Example drift: Five Man Band

Yeah you can be the hero of the story without being The Hero of the Five-Man Band occasionally. But then you can actually be The Hero without being The Leader per se, despite what the page says.

edited 1st Jun '11 9:32:14 PM by NoirGrimoir

Would it be worth changing on the Five-Man Band page?

I suppose for accuracy's sake, not that it would really do anything, people are ignoring what the actual page says anyways. For one thing there are all these four-person examples that don't even have one person taking two of the Five-Man Band roles. Blarg. But yeah, The Hero actually is almost always the main protagonist (the literal hero), rather than the leader, unless you have a Supporting Protagonist. In which case, yeah the leader will probably the The Hero (The Aragorn).

I do actually think the roles need a little more description, now that at I look at them. The Hero does, anyways.

edited 1st Jun '11 9:46:00 PM by NoirGrimoir

Read this post and the next few. We aren't going to redefine the Five-Man Band. It was a valid trope for quite a while. We're going to note that it's falling out of use in it's pure form, and that other, related tropes are taking its place. A trope doesn't get purged just because it's not currently popular.

It doesn't need redefined, the page is just wrong on that one point. Often The Hero ends up being the leader later on if they don't start out that way, but not always.

edited 1st Jun '11 10:00:02 PM by NoirGrimoir

I wonder if this was just a period-specific trope?

I don't think it's period specific, but it's not as commonly played straight as it might have been in the past.

I bet it's good to see if this trope applies to 1980s and early 1990s.

The four musketeers plus Constance. That would put it at about 1845.

That sounds a little like a Square Peg Round Trope to me, Eddie. I wouldn't call the Musketeers a Five-Man Band in the "classic" sense at all - maybe a Team Of Five, but I don't know whether Constance would really belong to the "team" anyway.

Incidentally, should the classic Five-Man Band be considered a Discredited Trope now?

edited 6th Jun '11 2:26:17 PM by nrjxll

The classic Five-Man Band is still used more often than a Team Of Five. Even if there are more or less members that doesn't mean the character roles are suddenly voided. Leverage has a Five-Man Band right from the beginning and you can identify 3 of the character types on the damn poster, and watching the show you can easily figure who is The Lancer and who is The Chick.

People who are shoving in simple groups of five people into the trope simply do not understand the trope. The characters have to fulfill either the behavior tropes or the skill-set tropes of the five man band. If it isn't an example it isn't an example, and bad examples should be purged.

The only problem I have with the idea of the Team of Five YKTTW is what exactly is the trope there? It's a group with a number assigned to them, and it's acting more of an index of alternate Five Man groups like the Three Plus Two. If it's an index it should include the Five-Man Band, not just be an alternate. That means the other possible combinations (like the two sets of foils and the leader idea) need their own YKTTW. And I would say that these combinations are not exclusive, you can have a Three Plus Two fit into the Five-Man Band mold all the same.

I would also argue against The Three Musketeers really fitting cleanly. Yes, D'Artagnan was clearly The Hero, and Porthos was The Big Guy, but Constance wasn't really part of the team, and Aramis and Athos don't fit cleanly into the Smart Guy and The Lancer slots, either. If anything , Athos and D'Artagnan split the role of The Chick; Athos is the moral center, and D'Artagnan is the emotional center of the group. Constance isn't a part of the team at all; she's simply the Distressed Damsel.

My personal position is that the Five-Man Band should require both five members, (with a possible sixth in a Team Pet or Sixth Ranger as long as they are secondary to the central five) and that the group also show the skillset and role division delineated by the member names.

edited 6th Jun '11 3:49:15 PM by Madrugada

Regarding Porthos as The Big Guy, that reminds me - is it possible for the Five-Man Band archetypes to exist outside of the Five-Man Band? I suspect the answer's yes, but I've always been a little unclear on that. For instance, if there's a "Team Genius" in a group of protagonists who are not a Five-Man Band, or even a Team Of Five, would he still qualify as The Smart Guy?

Oh, yeah. Certainly all five of them existed long before the first Five-Man Band was put together. And a team can usually be broken down into character archetypes, no matter how many of them there are. That's why I think that the Five-Man Band should be as tightly defined as I said up there. Otherwise it's simply "any group of five (or more) characters which vaguely resembles this make-up."

edited 6th Jun '11 3:53:00 PM by Madrugada

I think that's part of the reason we established how it has to use at least four of the character types, because people were putting in examples like a team of five with The Smart Guy being split between three characters and no Chick or Big Guy. As well as how if you needed to clarify the reasons why they fill that role for every individual then you're likely stretching the trope.

As for The Three Musketeers, I can kind of see a Hero/Lancer relationship between d'Artagnan and Athos, with Porthos and Aramis having Big Guy and Smart Guy qualities, but I don't see them functioning as a unit with either their personality clashes or skill set. There are elements of the ensemble trope there, but of course most ensemble tropes are all about avoiding making your characters homogenous personality wise.

How about turning this into a Band Of Heroes so that one wouldn't be constrained with the total number of members as long as there's a clear hero and lancer?

edited 14th Jun '11 6:12:06 PM by Soupdragon

I'm on board with that. Those are the most common roles. Of course, it will have to have a list of common roles (read: tropes). You still see The Smart Guy and The Big Guy a lot, even if not always.

And the ones that have those roles aren't a Five-Man Band. I know it's a hard concept to get down, but there is no reason to decay the trope just because people don't use it as often any more.

^ I agree. Just because people aren't using it right doesn't mean there's a problem with the trope. The trope is a valid trope as is, if anything needs to be done, it's clean up the examples so people don't think "Hey they added this example (with only three people) I can too!" And maybe rework the description a little to try to be more clear on the requirements.

A Band Of Heroes sounds like a cool trope though, I say ykttw it separately.

I'm really sorry for bad thread necromancy, but here the case was brought up that is my personal pet peeve.

Shoehorning The Three Musketeers in the Five-Man Band is beyond silly. In fact, Dumas might have patented the very new type of character ensemble which was followed on by many authors (and some of the examples of the ensemble were used and abused in other works).

First of all, the problem with shoehorning is that many tropers out there can't decide what the Lancer is - is it simply a friend of a hero with contrasting personality or character traits or whether the Lancer is supposed to be the rival of the Hero. In the Three Musketeers (and its sequels) Athos provides the contrast, Aramis provides the rivalry to our main Gascon hero. BOTH have academic education and in fact it's even stated in the first novel that Athos is smarter out of two (or at least speaks better Latin) and in Twenty Years After Athos is used in typical "Smart Guy" position quite a few times (scene in the boat, when he conventionally turns out to have studied navigation). Aramis is the rival to d'Artagnan in the second and third books (ESPECIALLY third).

In fact, other than the ugly shoehorning experiments, I'm going to make a brand new trope about Three Musketeers -inspired ensembles.

1. The Hero - the focus of story action, often the leader/field leader of the group. May serve as the focus point of the Nakama or at least someone who brings Nakama on the whole new level.

2. The Proper Man - quite often the oldest (or at least psychologically more mature) person of the group, frequently serving as a Mentor to younger/immature Hero. He/she is often the moral compass of the Nakama. Great deal of wisdom/encyclopedic knowledge is required, as well as relatively elevated (at least at the beginning of the story) social status compared to the rest of Nakama.

3. The Smasher - the Boisterous Bruiser of the group. Always prefers to solve things by brute force, leaving the intellectual approach to his smarter comrades. The brute force can range from Super Strength to Fireballs to Big Guns but it's often the most common way to solve the problem for him. On the other hand, he may be sometimes the one having the most common sense and is usually the most loyal member of Nakama. Often the most "down-to-earth" member.

4. The Outsider - this one always walks his way, contrasting the rest of Nakama in personality, skills, character and attitude. He is the most obvious candidate for Face–Heel Turn in the group. Possesses a set of connections (be it "Street" or high society) unique for the team and often helpful to them. The Outsider is a rival/adversary to the Hero, though good Character Development can remove outright rivalry, producing Type 2 Vitriolic Best Buds. Often has the agenda contrasting with the rest of Nakama. May or may not be the smartest member of the group, but at least he is quite often the most cunning one and the one the least likely to play by the rules. The Outsider can be a Token Evil Teammate.

Examples: The Three Musketeers

Hero - d'Artagnan

Proper Man - Athos

Smasher - Porthos

Outsider - Aramis

Iconic roster of Birds of Prey

Hero - Black Canary

Proper Man - Oracle

Smasher - Lady Blackhawk

Outsider - Huntress

YKTTW is to be made soon.

edited 7th Jul '11 10:09:37 AM by CharlotteXBy

I gotta say, I'm also sorry for adding my two cents in so late, but might I suggest getting rid of this trope and replacing it with a more genreal ensemble trope? It'd be a lot easier then saying "For it to count, it has to have at least..."

There's no need to get rid of it. It's a dying trope, but it did exist and it's still worthy of cataloguing. We don't remove tropes when they die.

What we need to do is figure out what's replacing it. A huge amount of the misuse is that we don't have anything link teams that are "close to but not really a Five-Man Band", to.

Good point. How about, instead, removing examples and making a list of groups and their member's respective roles as another page? That way, we could also include Team Medics, Tag Along Kids, and so on.

Didn't someone YKTTW a supertrope for this? A sort of "band," with Five-Man Band, Power Trio, and so on as subtropes?

On that note, I've been finding a lot of examples of what looks like Five-Man Band (and is listed as such), minus one or two roles. Should we put those somewhere?

I'd move them to the discussion page with an explanation if I was feeling generous that day.

If I wasn't I'd just deleted then with an edit reason of "It's not a Five Man Band if it doesn't have all the roles filled." or "Five Man Band requires that there be five people who fill five specic roles within the group. These examples don't fit that." or something along those lines.