Blue

       
The blue square is, in many ways, the darkest of the squares. This is the long dark night of the archetypal soul: its villains are consummate or insane in their villainy, its heroes can succeed only through suffering and death. Its themes are courage, strength, perseverance, victory, insanity, martyrdom, and rape.

Epic fantasy, horror, Gothic novels, Norse legends, and suspense thrillers tend to place themselves on the Blue Square. Lord of the Rings, the Last Unicorn, The Ring of the Niebelung, Rocky, Cape Fear and Apocalypse Now are classic examples of Blue Square plots.

The essence of a good Blue Square story lies in the fact that it is impossible for the heroes to win. In the case of the right-hand heroes -- the Virgin and the Prophet -- this is particularly pronounced. Like Selma in Dancer in the Dark, they are defenseless innocents in the shadow of inconquerable evils. Ultimately, they win -- but unless they are saved by a timely deus ex machina, like the eagle that swoops down to pick up Sam and Frodo from the sinking shores of Mordor, they win by dying.

For the Valkyrie and the Warrior, success is a little easier to attain: they look like a long shot, doomed from the outset, but provided that they are willing to make inhuman acts of courage and perseverance, victory is in hand. If Rocky is willing to be punched in the head for long enough, eventually his weakness (left-handedness) will become his strength, and he'll be able to win. Provided Chyna in Dean Koontz's Intensity has the courage to follow the insane serial killer to his lair, to keep her head, struggle against any obstacle, and keep dragging her weary carcasse around after it's battered to the point of near uselessness, she's sure to make it out alive and save the girl to boot.

On the villains side, the Blue Square provides the greatest opportunity for terror and incomprehensible evil. Here you find the demented mad-men who want to destroy the world -- not for any particularly clear reason -- who hope to cover Middle Earth in a second darkness, who take delight and pleasure in savagery and violation. Villains on this square cannot be reasoned with, they are immune to compassion and understanding, they tend to know that they are evil and to revel in it, or else to have redefined "good" in such a way that it is indistinguishable from atrocity.

The insanity of the Blue Square hero lies in the fact that they are willing to hope against hope. The Prophet, to the world, may seem to be a raving lunatic; the Virgin's willingness to sacrifice herself looks like folly; the Warrior seems like a stupid lunk; and the Valkyrie seems to weak and feminine to do the serious, masculine work of fighting beasts. It is, in any case, and insanity that lies in a fanatical devotion to goodness, for which the heroes are willing to lay down their lives.

The insanity of the villains is the classic, inhuman type of insanity. The Sun-King may appear to be polished, powerful, and world-wise, but, like King Haggard in The Last Unicorn, he is willing to go to reckless lengths to realize an ultimately insane vision. The Victim is a woman who is devoted to her own self-destruction, who takes delight in seeing herself immolated, who positively steeps in the wrongs that have been done to her -- the ghost in the Japanese horror classic Ringu is a good example of a Victim: she is willing to do insanely creepy things, and even to kill, for the sake of having her victimhood trumpeted before the world. The Amazon is intent on thinking of herself as a man, often to the point of actually hating other women, and even of offering them up as rape victims to her lover, the Beast. The Beast, of course, is completely mad -- though the majority of well done Beasts, unlike their opponent, the Warrior, are not stupid, but possess a hideously deformed intelligence. Kurtz in Apocolypse Now is a perfect example of the type: he sees himself as a sort of philosopher, but as the climactic comparisons between the slaughtering of the man and the slaughter of a sacrificial cow makes so clear, he has, in fact, completely lost his humanity.

Blue Square stories often contain a supernatural element -- the Victim frequently appears as a Ghost and Beasts may easily be replaced by slavering monsters, and Sun-Kings may well resort to sorcery to realize their visions. On the heroic side, victory can often not be attained in this world; if the story is to end with the heroes triumphant, then there must be the implication, if not the explicit appearance, of another world, higher and greater than this.

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