I had a hard time with this entry, not because of the source material, but in terms of where to analyze. The concept of Archetypes is easy enough to follow in Jung and Campbell…and I live in LA, so I know all about the Hero’s Journey.
But in terms of looking at the archetypes in my own work, I wasn’t making much progress. I thought about characters like Thea but it was hard to look at them in an archetypal sense, because I spent so much time making those characters real and distinct to me. But I made a connection through Campbell’s work. A Myth is a symbolic representation of an event of initiation in one’s life. Based on that principal, I should be able to examine people who were involved in these sorts of events in my life and find archetypal value in them.
The person in my past that came to mind was a former love from college the year that I lived in the dorms and started forming some of my working theories. She had the ability to pick up parts of you and absorb them into her own personality – body language, speech patters, the whole nine yards. Needless to say, when you’re confronted with yourself like that, it has an effect. For me, it helped me decide to refine my direction. If my life had been a myth, she would be an archetype that affects supernatural aid, in particular a shapeshifter.
This conclusion resulted in the module relationship below, which may be useful in developing more effective characters.
Technorati Tag Archetypes
