Contextual Studies: Fairy Tales, Cosplay and Archetypes

During our final lecture on Representation, we was presented with various new books and ideas about fairy tales, cosplay and archetypes. Starting with archetypes, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that the human psyche was composed of four components:

• Conscious Personality: This is the part of our psyche we develop as we grow.
• Personal Unconscious: The aspect of the psyche we are not aware of which often appears in dreams or as creative ideas.
• Collective Unconscious: Dispositions that are inherent and common to everyone and made up of universal themes and ideas – i.e. archetypes.

• Self: The totality of the personality. 

Within the collective unconscious, he states that there are a few specific archetypes that relate to thoughts or images that have universal meanings across cultures, deriving from historical roles in life.  He claimed numerous archetypes, but paid specific attention to a select few:

• The Persona (or Mask), which is the outward face we present to the world, concealing our true selves. 
• The Anima/Animus, the mirror image to our biological gender, such as the unconscious female side in males and the unconscious male side in females, with each sex manifesting attitudes and behaviour of the other as a result of living together for centuries.
• The Shadow, the more chaotic, wild, darker and potentially troubling side. It is the source of both destructive and creative energies. 

http://changingminds.org/explanations/identity/jung_archetypes.htm

http://www.simplypsychology.org/carl-jung.html

Carol Pearson was heavily inspired by both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell's works, creating six archetypes in her book The Hero Within (1986) before expanding it to twelve in Awakening the Heroes Within (1991), eventually leading to the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator. This is used to determine which core personality archetype might be active in a person's psyche at any given time. It consists of 72 questions with the Likert Scale numbered responses (with 1 being Strongly Disagree and 5 being Strongly Agree). From this a score is totaled for each of the archetypes in order to indicate the strength of the traits within each archetype at any given moment. The twelve archetypes are as follows:

• The Innocent
• The Orphan
• The Warrior
• The Caregiver
• The Seeker
• The Lover
• The Destroyer
• The Creator
• The Ruler
• The Magician
• The Sage
• The Jester

Using these archetypes, you can identify the traits of each archetype within character's in order to push narratives forward and to identify characters further, as well as building character's and narratives around these classifications, almost in a similar manner to how some games build characters around roles and fighting classes such as a ranger, warrior etc, and in a sense could even directly tie in with one another. 

Cosplay is a portmanteau of costume and play, and is a phenomenon at conventions and online communities. Much like how designers use fairy tales to create their own unique twists and takes on the characters and stories, cosplays do so in a much more physical manner, by bringing fictional characters into the real world and living the role as that character. Similar to the likes of fan art and fan fiction, it allows the fan or viewer to take their own role and view on the character, or bring them into their own worlds and continue that character's story. An interesting thing to note is how the cosplay community is dominated largely by women, as opposed to comics and video games being suggested to be dominated by men, the sources of which the characters being cosplayed originate from. This bridges the gap between the supposed gender division and allows women to showcase their interest and love for video games and comics more defiantly. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/why-comic-book-guys-are-quivering-at-cosplay-gender-insecurity/383617/

Charles Perrault laid the literary foundations down for fairy tales and began a whole new genre as a result, writing the likes of Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood. However, due to various adaptations of the stories aimed for children, the stories have changed to varying degrees depending on the creator of the adaptation as a result; reshaping, deconstructing and even mashing up various fairy tales in order to create new and unique takes on the stories. This has resulted in various adaptations of the characters and re-imaginings in various different lights, similar to cosplay, although to more extreme results to the point that the characters are vastly different. In a sense, it is almost similar to fan art; taking the characters and plots and setting them in your own world with your own imagining and takes on the characters, twisting the roles and points in the story to create a unique twist to the traditional tale. These vary from very child friendly stories such as those created by Disney, to much darker tales such as those seen in the video games The Wolf Among Us. Fairy tales also can lay the foundations for story plots or even minor events within a larger plot due to the iconic nature of some fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, and how they are written. Part of Charles Perrault's work laid down the structure of a fairy tale, which in turn links to The Hero's Journey. Vladimir Propp also created a plot structure, as well as character archetypes after analysing basic plot components in Russian folk tales and fairy tales:

• Absentation
• Interdiction
• Violation
• Reconnaissance
• Delivery
• Trickery
• Complicity
• Villainy
• Meditation
• Beginning Counter-Action
• Departure
• First Function of the Donor
• Protagonist's Reaction
• Acquisition of Magical Agent
• Transference
• Struggle
• Branding
• Victory
• Liquidation
• The Return
• Pursuit
• Rescue
• Unrecognised
• Unfounded Claims
• Difficult Task
• Solution
• Recognition
• Exposure
• Transfiguration
• Punishment
• Wedding

This layout is very similar to a long winded or extended version of The Hero's Journey, which is an effective narrative that can be twisted and altered to create a wide variety of interesting and unique stories.

There is also a character theory developed by Propp which indicates 7 broad characters types within 100 tales he analysed:

• The villain (struggles against the hero)
• The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)
• The (magical) helper (helps the hero in the quest)
• The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative)
• The false hero (perceived as good character in beginning but emerges as evil)
• The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)
• The hero (victim/seeker/paladin/winner, reacts to the donor, weds the princess)

It is clear that these can easily be applied to various medias including games, and often is. This list resembles a listing that could easily be seen within a RPG style game. For example, the video game Tales of Symphonia easily follows this *SPOILERS*

• The hero is Lloyd Irving (the main character).
• The princess is Colette Brunel (the chosen that must become an angel in order to save the world, as well as the love interest of Lloyd Irving).
• The helper is Genis Sage and the rest of the team once acquired.
• The false hero is Kratos Aurion (initially a team mate but later revealed to be an enemy).
• The other three roles can be taken on by multiple characters.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProppsFunctionsOfFolktales