the hero. A character isn't an archetype. A character does an archetype, for a while.

Here's a small example you can check, and it shows how thin the ground under these words is. The archetype we call the mentor is named after Mentor, a minor figure in the Odyssey. Even the scenes that matter aren't really his, because Athena takes his form to guide Telemachus. The modern word reached English mainly through Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque of 1699, a French novel written for a royal pupil. So the label is late, borrowed, and attached to a disguise. Someone found it handy. Nobody discovered it.

Victoria Lynn Schmidt's forty-five, and Tami Cowden's sixteen: what a catalog is for

Two craft catalogs are worth knowing, because between them they cover most of how the word is used in publishing today.

Victoria Lynn Schmidt's 45 Master Characters was first published by Writer's Digest Books in 2001, with a revised edition in 2012. The count works like this. There are eight female and eight male core archetypes, each named for a Greek or Egyptian god and each given a heroic and a villainous version. Aphrodite is the Seductive Muse or the Femme Fatale, Artemis is the Amazon or the Gorgon, Demeter is the Nurturer or the Overcontrolling Mother. Then there are four friend archetypes, six rival archetypes and three symbolic ones. She illustrates them from film and fiction, and she clearly separates archetypes from stereotypes in much the same terms as this page. The stereotype is the cardboard cutout. The archetype is the model you build a real person on. Her subtitle sums up her case: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters.

Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever and Sue Viders published The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes through Lone Eagle in 2000, and it was reissued in 2013. It gives eight hero patterns and eight heroine patterns, with strengths, weaknesses, upbringing, and how each pairs with the others. You can still hear its vocabulary in romance craft talk twenty-five years later: the Chief, the Bad Boy, the Best Friend, the Charmer, the Lost Soul, the Professor, the Swashbuckler, the Warrior.

Use a catalog the way you'd use a paint chart. It's fast, and it stops you reaching for the same three characters in every book. It's useful at the moment when you know a scene needs somebody and you don't know who. What it can't do is finish the job, and neither author claims it can. A catalog entry gives you a temperament and a set of fears. It doesn't tell you what this person's ordinary Tuesday looks like.

Madeline Miller's Circe (2018): the detail the pattern does not predict

In Homer's Odyssey, Circe is an episode. She lives on an island and turns Odysseus's men into pigs, Hermes supplies the herb that protects him, and the story moves on. As an archetype she's the enchantress: powerful, dangerous, sexually threatening and hard to read. Centuries of retelling kept her just that.

Madeline Miller's novel came out from Little, Brown on April 10, 2018, and it's now part of the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read program. It turns the pattern into a person in its first pages, and it does it by contradiction. Miller's Circe is born in the house of Helios with neither her father's power nor her mother's charm. Her voice is thin, like a mortal's, and her family mocks her for it. She's a minor god who is bad at being one. Then she discovers witchcraft, and the first thing she does with it is disastrous and petty. She turns a fisherman she loves into a god, he chooses a nymph instead, and she turns that nymph into a monster out of jealousy. Exile follows, and later there's a son.

Look at what that costs and what it buys. It costs the archetype's menace on page one, and it buys everything else. You can't dig into "powerful and frightening". You can dig into "humiliated, mediocre and furious about it". Every later act of power means something, because readers watched her have none. Her cruelty stops being something all witches have and becomes one particular woman's bad night.

Notice too that Miller hasn't abandoned the pattern. Circe still lives on the island, still turns men into animals, still receives Odysseus. The silhouette is intact. Only the inside has been filled in, with material the silhouette couldn't have predicted. That's the whole technique.

Shrek (2001) and The Cabin in the Woods (2012): the subversion that became the convention

Subversion works, and then it stops working, and you need to understand both halves.

Shrek, released by DreamWorks in the United States on May 18, 2001, flipped expectations at full speed. The ogre is the hero, the handsome lord is the villain, and the princess is a good deal less delicate than advertised. It won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 74th Academy Awards. Twenty-five years on, the flip is the default in mainstream animation. A princess who can fight and a hero who belches don't subvert anything anymore. They're what audiences expect. The move worked so well that it became the convention, so you can't get the same effect from it now.

The Cabin in the Woods was written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard and directed by Goddard. It was shot in 2009, and Lionsgate released it on April 13, 2012. The film takes the next step and names the patterns out loud. Inside the plot itself, its five students are given horror's stock roles: the Whore, the Athlete, the Scholar, the Fool, the Virgin. The ritual they're trapped in needs those roles to behave and die in the traditional order. Whedon described the film as a loving hate letter to horror. It shows very clearly that audiences already know the catalog, and it marks roughly the point where subverting the types stops working. Once the joke is that the character is a stock type, the stock type has become the subject, and you can't also use it straight.

The fair craft conclusion is an unpopular one. Flipping an archetype is now a convention in itself, so a subversion that surprises nobody is just a different cliché with better press. "The mentor betrays the hero", "the chosen one isn't chosen", "the grizzled soldier is gentle" and "the villain was right" are all patterns your reader has met dozens of times. If your only plan for a character is to flip the expectation, the reader will be a page ahead of you.

Diana Wynne Jones made the point with a straight face thirty years ago. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland was published by Vista in 1996, DAW's US paperback followed in 1998, and a revised Firebird edition came out in 2006. It's an alphabetical tourist guidebook to the furniture of epic fantasy. Reading it is the quickest way to discover how many of your instincts are other people's habits. It doesn't suggest reversing every entry, because the alternative to a cliché is a specific person, not a mirrored cliché.

Why patterns recur, and what that does and does not prove

There's a strong version of the claim that patterns recur, and a weak version. The weak one is true.

The strong version says the same figures show up everywhere because they're wired into us, as something every human reader inherits. That's basically Jung's hypothesis, and no one has ever shown it by experiment. Folklorists who have looked closely tend to find the opposite: evidence of descent, with stories passed down like family lines, rather than of memory we're born with. In Royal Society Open Science in January 2016, Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani applied the methods biologists use to trace family trees of species. They used them on 275 "Tales of Magic" drawn from the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index, a catalog of over two thousand international tale types, across fifty Indo-European-speaking populations. A hundred of the tales clustered in a way that fit inheritance along population lines. Seventy-six of those held up when the researchers allowed for how close the populations lived to each other. One of them, "The Smith and the Devil", they argue plausibly reaches back to the Bronze Age.

Inheritance is a more interesting finding than the idea that the same stories are built into everyone, and much more useful to you. Stories are inherited the way languages are: copied, carried, changed and passed down. Your reader doesn't recognize the mentor because the mentor is printed on their genes. They recognize it because they've read four hundred books, seen a thousand films, and been handed the same equipment you were.

Add a plainer second explanation. The social roles recur because the situations recur. Every society has people who know more than the young, people who want the same scarce thing, people who arrive with news, and people who guard a door. A pattern that keeps coming back may be telling you something about how people live together rather than about the human unconscious.

In practice this gives you a license and a warning. The license is to use the patterns freely, because your reader really does know them and you can bank on that. The warning is not to tell your reader, or yourself, that a character works because it taps something eternal. If it works, it works because you made this one specific.

An everyday scenario: the mentor who was only a function

You're eighty thousand words into a second-world fantasy, one set in an invented world. Two beta readers have separately said the same thing about the woman who trains your lead: she's fine, but I forgot she was there.

You go and look. Her name is Ottoline Barratt. She's a retired harbor pilot who takes your protagonist on, teaches her to read currents, and says something wise at the end of chapter nine. She's killed in chapter twenty-six so that the lead has to manage alone.

Run the two tests. What does she do that nobody else in the book does? She hands out skill and then dies, which is the mentor function and nothing more. What's true about her that the pattern wouldn't have guessed? Nothing. Every fact you've given her is one the label already suggested.

So you add one specific, contradictory thing, and you make the plot need it. Ottoline doesn't want the job. She lost her license over a wreck she may or may not have caused, and she hasn't taken an apprentice in eleven years. She agrees only because your protagonist's mother is the harbor master who took her license away. Now the teaching scenes have an argument running under them. The wise line in chapter nine becomes suspect, because she has a reason to want the lead to fail in a particular way. And her death in chapter twenty-six settles something instead of just removing her, so the lead inherits a grudge rather than a lesson.

Nothing about the plot changed. One unpredicted fact went in, and the function became a person. That's the whole operation, and it usually takes an afternoon.

Try it yourself

Think of this as an audit. It works best on a draft you already have, and a full cast takes about an hour.

  1. Name the function, not the type. For each named character, finish this sentence in plain words: "In this book, X is the one who ______." Teaches, refuses, brings the news, wants the same job. If you can't finish it, you've found a character with no job, and that's a different and bigger problem.
  2. Write down the label you were working from. Beside each function, put the pattern you had in mind when you wrote the character: the grizzled veteran, the sunny best friend, the rebel, the cold matriarch. Getting caught out here is the point of the exercise. You can't move away from a pattern you won't admit you used.
  3. Run the deletion test on the label. Delete the label and read the character's three biggest scenes. If the label still fully explains everything they say and do, you haven't turned them into a person yet.
  4. Add one unpredicted, concrete fact. A quirk won't do. You want something about their history, their skills, their loyalties or their wants that sits awkwardly against the pattern. The teacher who has been wrong about something important. The rebel with a mortgage and a dependent. The loyal second who is loyal to someone else first.
  5. Make the plot need it. This step separates characterization from decoration. Find at least two scenes that change because of the fact you just added: a different line, a delay, a refusal, a piece of help held back. If you can't find two, the fact is ornament, and you should choose a different one.
  6. Check for duplicate slots. Two characters doing the same job is the most common cause of "I couldn't tell them apart". Either give one of them a different job or merge them, and merging usually makes the better book.
  7. Check what the reader was promised. Some genres come with expected figures. If yours does, make sure the expected figure is there and finished, rather than left out in the name of originality. Reader promise is the page for that judgment.
  8. Do it once, for the series. If this is book one of a long run, write down which functions you're deliberately leaving unfilled and which patterns you're saving. It costs far less than discovering in book five that every mentor you have is the same woman with a different accent.

A copy-and-paste version for your notes:

Character: __________ In this book, they are the one who __________ The pattern I was actually using: __________ One fact the pattern would not predict: __________ Two scenes that change because of it: __________ and __________ Anyone else doing the same job? __________

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Treating the archetype as the finished character. This is the most common failure by a wide margin. You chose the pattern, wrote the pattern, and stopped, and that's how "stock character" reviews happen. You can't see it from inside the draft, because the character feels familiar, and you mistake that for feeling real.

Believing the twelve-archetype chart is Jung. It's Pearson and Mark's branding framework from 2001, built on Pearson's earlier work on personal growth. Jung refused to fix the number at all. Cite the chart if you find it useful, but cite it correctly, and don't tell readers or reviewers that psychology backs your cast list.

Believing Campbell proved that all stories share one pattern. He argued it, and folklorists including Toelken and Dundes have argued he got there by picking his examples. The vocabulary is still useful. Don't repeat the universal claim as settled. See Hero's Journey, which covers the structure and its critics properly.

Mistaking an archetype for a personality type. Archetypes describe what a character does to the plot. MBTI-style types, star signs and enneagram numbers describe a temperament. If you build a character out of temperament, you get someone consistent and lifeless. Start from the function, then decide who this particular person is.

Confusing an archetype with a stereotype, in either direction. Some writers defend a truly stereotyped character by calling it an archetype. That doesn't work, because a flattened generalization about real people isn't a story function. Others panic about the mentor or the rival being clichéd and strip the cast of recognizable jobs, which leaves the book shapeless. The first is a problem of harm and the second is a problem of craft, and they need different fixes.

Assigning one archetype per character and freezing it. Vogler made this point himself. A character can be the herald in chapter two, the ally through the middle, and the shadow at the climax. Asking "which one is she?" gets you a worse answer than asking "what is she doing in this scene?"

Subverting as a plan rather than as a choice. Flipping is now the expected move, so "and then the mentor betrays her" surprises almost nobody. Flip an archetype when the flip means something about what your book is saying. Otherwise, being specific beats flipping every time.

Adding a quirk and calling it depth. The sniper who bakes, the assassin with an allergy. Quirks come cheap because the plot never touches them. The test is whether removing the detail changes any scene. If it doesn't, it's a costume.

Letting an archetype do the work that belongs to motivation. "He's the rebel" is not a reason to burn the warehouse down on Thursday. The pattern is a shape. Motivation is a reason, and flaw is a particular way of being wrong. A label can't stand in for either one.

Assuming the pattern predicts the arc. A mentor doesn't have to die, a rebel doesn't have to be tamed, and a nurturer doesn't have to sacrifice herself. Those are conventions that stuck to the patterns through repetition. Decide your character arc on the story's terms, not the label's.

Casting to a catalog instead of to a plot. If you work through a list and assign one of each, you get a tidy, oddly weightless cast. The list is for checking. The plot decides who the book needs.

Using archetypes to avoid the harder question. When a character isn't working, "which archetype is she?" feels like progress, and often it isn't. The question that does the work is what she wants in this scene and who is refusing her. See protagonist, antagonist and foil for the roles this table treats as their own elements.

Related elements