Markup View

Author: kjnoren

Sep 14th 2012 at 2:13:32 PM

@Bisected8: Frankly, I think the entire description is rambling, unclear, and hard to follow. The word "they" is used a lot, without a clear inference who it refers to: the team or the backer. A long list of possible things the backer contributes. Lots of potholes, with mays and mights.

Here's my vision of what this trope is about:

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Name: TheBacker

Laconic: A character who enables the group to function while still being apart from it

TheBacker is a character whose role is to bring the team members together, to give them a mission and a direction, and receive their results, but who is still apart from the group.

This is a very handy character in bringing a disparate group of people together and sending them on episodic adventures. The recruitment might be by simply hiring them, or involve coercion. Taken to its logical extreme, this is a character that never appears in the stories, all we get are messages. In a way, TheBacker can be thought of as a talking, recurring MacGuffin.
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