Tropes(?)

I said a few days ago that I was going to write about tropes. I take it back. I don't think that's the right term. I've luckily managed to avoid an addiction to TV Tropes, and as such I'm not exact on what qualifies as a trope. Apparently anything thats an article on TV Tropes is a trope, which is a much larger category then I intended to discuss. I actually wanted to talk about categories of non-main characters.

Characters play certain roles. You have the main character (or main characters if its a story featuring multiple important points of view) and in every case I can think of, this main character is you. He or she may not look like you, think like you, or even act to your liking, but you follow this character. Whether or not you agree with them, it is their journey that drives the story for you.

And then there are the other types of characters, like the mentor, the nemesis, the damsel in distress, etc. They exist for the main character to interact with. There is an otherness to these characters. You can admire or despise them, but you don't end up developing the same intimate connection you have with the main character(s).

But what if you were to look at the world from the "other" character's point of view? As I was saying before, I suspect the world feels very much the same to you as it does to me. This is why the golden rule exists after all, I assume that in general, the things that make me happy make you happy. But in the case of some of these figures, it's difficult to see them as regular people because of the role they play.

When I was a wee college freshmen, I'd look at my TAs and think "Wow! They're so cool and mentor-ly." And then I got to know some of them as friends, and yes they were still cool and mentor-ly, but they also become people to me. Getting to know them sort of brought them over that line of other-ness and back to the realm of normal people.

And then I became a TA myself, and I didn't feel any different. I felt like the same me as i was the previous year, albeit with some added responsibilities.

There's no moral to this post. It's just an observation that interests me, that those "other" characters are normal people too. Just imagine, Yoda could feel very much the same in his day to day life as I do... minus the youthful angst.