Character Archetypes: Trickster

Lately, I've been playing with an idea for a girl who uses a magical ring to change her appearance and lead a double life. Diamond, as I call her, likes to be at times beautiful, at times plain, at times rich, at times poor, at times the center of attention, at times practically invisible. She uses these dual roles to get what she wants. She's a trickster.

Which got me thinking. What is a trickster? What makes them tick? How do they pull off their mad plans and what roles can they take in the story?

Definition

"A trickster is a character who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior. The Trickster openly questions and mocks authority, encourages impulse and enthusiasm, seeks out new ideas and experiences, destroys convention and complacency, and promotes chaos and unrest." So sayeth TV Tropes, my authority on archetypes.

Put another way, a trickster is the polar opposite of your typical law-abiding hero. He trades relatability for unpredictability. You might not approve of what a trickster does, but darned if hhe doesn't make things interesting. And therein lies both the risk and reward of writing one. You may have to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in order to give the character life.

Characters In-Depth

I want to look at what makes other trickster characters tick. T.V. tropes offers a wonderful list of examples, but for my intents and purposes, I want to study tricksters I know very well, so I've chosen one trickster I watch every Sunday and another I wrote an awesome fanfiction about.

Rumpelstiltskin (Once Upon a Time--TV series)

In a show chock full of magicians, Rumplestiltskin is arguably the most powerful of all. Though he's known as "The Dark One," he's not really into taking over the world or committing acts of genocide. Instead he watches on the sidelines, offering deals to heroes and villains alike. If you need something, he'll give it to you... but often at a price.

The deals are the source of his trickster power. Every single one is made to his benefit and few are what they seem. Sometimes, Rumpelstiltskin seems to promise one thing, only to deliver something else. Sometimes he asks for small tokens in return for powerful magic: name, a cloak, a strand of hair. They will be important later on. Rumpelstiltskin works the long game like no one else in the show. It took him several hundred years to put his grand scheme into action, but he did succeed.

Nabiki Tendo (Ranma 1/2Anime/ Manga)

Almost everyone in Ranma 1/2 is a rock-splitting, high-flying super martial artists, half the characters are cursed, and the rest are more than willing to use magic objects lying around for their own nefarious purpose. (It should be noted, this is a comedy, so said purpose includes anything from growing hair to making someone fall in love.)  In this world, Nabiki Tendo is an anomaly. She doesn't fight or dabble with magic. Yet, when something stands between her and money, she will destroy heaven and earth and poor hero Ranma to get it.

Whereas everyone else uses physical force, only Nabiki relies on manipulation to get her way. She blackmails, spills secrets, sells things the heroes might want. To keep from getting hurt, she plays up her own weakness and her strategic position as the sister of Ranma's girlfriend. Nabiki knows Ranma will be obliged to save her from the chaos, even if she's the one who created it. If worse comes to worse, she'll whip out the crocodile tears, pretending she's hopeless in love or wounded by the hero's actions. Then, as he stands paralyzed, she'll strike like a viper, wheeling and dealing not two feet behind his back.

Personality Traits

Deceptive

All tricksters lie. If they don't fib outright, they tell half-truths or leave out important information. It's impossible to play tricks without deception. But aside from that, this may have a defensive purpose. They know the power of getting inside someone's head; they don't want that to happen to them. So they feign indifference about the things they care about, mask anger with a smile, and lie about their motives. Some may go all out and pretend to be crazy. They want to seem unpredictable, as that is their greatest asset.

Student of Psychology

Tricksters are smart. Not in a memorize-the-Internet way or a make-robot-out-of-soupcan way. Their power derives from psychology. They can predict how people will react. This isn't done by reading books, but by going out and studying them. The trickster doesn't hide out in a tower, he interacts with the masses. And if he finds a special subject of particular interest, you can be sure he will unwrap their loves, desires, weaknesses, and philosophy on life.

Master of Planning and of Improv

Tricksters can draw up insanely complicated plans and abandon them in an instant. Maybe they say that everything is going to plan. Maybe they say they have no plan at all. These are lies. Think of any prank or surprise party you've pulled off. You need to figure out what you want to do and how to pull it off. So you plan. But something goes wrong. So you improvise. Tricksters must do both, and do them so well it comes off as effortless.

Playful

Tricksters generally don't take themselves too seriously, and ultimately, this is their saving grace. An evil mastermind will pull off a complicated schemes in hopes of ruling the world. Tricksters usually settle for a few bucks, a shiny object, and maybe some amusement. Even dangerous tricksters tend to be witty, charming, and amusing. They force you to like them--perhaps their greatest trick of all.

How to Play a Trick

The Motive

Why are they playing the trick? That's the first thing a writer must consider. Reasons can range from great to petty: trying to prove a point, trying to win a bet, boredom, money, a valuable object, love, greed, vengeance, justice, freedom. They may, of course, say they want one thing (like money) but really want something else (like vengeance). Or their motive may evolve alongside the prank.

The Victim

Who are they playing the trick on? Bear in mind, the choice of victim may shine a light on the trickster's psyche. Does he chose people he admires or loathes? Does he pick easy marks or go for a challenge? Even if he chooses at random, he may adjust the trick according to the person.

The Set Up

You cannot just pull off a trick in a void. You need to make sure the circumstances are just right. In The Dark Knight, the Joker had to carefully cultivate an atmosphere of terror. In Ocean's Eleven, Danny Ocean had to make sure he had the right people in the right spot at the right time. Costumes are dawned, mirrors polished, smoke blown. Even magicians aren't exempt. They may be able to wave their hands and come up with any scenario they want, but first they need to think up that scenario. Weirdly enough, the more powerful the being, the more they relies on rules and limits. A trick is only fun if you can get the hero to play along.

The Test (Optional)

If the trickster doesn't know their mark very well, and if they are a relatively normal person (not an immortal god), it might behove them to set up a little test in order to gauge their victims reaction. For example, in my fanfiction, I Want a Refund, Nabiki's trick relied on her victim carrying enough about her to fight for her honor. To test this out, she had him walk her home from school. Little tests like this are a good way to foster trickster-victim interaction and make the audience wonder what's to come.

The Strike

This is where things go boom.

Now tricks can take many forms, but its usually vital for the trickster to insert himself in the action. No sitting in a tower for him.  First of all, the trickster knows the trick won't go off without his involvement. Second, this is where the fun is.

The Counter Strike

Tricks don't go as planned. Any simple thing might go wrong. The victim may fight back. A good trickster will roll with the punches.

The Getaway (Optional)

The problem with tricks is that, even if you succeed, you will end up with a huge mess and perhaps a mob of angry people. This is a good time for the trickster to make a graceful getaway, far from the chaos and the consequences.

The Lesson

Tricks are a psychological experiment. You mess with people in order to see how they'll react. If the victim is wise, he will learn something from the trick. The process may also change the trickster.

Final Thoughts

Tricksters work especially well as wild card supporting characters in long running series. Their personality adds spice and they can cause the hero plenty of stress without doing him much harm. Tricksters can be good or bad, helpful or bothersome. They can switch sides on a whim.

The question, for me, is can they work as main characters? I think so, but they may be trickier (ha) than a regular hero. The fun of a trickster is their lack of inhibition. Heroes get saddled with the weight of expectation: upholding morals, saving the world, etc. One way of balancing this is creating a secondary character who can act as the pillar of respectability, freeing the trickster to act as they want.

Another problem is the actual trick. A trickster must be like a magician, misdirecting the audience all the way until the end. Having a trickster as a point of view character risks giving up the goat too soon. However, a writer can get around this by judiciously cutting scenes or setting up the trickster as an unreliable narrator. It's a delicate art to leave out important information without annoying the reader, but it can be done.

Book Review: Trickster

Title: Trickster
Author: Jeff Somers
Genre: Urban Fantasy

Summary

Lem and his pal Mags are idimustari, low-level magicians who spill blood from their own veins to perform simple cons.  It's barely a living, but it's about to get much worse when they run into headfirst into the schemes of Mika Rensar, the most powerful mage in the world.  To achieve immortality, she's willing to sacrifice all life on earth.  But in a world where magic must be paid for in blood how can Lem survive her scheme--let alone foil it--when he is unwilling to use anyone's blood but his own?

Review

First of all, if you dislike vulgar language, this book may not be for you.  The f-word makes an appearance pretty much every page.  I personally don't appreciate cursing, but in this case it doesn't seem gratuitous.  The story is told through the eyes of Lem, a street-wise con-magician; as such, it would be strange for him to observe the niceties of drawing room language.

The story begins when Lem and Mags find a dead body.  The dead body quickly leads to the discovery of a kidnapped girl named Claire, a threat from Mika Rensar and her apprentice Amir, and the realization that Mika's scheme involves killing off 99% of all life on earth.  This is 1/3 of the way through the book.  The tension definitely keeps you reading, but I wonder if Mr. Somers didn't make the stakes a little too high.  Lem is often so low on blood he's on the verge of fainting and Mags can hardly manage a spell.  Yet somehow they keep thwarting the will of the most powerful being on earth and her high-ranking apprentice?  After a while, the villains start to appear ineffective if not downright stupid.

So, let's talk about the characters.  Lem's ethical code of using only his own blood for spells makes him an appealing hero.  The kidnapped Claire shows fight and spirit and has a tragic backstory.  Sidekick Mags is a massively strong intellectually-stunted man-child.  He's meant to play Lenny to Lem's George, but I find him inconsistently drawn.  Sometimes Mags is a gentle puppy, other times he explodes in anger.  Supposedly, he can hardly do spells--yet he pulls off complex ones when it's needed.  Still, I found most of the characters well-drawn and interesting.  None of them annoyed me enough to pull me out of the story.

The author has some wonderful ideas, starting with the central one: combining magic with blood-letting.  Most of the great tragedies of history come from mages trying to gather enough blood to fuel a spell.  As Lem often points out, magicians are not good people.  The wisdom of this saying will bear out time and time again.  The tone of Trickster skews cynical, and the descriptions, while good, are often ugly.  We are taken to moldering houses, seedy bars, and cults. Still, I don't mind a touch of noir, as long as the story is compelling and I have at least one person to cheer for.  Trickster provided that.  I read it and couldn't put it down, until the very end.

Oh, the ending.  Where to begin?

First of all, I can't say whether most readers would notice or care about all the plot holes and loose threads I found--but I did notice and I did care and it grated on my nerves.  I felt mildly disheartened when I realized Claire had become the typical damsel in distress the hero had to rescue.  I disliked the torture scene.  I sighed when the author asked me to believe that his first person point of view narrator was going to die.  But those things I could overlook as a matter of personal taste.  I could not, however, overlook dropped characters, dropped themes, a pointless cynical ending, and a rushed sequel hook.

But my complaints are too numerous to be contained in the review section, so allow me to dissect them, piece by piece, in the rant.

Rant (Lots of Spoilers!)

The main moral thrust of the book is whether or not Lem will use other people's blood to work more powerful magic.  He states that, even if the other person gives you permission, using their blood is too much like rape.  It's disgusting.  It's corrupting.  But in the end, of course, it's unavoidable.  If Lem wants to save the world, he needs help.  So, two-thirds of the way into the book, he drops his code and uses other people's blood.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the last time this code ever comes into play again.  Does he suffer for breaking the code?  Not really.  Does he go back to abiding to the code?  Not that we see.  The whole moral dilemma is scooted aside so that we can get to the action.

The climax gets rolling when Lem recovers the udug, a demonic green necklace which provides the wearer a relentless stream of information: past, present, and future.  Lem gets a hold of it when he meets Claire, back on page 41.  On page 141 Mika's apprentice Amir attempts to recover the udug but is distracted by Claire, fireballs, and the arrival of police.  Lem is too busy running away to bother with the demonic artifact.  By page 274, he finally gets back to it--after days, maybe even weeks have passed.

Lem has an excuse for the delay.  What's Amir's?  It seems like the villains completely forgot to recover a rather important weapon.  Now the udug is hidden, so perhaps they can't find it.  Perhaps.  Though that's not a ringing endorsement of their skills.  But even if they don't know its exact location, they have a rough idea where it is.  Yet they don't bother to post one guard.  Strike 1 for villainous stupidity.

The udug leads Lem to a bar where fellow idimustari rally together to keep the world from ending.  The rise of this ragtag army would have been a wonderful heroic moment--but after 5 pages, the bad guys crash the party and the idimustari scatter like rats.  So much for that.  Mika reclaims the udug, but its last words to Lem is "let her take you."

It's another intriguing idea that gets dropped before it can develop properly.  What happens when Lem is taken?  He gets tortured.  That's it.  He also learns some pointless information about when the ceremony to destroy the world will take place.  But mostly just torture.  Amir gets the information he needs from Lem and leaves him for dead.  Because it was so difficult to pull out a gun and shoot this pesky idimustari who has thwarted his plans for the last few weeks.  Strike 2 for the villains.

Lem, of course, recovers.  At this point, the Mika and Amir begin their complicated death ritual, which requires total concentration, exact precision, and no interruptions--without a single guard posted to keep annoying good guys from interfering.  Now, I could buy trading security for secrecy--if it wasn't extremely obvious that every single idimustari knew of their plan.  Seriously, would it kill them to have a few tough guys with guns and some extra evil magicians keeping watch?

Especially when anyone can tap into the massive energy source they're creating.  It's like heaping guns in every single room of an empty house and hoping no one will use them.  Years and years spent planning this delicate ritual and they can't even post a guard.  That's it.  3 strikes, you're out.  I have lost all respect for the villains.

In the end, Lem saves Claire and keeps Mika from completing the spell.  He does not, however, prevent total disaster.  Tragedy upon tragedy piles up in unrelated cities: mass suicides, drownings, shooting rampages, all within minutes of each other, hundreds of thousands of deaths.  Our intrepid narrator sums it up this way: "all [we] had done was kill a bunch of people to no [f'ing] purpose."

Now, I find this a rather depressing and cynical conclusion.  But that's not the worst of it.  Up until this moment, the author has maintained the illusion that Trickster essentially takes place in our world.  These astonishing calamities shatter this illusion.  It is no longer our world.  We have spun off into an alternate reality.

This, I suppose, could be used to set up a sequel.  The secret's out.  The citizens of "real" world will ask questions, and the magicians will either need to ban together to hide their secret or reveal themselves.  Instead, a random character named Mel pops up out of nowhere, tells us Mika is alive and willing to try for immortality again, and invites Lem to join her in the war.  That's our infuriating sequel hook.

First of all, where was Mel and her army when Lem needed them, when the world was on the brink of distraction and no one but two idimustari around to save it?  Second of all, Mika's recycled schemes to destroy the world no longer interest me.  She's lost her credibility and anything she tries is bound to be more of the same old incompetence.

One last thing.  Claire--the damsel in distress who inspires Lem to ditch his code and fight the two most powerful mages in the world almost single-handly--disappears.  She is there one paragraph, gone the next.  Lem rather bleakly concludes she ran off to get away from all this craziness.  I don't really buy that.  There are characters floating around who have reason to kidnap her all over again.  It makes me angry at Lem for not even considering the possibility she might have gotten in trouble, for giving her up for loss the moment he's saved her.

So is Claire so incredibly rude, selfish and insensitive that she'd abandoned the guys who nearly rescued her without so much as a goodbye?  Or did she just get kidnapped for the fourth or fifth time this book?  Neither situation is appealing.  Claire is arguably the third most important character in the book.  After investing so much emotion in her, we (the audience and Lem alike) deserve more than for her to just drop off the face of the earth.

And really that's the last straw.  At this point, it seems like the author has gone out of his way to make the story as inconclusive as possible.  Maybe he's doing this to make a point about the randomness of life, maybe he's trying to set up a sequel.  I don't care.  Stories are not life: they need a point or what's the purpose of reading?  And once I lose my trust in the author's basic story-telling abilities, I'm not interesting in a sequel.