Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-87.58.238.15-20180120205635/@comment-31763506-20180120235120

Although my experience is that one can learn more about literary criticism from a random walk through TVTropes than one can from the entire collected works of Jacques Derrida, its contributors have a tendency to define archetypes and then smash examples until they can make them fit into them, which is a bad habit as old as Aristotle.

The Five Man Band is one of those mushy archetypes. What I think is actually happenning is that there's an evolutionary pressure in fiction writing that pushes the size of groups of protagonists towards the range of five or so. Anything less than three has no group dynamic, but it gets increasingly difficult to maintain distinct characters with separate identities and actions without the size of the work ballooning to support those intercharacter interactions as the number of protagonists expands.

A good example of the latter is Tolkien. In "The Hobbit", he has a team of 14 protagonists, excluding Gandalf, but apart from Bilbo, Thorin, Balin, Bombut, Fili and Kili, name one thing that they do or say. This effect is present, but less pronounced, in the Fellowship of the Ring, especially while the Fellowship is still together. Many of the more memorable character interplays happen either on the road to Rivendell or after the breakup of the Fellowship into smaller groups.

Concurrently, there's the tendency to award individual characters "hats", areas of specialization or stock archetypes. In American HS fiction there's the big meatheaded jock, sharing many of the characteristics of the fantasy RPG meat-shield. The Five Man Band trope has archetypes that are sufficiently broad and generic that you can usually shoehorn three or so characters into the pattern and claim a good fit where none really exists.