Squares

A plot is essentially a story constructed around the archetypal tensions and relationships of a group of characters, centering on a common goal or concern. This can be something as all-encompassing as “saving Middle Earth from a second darkness,” or something as small and specific as an old wood-carver's puppet becoming a real boy. In general, the degree to which a story impacts its audience – the degree to which it is something that will stay with the reader and be remembered as great several years after they have read it – is the degree to which this plot centres on significant human concerns and universal themes. A movie about which pizza-parlour is going to gain the patronage of the after-school crowd might provide some ephemeral amusement for a gaggle of thirteen year olds, but unless it finds a way to dove-tail pepperoni and double cheese with the eternal destiny of the human person it will ultimately get relegated to a back-closet of the mind, along with the theme-song from Barnie and Friends, and the secret codes for Super Mario Brothers.

All good plots are built on something which can be roughly described as a “square” of relationships. There are eight points on the square – four corners, and four sides. The corners represent the Hero, his (or her) Lover, the Villain, and the Hero's Nemesis. The Hero and the Villain are of the same gender; the Lover and the Nemesis are of the opposite sex. Some readers may object that there are stories where the Hero has a same-sex Lover, or where the Villain is of the opposite sex from the Hero. There are numerous possible reasons why this might be the case, and they will be treated at a later stage: however, it is necessary to look at the rules in their simplest form before we can start talking about exceptions. A simple plot is made using any two of these relationships: a simple Romance is made using a Hero and a Lover; a simple Heroic narrative is made using a Hero and a Villain; a simple tragedy is made using a Hero and a Nemesis. More complicated plots use three of these points – the Hero, for example, may be fighting with the Villain to see who gets the Lover; the Nemesis may be lurking in the shadows allowing the Villain to defeat the Hero, and so forth. A complicated and complete story can be made using all four points and nothing more – this is often the case, for example, in classic Film Noir – but most stories will neglect at least one of the corners and include several characters from along the sides of the square – that is to say, characters that support the action and perform important roles, but who aren't absolutely essential in defining the plot and determining the type of story.

These characters are the Sidekick, the Villain's Lieutenant, the Ball and Chain, and the Hapless Love. It is obvious from the lack of clear, single-word titles for most of these relationships that they are less common, and less imporant to most stories, than the relationships listed above, and that they need more explanation. The Sidekick is self-explanatory enough: Puck to Oberon, Jiminy to Pinnochio, Watson to Sherlocke Holmes – essentially, a character of the same sex who is friends with and assists the hero in completing the quest. The Villain's Lieutenant is the main henchman of the evil one; some writers on the subject of archetypal stories have opined that the Lieutenant is, in fact, more dangeous and imposing than the Villain (as in the case of Cinderella, where the Step-sisters are technically her direct rivals for the hand of the Prince, but there is no question that the Stepmother is the greater obstacle). This is not necessarily true (for reasons that we will discuss later), and in some cases the Lieutenant is a largely comic or impotent character – the photo-journalist in Apocalypse Now, for example, holds the position of Kurtz's Lieutenant but really isn't formidable in his own right so much as he serves to showcase how insane and formidable the Villain is.

The Ball and Chain is a form of minor villain; someone of the opposite sex who the Hero gets saddled with and who acts as an obstacle – often a comic obstacle – throughout the course of the story. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the ditzy blonde is in a Ball and Chain relationship to Indy: she doesn't really do anything, and she isn't a serious impediment to his completion of his quest, but she is an irritation that he can't get rid of. Situation comedies are frequently built around this relationship: the Hero is married to his Ball and Chain, and the show deals with the ultimately trivial inconveniences that this occasions. The Hapless Lover is also of the opposite sex, obviously, but is a minor heroic character; depending on the type of plot she may be in love with the hero but unworthy of him, or the hero may be in love with her, but unworthy of her love. The relationship is one of unrequited love – Echo persuing Narcissus, for example. It can resolve only in a romantic tragedy, like the Hollywood Classic “Roman Holiday,” or in a Deus ex Machina that makes the hapless lover worthy of her love, as in the story of Cupid and Psyche.

It is possible to build a plot around these secondary relationships, but it is uncommon, and it usually involves making a work whose scope and implications are less serious, or less important than a plot built around the corners of the square. Simple childhood stories about a boy and his dog, or a frog and a toad, are Sidekick stories. They're touching stories about the power of friendship and co-operation, but unless a Villain, Nemesis or Lover is introduced, the stakes remain predictably low. Stories about a Hero destroying the Villain's Lieutenant are also common in children's television and literature – remember the endless cartoons where the Superhero would beat one after another of the Villain's mignions, but the Villain would always live to find a new Lieutenant and fight again? In general, plots built using one corner and one side of a square are good if you want to have a long-running series where the action never quite resolves itself – which may explain why so many light-weight night-time dramas involve a nauseatingly interminable unresolved affair between a heroine and a man who she is half in love with, but who is either never quite worthy of her, or whom she never quite manages to deserve. Gilmore Girls, I understand, has managed to keep this sort of Hapless Lover tale going for several seasons.

But, you might object, those Saturday morning cartoons did have a Villain, and often the Hero even had a Lover, so how can they be dismissed as Hero-Lieutenant stories? This is because a plot is built by deciding which character is going to be the foundational character for the story, and then choosing a primary relationship, which determines what sort of plot it will be. The character on whom the plot is founded will not necessarily be either the hero or the perspective character. Lord of the Rings, for example, is built around Sauron: without the dark Lord and his Ring, there is no story – Frodo would have lived a relatively quiet life at Bag End, and Aragorn would have been just another Ranger wandering around an elven forest, preserving the blood of the Dunedain for another generation. Rocky, on the other hand, is built around the character of Rocky: precisely whom his opponent happens to be is largely irrelevant (as evidenced by the fact that there are six Rocky movies, each with a different villain); the story is essentially about Rocky becoming all that Rocky can be.

These types only cover one of the types of archetype: archetype of relationship. A clean understanding of the relationships on a square (covered in introduction to square mechanics) is a good starting point for crafting a story, and has some use as a simple analytic tool, but until these archetypal relationships are being filled by archetypal characters, there is a great deal that can go wrong with the narrative. This is because there is not merely one square on which a story can take place, but five, each of which has a specific cast of archetypal characters, and a particular set of thematic concerns that are peculiar to it. Since there is no language spefically designed to refer to these five different types of plot-character squares, we will refer to them by assigning each a colour.

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