Dear Jeannie,
I've created a world based on China's one-child policy where the first son is kept and all girl children are given to an orphanage at birth. I'm wondering how being raised in this sort of environment would affect the classic character archetypes? Let's say my MC is a "care giver"--what kind of baggage would she bring with her?
Helpless in Houston
Dear Helpless,
If you haven't read up on the Caregiver in my Character Archetypes 101 series, you can start there.
The core of an archetype won't change due to the environment. They simply act out their archetypical traits within that environment.
If your female heroine grew up in an orphanage, she would probably have been a parentified child, going around and helping the other girls. And in a severe dystopian-type world where all the girls are thrown out, most certainly there would be a lack of resources to care for them...so the few adults manning the orphanages would welcome her help. She might be like a mother-figure to the other down-and-out orphans. Caregivers want to make a difference in the lives of others...this challenges them and really fulfills a need.
On the flip (shadow) side, she'd likely grow resentful if too much is put on her. In part, this would be her fault, due to her poor boundaries and not knowing when to say no. And even if the culture in accepting of the fate of girls (being discarded), it wouldn't lessen the curiosity and bitterness the girls (and your Caregiver) might feel at the actions against them. Perhaps in her zealousness to make the lives of the other girls better, she might advocate against the dystopian rule for girls being given to orphanages at birth.
Hope this gives you a starting place!
Jeannie
Dear Jeannie,
I'd love to hear your take on personality types/archetypes on some biblical characters. What can you tell me about the personalities of Ruth and Naomi?
Biblical Bookworm in Bethesda
Dear Biblical Bookworm,
You know, I really got into this kind of thing when I did a post on the Woman at the Well, psychoanalyzing her, for lack of a better term. I think that your question would better be served in a Character Clinic-type setting than in this format. I'll work up something on each of them and post them separately, because really, they deserve more attention than my little column can give here.
Hope that's OK....because I truly love looking into Scriptures with my therapist eye. So hold on...it'll come later, but it'll be worth the wait. :)
Jeannie
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Post them anonymously below, using monikers like Sleepless in Seattle. I promise I'll get to them in future Dear Jeannie columns.
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Anonymous · 614 weeks ago
One of my main characters is constantly degraded by women and men (especially men who treat her as an object for them to control). In her childhood, her foster father tried to take advantage of her sexually. I read somewhere that even after being taken advantage of in such ways, girls still remain sexually active. Can you explain the progression from being sexually abused to sexually active?
-Always Anonymous
anonymous · 613 weeks ago
My WIP is a post-apocalyptic war story. My MC decides to go to war after a childhood hero (A soldier who spoke at her school whose words gave her the courage to survive the apocalypse) is tortured to death by the enemy, and the execution broadcast as shock-propaganda. Two years later, after her first mission goes haywire, my MC is killed in the same manner by the same man, only to be revived by enemy doctors and told that she is now required to serve a year working in the enemy hospital to pay for her resurrection. Shortly thereafter, she finds that the childhood hero whose death motivated her to go to war is alive and working as a nurse. Now the pair have finally sparked a real conversation regarding their experiences, and it was my Old Soldier who brought it up. I'm unsure as to how my MC will deal with her death and resurrection, or whether my Old Soldier will feel that her death was indirectly his fault.
~ Wondering in Washington