Character Analysis

One of my favorite characters is Rudy Ruettiger from the movie Rudy. As the main character in the story, he plays the hero role. He is an undersized kid from a poor family whose goal is to play football for Notre Dame. He saves money working in his town's factory and attends a local community college for several years before finally being admitted to the school. He then faces the challenge of going up against players that are bigger, faster and more athletic than he. Eventually, he gets to play in one series in his final game. He goes through many challenges along the way, though he is anything but a reluctant hero. He overcomes adversity the entire movie, facing challenge after challenge. His main companion through the movie is his friend D-Bobb, who gives Rudy advice (though not always the best) throughout the movie. Although Rudy is the hero, there is no ultimate sacrifice that he makes at the end of the movie, though you could say that he makes it earlier on when he decides not to marry a girl from his town and instead attend Notre Dame.

Entourage

My favorite t.v. show is HBO's Entourage. The old seasons anyway, it's actually been getting progressively more difficult to stomach the last few years. Anyway, the show is about an actor (Vincent Chase) and his friends and basically all the shenanigans they get into. Initially in the first season we have four guys all in their twenties (except Johnny Drama, Vince's older brother who are all single and running around partying. By the end of the season six we had the one friend Eric getting married, while another friend Turtle has been in and out of serious relationships the past two seasons. Entourage isn't a hero story by any means but you can tell that Eric Murphy provides the stability for Vince, so you could say that he is advisor if you want to put Vince in the hero category. The other friends, Johnny and Turtle are sidekicks who have most of their shenanigans together while Eric usually handles the business side of things. You also have Ari Gold, Vince's agent and is also an advisor, though not nearly as personal as Eric. Other characters come and go through out the seasons and there's always at least one celebrity cameo in each episode.

Looking at the "hero" arch

We have spent several class periods discussing the different roles that characters play in movies/books and so on. One of the more interesting story archs in my opinion was that of the hero. I recently wrote a paper in my Advanced Composition class discussing this particular arch. We had your everyday guy who was told by an outsider that he needed to perform a specific task and he was of course reluctant at first. It wasn't until circumstances that threatened his "people" (I am discussing the character Doyle from the show Angel who in this particular case is a "half-demon", and in the episode a group of half-demons are being threatened by "pure demons") that he came to accept his role. He was aided through the episode by his companions until the end, where he had to make the ultimate sacrifice, his life, for the greater good. In my paper I broke down the arch much more specifically and pointed out the similarities and differences between Doyle's arch and the typical hero arch. The hero arch is one that I took for granted, never really paying attention to it in media. After the discussions we had though, it was funny how obvious the arch was in this particular episode.