[UA] Stereotypes and archetypes

[Ville Halonen]

Greg Stolze wrote:
>I think that what you get with stereotypes are either (1) handy coat racks from which we hang our prejudices (The Humorless Kraut, the Cowardly Dago and the Superstitious Catholic, to mention groups to which I belong) or 
(2) archetypes as we'd LIKE THEM TO BE, rather than as they REALLY ARE.

-snip-

>I resist the idea of "fictional archetypes" in UA because I think it clashes with one of the central tenets of the game -- that the universe responds to HUMANITY.  Not to particular, chosen representatives of it, but to the whole mess.  Now, if wwe start going for fictional archetypes, suddenly the lives that 99+% of us live don't matter as much as what one writer's perceptions.  Most people don't write books and a lot don't read them or care about them.  There's much more to life than the idealized or bowdlerized or polemicized images that writers see fit to confine in print.

>Do you really think writers have a deeper understanding of humanity than anyone else?

If none of my response makes sense in relation to what's written above, it's a clear sign that my understanding of English isn't as good as I thought, or Greg can't write, or both, or that our wavelengths aren't compatible (at least email-wise). Anyway, thoughts:

As I've understood, archetypes and their avatars gain their power from the beliefs and values and all that stuff of a large enough mass of people. Their behavior fits into this large mass' (and his own?) image of the archetype they represent. They ARE what they THINK they (and a lot of other people) SHOULD be. 

Where all this springs from, is a matter of debate, and in black-and-white:
a)a collective unconscious or the "human nature"
b)the society, friends, family and all that=other people (and human mind is an empty plate at birth)

I had a third option also, but a phone call killed the thought. IMO the option A is quite useless UA-wise, as trying to change it wouldn't fit into the UAniverse. The Invisible Clergy influences the circumstances and chances, and use them as instruments to change how people think, and what they want to do is to make people think like them. And what this this thought-pattern is like in the endtimes (and metaphorically represents "the collective unconscious", or metaphysical the ballot box) shapes the next universe.

The IC is not alone in trying to change people's minds, as the option B represents. Friends and family have an awful lot of influence, and I believe the media has a lot of power also, working in people's minds at once and if the individual doesn't recognize this (or sometimes even if he does), he is influenced by some institution he has no contact with.

Now, one writer (or an actor, or a talkshow host or…) can be considered a part of the media. And let's assume that she's *really* good at whatever she does, and the character that does not regularly appear in real life (and is thus not a part of the "collective unconscious") has such an influence over a required amount of people as to form an image of such a personality really existing and an ideal of a personality, and there's a nutcase who either is influenced by the character, or, better yet, is accidentally quite the same as the character portrayed: can he ascend?

That's *highly* hypothetical, but did I make *any* sense?

Of course, at this moment I realised that the Invisible Clergy is not about ideals and what people think it *should* be...or is it? Is it more about strong-willed (or onesided, or…) individuals whose actions and playing, accidentally or rather not, a certain expected role really make the difference; or what the masses think as good people (hardly); or what is mostly going on in the masses' heads, and thus the true power being in the hands of those who have the resources or the wits to affect the masses' minds?

*BOOM*

My brain is smoking. Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.

<too much English too much UA too much complicated sentences too much too much>

Now I maybe understood more brightly what Greg was going for, but still, this message clearly represents that I don't have such a strong picture of what the IC really is, and that is why I won't delete it, even though it goes a bit off the road and I see the many of the flaws myself. But it can't be *complete* crap, can it? Anyone like to share thoughts of the above, their own views, and the canon?

-V
Confused

P.S. From what I've read, the modernistic view of the arts represent(ed) the writer or the painter (and all other authors; the word derived from "authority") really ARE/WERE more in touch with the universal values and human nature than 99+% of the people and are/were to be respected for that; who couldn't understand it, was considered lay, dumb, mass.

--

"Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations." –The Joker, "The Killing Joke"


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