Is it bad that my main characters do not fit into five man band trope?

The five mainsin my story consist of three guys and two girls. First guy is the hero. The two girls are half smart guy half lancer, so whatever smart guy traits one has the other doesn't. It's a bit of a mash-up. The big guy is one put into that categorey because he is the tallest, but he is too complex to be summed up as "big guy". And finally the chick is a guy. So I am not sure if this is really a five man band or if this combination is even good.

I am the white void, I am et cetera, et cetera... THE END HAS COME!

Five Man Bands are not the be-all, end-all of protagonist groups; they're just one way to foster characterization dynamics and spur character development. The most important thing to look at is whether they interact in ways that are consistent with their characterizations, if that's the kind of story you're writing, not whether they fit some kind of predefined pattern.

edited 13th Jul '14 10:28:38 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

If anything, it might be praiseworthy.

Nous restons ici.

Actually, your characters would fit right in on the Five-Man Band page, because Five-Man Band is quite possibly the biggest case of Square Peg Round Trope on this wiki. So long as you've got five main characters (and sometimes even if you have four or six), someone will call them a Five-Man Band, no matter how badly they have to twist the characters to make them fit.

There's nothing wrong with not having a Five-Man Band but you might have one except according to Eddie The Chick can't be male. If he's The Heart I'd still consider it a Five-Man Band. I'd have to know more to know if this combination of characters is even good.

Tropes are ultimately patterns that emerge; the FMB came about because it was an easy dynamic to write, but there's more than one way to relieve a feline of its dermis (see Cast Calculus).

TV Tropes's No. 1 bread themed lesbian. she/her, fae/faer

I think you're looking at the whole tropes thing backwards. Honestly, it took me a while to figure it out but tropes are basically labels. "Five Man Band" is a label that describes a certain type of five-person group. If you're not writing that kind of group, don't worry about it. You don't need to aim or attempt to write a certain trope - you can, but tropes work better to describe something after it's been written than they do as goals.

Fear is a superpower.

Agreed: tropes (for the most part) are descriptive, not prescriptive; that is, they don't tell you what to write, they tell you what you've written.

My Games & Writing

I write characters that I think are interesting. I include enough people to embody the skills they will need to "get the job done". I think in terms of interesting interactions/relationships between the characters - so I do think in terms of "foils" and such.

But I never think in terms of whether they fit into any particular group dynamic such as Five-Man Band.

Later on, if someone wants to point at them and say "(S)He's The Lancer" or whatever, then fine: if the character has turned out in such a way that that's how (s)he comes across and someone identifies it as such, no skin off my nose.

However, it wasn't written with "So-and-so is the Lancer" in mind.

I've looked at the Five-Man Band trope and find it hard to reconcile many of my characters with that dynamic but that's not to say that they won't in some way fit one or more of those character tropes.

I might "tropify" someone as "Mama Bear" or "Papa Wolf" or even Badass Normal, but I apply those to individuals rather than think of Leader, Lancer, Heart etc.

Except that the trope page explicitly says it only fits if the characters don't have to be twisted to fit into the roles. The way the page describes the trope basically leaves no space for ambiguity whatsoever; either it's an exact match or it's not a Five-Man Band, no third option.

That's indeed what the page says.

However, there's no law that says any particular group of five characters has to be a Five-Man Band - the fact that people have to be cautioned about shoe-horning characters into roles to make them fit, demonstrates there are a large number of successful team dynamics out there that don't fit the trope.

Questions you should be asking:

Does my team have the requisite skill pool to drive the plot? (Can include having someone who knows how/where to find skilled people to help.)

Are they interesting characters?

Do they interact in ways that will keep the intended audience interested?

Is there proper character development?

Is there sufficient conflict in the story? (Not necessarily just between members of the team, could be between individuals and their own short-comings or between the team and those they encounter etc).

Basically, if the team meets the requirements for an interesting story, it doesn't matter if you don't have all the characters in the Five-Man Band trope.

Don't feel the need you have to turn a character into a particular type or shoe-horn in an extra character just to "tick check-boxes" - we get enough of that shit from formulaic TV series, films and books as it is without adding to it.

If you like your characters and the way they interact with one another and the 'verse they're in, then go for it. Only change them if they don't work.

Really, does it matter if the group doesn't have The Lancer or The Big Guy or The Chick (e.g. the female member(s) don't fit that particular trope)? Maybe there's no one person who can be said to be The Leader. What does it matter, so long as the team works?

Well said, Ars Thaumaturgis. That's what I was clumsily trying to say.

Also very good points, Wolf1066. How the characters affect the plot is far more crucial than if a certain label fits them as a group.

Fear is a superpower.

That's what the trope description says. The examples tell a different story.

Then it needs to be cleaned up, not to have people encouraged to add more bad examples.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Yes, it's terrible, the police will be around to confiscate your computer later today, citizen.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Or maybe the description needs to be changed a bit. All tropes are defined by examples in fiction, not by arbitrary people; Tropes Are Tools, not rules.

Can we at least take this to TRS, or something?

edited 17th Jul '14 9:20:20 AM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Five-Man Band has been to TRS and has a clean up thread. I don't see anything wrong with the description.

Five-Man Band does not need to be changed. Five-Man Band will not be redefined. Five-Man Band is not broken and does not need to be repaired. That's why the page is locked; because people kept tweaking the definition to make it cover an example they wanted to add. Five-Man Band is not only not a commonly used trope anymore, it's a very rare trope to find in new works.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a team of five characters who are not a Five-Man Band. Having one won't make your work better; not having one won't make it worse.

edited 17th Jul '14 10:36:02 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.