Character TypesBy Rebecca Burrell

Everyman character‘Everyman character’ = An ordinary person, the typical or average person – representative of the human race.

An ‘everyman cheater’ is the character that is empathetic to all regarding the audience. They are usually popular in the fact that they tend to stand in a larger group of friends whom are more interesting and supporting towards the narrative.

3 everyman characters: Seth from ‘Super bad’ because he does everything to get into the bigger crowd to be somebody. Ted from ‘How I Met Your Mother’ because through the entire series he is represented as that average guy who’s getting old and has yet to settle down and find someone finally worth marrying to building a family with. Piper from ‘Orange Is the New Black’ because she is the average woman who simply made one mistake and it got her in prison, but she is not the conventional prison type so she is trying to find her place, her group, and the person she needs to be in order to survive prison life for 15 months.

ArchetypeArchetype: Archetype is a typical universal type of character that is found in many different media texts.

This can be applied to Plato’s theory of forms as he said that everything in life is a copy of its creator i.e. a writers characters in a script are copies of people that already exists – there is no such thing as an original character (no such things as a character being an ‘idea’ as it was already there in real life).

Jung said that archetypes are not fixed to characters as there is an endless amount of different kinds of archetypes, so characters mostly do not even fit underneath one category as they can be under many different ones, especially since archetypes are such a flexible concept.