Screenwriting: Character Archetypes & Pivotal Characters

Last week Lights Film School held another live screenwriting lecture for our students. The lecture can be found below:

Screenwriting – Character Archetypes & Pivotal Characters
There comes a time when all your protagonist needs is a boost — something to change their immobility into actuation. “Pivotal characters” have the difficult job of launching action between our protagonists and antagonists. Find out why they are so crucial to the plot and when we can expect to have them give our heroes that much-needed shove. Here’s a hint: somewhere around page sixty…
Suggested reading: Jacob’s Ladder by Bruce Joel Rubin.

In this lecture we not only explored pivotal characters but also character archetypes. Character archetypes are an important part of the screenwriting craft because they are universally understood and recognized. Audiences tend to gravitate towards them.

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Message by:  Lights Film School
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Below you’ll find some of the more common archetypes:

Let’s start by exploring the protagonist archetypes.

Hero: This character pursues a goal to avoid a negative consequence. The “hero” archetype does not need to be an entirely positive person as long as they are interesting and have a sympathetic goal.

Audiences are often fascinated by a hero’s contradiction so you should design this character to be reasonably flawed. However, a hero will overcome their flaw by the end of the film.

Within the category of hero archetypes there are two main types:

1: Willing Hero (i.e. Batman)
2: Unwilling Hero (Bilbo Baggins)

Anti Hero: The classic hero is known for pursuing a positive goal. The anti hero on the other hand is known for pursuing a negative goal (i.e. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver).

Tragic Hero: A tragic hero is a type of hero with a tragic flaw (i.e. obsession, greed, envy) that pursues an active but misguided goal in order to achieve a positive result. However, in the case of the tragic hero, the goal turns out to be not in their best interest and therefore self destructive.

Often an anti hero is also a tragic hero. The main difference is that the tragic hero’s flaw can’t be overcome (i.e. Death of a Salesman)

Now let’s explore the antagonist archetypes

Antagonist: The antagonist (usually negative) is the person who challenges or obstructs your protagonist from achieving their goal. However, it should be noted that an antagonist isn’t always a “bad guy” or “negative”. For example, if your protagonist is a 16 year old girl with her main goal being ‘freedom”, her caring but overprotective mother could be seen as her antagonist snice the mother, even though her intentions are good, would be obstructing the protagonist from achieving her goal of freedom.

If you are having a difficult time identifying who your antagonist is simply examine your script’s climax and see who the protagonist is engaged with. The more personal you can make this relationship the better.

Sub categories of antagonist include:

Nemesis: A nemesis is a lesson antagonist. They usually co-exist with the main antagonist. Think of them as a “speed bump”.

Thank you for those of our students who attended and participated in this live lecture. We hope to see you in the next online lab chat.

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