Trope Talk: Trickster Heroes

"Heroism" is one of those really annoying things that doesn't have a clear-cut definition

in any meaningful sense, but so much of our understanding of storytelling and characterization

is built on it.

The current dictionary angle highlights bravery, unselfishness and nobility as the principles

embodied by a hero, which sounds fine and dandy until you (a) try to hold any of the

archetypical Ancient Greek heroes to the moral standard of unselfishness and (b) notice that

nobility as a core precept of heroism is a holdover from the feudalism days when the

divine right of kings was more foundational to most people's worldviews than gravity.

There's no other reason the word for "inheriting social rank" is the same word as "traits that

make you the best kind of person" - or, for that matter, why the word for "common peasant"

is "villein".

I once went down an unhinged rabbit hole trying to cleanly define an antihero, because it

turns out if a concept doesn't have a definition, neither does its antithesis.

Heroism is an ideal, a standard, a soft-edged concept heavily dependent on the snapshot

of cultural context it forms in.

It's not something we can lay strict parameters on - it's a vibe.

And because it's a vibe, people are pretty good at feeling out when a character trait

doesn't fit that vibe.

An alleged hero can lose their goodwill and dessert privileges very quickly if they don't

check all the boxes on the current edition of the moral absolutism rubric.

It's easy to be a protagonist - all you need for that is to keep the camera on you.

Being a hero has standards.

Which is why it can be kind of complicated to make a Trickster Hero.

Trickster characters in general are pretty simple.

They're manipulative schemers who get what they want by fooling people into giving it

to them.

Typically their favored strategies include lying, stealing, sneaking and generally doing

everything in their power to not be wholly perceived and understood, because if that

happens it gives the game away and makes their plans eminently thwartable.

Which is a pretty complicated  set of characteristics 

to give… to a hero.

Now again, part of this is because of my perennial nemesis, the fact that "hero" does not actually

have a solid definition.

For instance, while trickster traits might feel fairly antithetical to an america-centric

cultural concept of what heroism looks like, there are a metric buttload of trickster gods

and culture heroes that maybe spend a slice of their time playing antagonist causing problems

for the rest of the pantheon, but the bulk of their time is spent as the hero, winning

personal victories or contributing to the creation and shaping of the world through

cunning schemes.

Tricksters are such a staple of worldwide folklore and mythology that there's whole

swaths of study dedicated to conspiracy-boarding why they're like that.

For an easy handful of examples, various versions of Coyote and Raven crop up as trickster figures

in several indigenous North American cultures, Anansi originated in West Africa and gets

up to a lotta hijinks that later got blended together with other trickster figures like

Brer Rabbit, Loki is obviously  a pretty archetypical 

trickster and schemer in the space of Norse

mythology with the interesting twist that he gets his ass kicked a lot and the secondary

twist that chief god Odin is also a trickster figure while also being 100% the boss, and

then you get powerhouses like Sun Wukong who, despite having the power of god and anime

on his side, continually has to use sneaky tactics and shapeshifting to outwit the opponents

he can't just punch through a mountain or two.

There's a lot of interesting threads through various mythological trickster stories that

we're not even gonna try to fully unpack here, but do have some interesting implications

for the discussion of trickster heroes.

For one thing, a lot of these mythological tricksters have a tendency to use their tricks

to help humanity, either  accidentally or deliberately.

One of the most iconic examples of that is Prometheus purposefully stealing fire from

the gods and giving it to humanity, which is an unconditional positive that he is very

harshly punished for.

You also get things like the Inuit story of frequent sneaky trickster Raven being the

first teacher of humanity, getting everyone up to speed on the whole "wearing clothes"

and "dying less" thing.

A lot of Diné folklore about Coyote is pretty negative, but there's at least one story where

he saves humanity from a child-eating giant by convincing him that letting Coyote break

his leg will be great for his long-term  

child-eating career.

So clearly, trickster traits and heroism - or 

at least protagonist status  bundled with do-gooding

- go hand in hand a lot.

But I'm not presently qualified to delve into folkloric tricksters any deeper than I already

have, and besides, we don't need to caveat heroism itself to justify the existence of

trickster heroes.

There are ways to make a protagonist heroic while still letting them get their scheme

on, and that's a very interesting duality I'd like to explore.

A trickster hero's primary skillset is in manipulating a situation to their advantage

through cunning and trickery rather than brute force.

Generally they are in some way an underdog facing some sort of more-powerful antagonist,

and if they fought that antagonist on the terms the antagonist defined, they would 100%

lose.

This is a classic foil dynamic, where the protagonist and antagonist have contrasting

qualities instead of being very similar to one another.

A villain who is extremely strong and durable might get pitted against a hero who's fast

and sneaky.

A villain with a ton of money and political power - like a noble of some kind - might

go up against someone without much of either.

A villain with access to a powerful weapon will probably find themself dealing with heroes

that are hard to hit with it.

You may note, this isn't so much a battle of equals as it is an overwhelming antagonistic

force facing heroes that need to work pretty hard to not just be flattened.

Brute force can take a lot of forms, whether it's physical strength or social capital or

political power or technological supremacy.

In contexts where the villain is well-situated to just bulldoze their enemies, the heroes

will need strengths and strategies that make them much more un-bulldozable.

Which is 100% a word.

Merriam and Webster told me themselves.

Now because "trickster" basically just describes a skillset, there's no real restrictions on

a trickster character's personality or motivation.

But in order for them to qualify as a trickster hero, that personality and motivation needs

to be decently heroic.

They need to be using their sneaky trickster-ness for a good cause, or at least a sympathetic

one.

And again, because heroism is a vibes-based value judgment, their sneaky trickster-ness

can't be so over-the-top as to outweigh their good-guy qualities.

It's frequently considered heroic to be honorable and fight fair, but of course a trickster

hero facing a powerful enemy is in a situation that is already unfair and blatantly skewed

against them, and if they try to fight "fair" under those conditions, they're just going

to lose.

The number one trait most trickster heroes share is that they're fundamentally reactive.

All their lying and scheming is done in response to some powerful jerkface rocking up and causing

problems.

This already goes a long way towards making trickster qualities feel more heroic, because

the target of their wrath is the instigator of the whole situation.

Bugs Bunny doesn't start causing trouble until Elmer Fudd pokes his shotgun where it doesn't

belong.

This is also how most trickster superheroes work - their very motivating origin stories

are the result of bad guys causing problems in their presence, inspiring them to stand

up and do something about it.

Superheroes exist to solve problems, and if a superhero's powerset doesn't just let them

hit the problem til it goes away, they need to be sneakier and more creative about it.

Probably the most classic trickster superhero is Spider-Man.

He's smart, quippy and creative with his powers, but most of his enemies are physical tanks

like Rhino or Sandman or Venom.

Spider-Man may be strong, but he's not Superman.

He can't just punch people into orbit if they're getting inconveniently rowdy.

Instead he typically has to use the terrain to his advantage, luring his opponents into

environmental hazards or exploiting some flaw he's noticed in their powerset - like the

first time he fights The Rhino in Spectacular 

Spider-Man, he realizes  Rhino has a huge overheating

problem and lures him into the steam tunnels to knock him out with super-heatstroke.

The fact that this isn't exactly honorably chivalric combat doesn't do anything to diminish

Spider-Man's heroism - it just makes him seem smart, and everything he's doing feels necessary

because the extremely destructive bad guys he's stopping are very, very hard to stop.

And there's another interesting element to a trickster hero's playbook.

Usually a trickster hero stops the bad guy, not by doing things to the bad guy until they

stop being a problem, but by convincing the bad guy to do things themselves that turn

out to have undesirable outcomes.

The agency is all on the villain, which is of course the problem the hero is facing when

the story starts - the antagonist turns up to cause problems, and the protagonist doesn't

have access to the kind of raw power that would let them just make the villain stop,

so instead they have to shape the villain's actions until they either choose to stop causing

problems or physically can't continue.

The villain in this scenario isn't suffering anything they didn't literally bring on themselves

- the only twist is that they didn't think it was going to affect them.

It's a classic case of using the enemy's strength against them.

An extremely textbook demonstration of this is an old Brer Rabbit story, where Brer Rabbit

finds himself seized by his perennial nemesis and local carnivore Brer Fox.

Faced with the prospect of being straight-up eaten, he begs and pleads with Brer Fox to

please oh please don't throw him into that briar patch over there.

This wasn't something Brer Fox was previously considering - he was just gonna torture him

a lil bit and then eat him - but the more Brer Rabbit begs him not to throw him into

that briar patch, the more Brer Fox wants to, just to make him suffer.

In the end he succumbs to temptation and yeets Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, only for

Brer Rabbit to expertly navigate the briars without a scratch and vanish into the underbrush

where Brer Fox can't follow.

As he explains from a safe distance, Brer Rabbit was born and raised in a briar patch.

This is a very classic con.

A trickster hero faced with a cruel antagonist can convince them to do almost anything if

they think it'll hurt somebody they want to see suffer.

And more broadly, to generalize off this model, the number one way a trickster can get an

antagonist to do what they want is to figure out what the antagonist wants and convince

them that they can get it by doing this one thing.

If they wanna hurt people, oh this would hurt me sooo much.

If they want power, oh this would make you so strong!

If they want money, oh I have so much cash and absolutely no street-smarts it'd be a

shame if somebody scammed me out of it!

Leverage, being a con-of-the-week show, always starts with our crew of heisting heroes figuring

out what the villain of the week wants most and then building a scam about making them

think they're gonna give it to them.

And Leverage is a good segue into another way a writer can make a crew of schemers and

scammers seem heroic by contrast: beyond making them fundamentally reactive, give them somebody

completely sympathetic to protect.

A trickster fighting on their own behalf is in a slight gray area no matter how terrible

their enemy might be, since they're still putting their enemy through hell because of

some personal slight - but a trickster fighting on behalf of a helpless innocent without a

dishonest bone in their body is tapping directly into the foundational tenet of modern heroism:

selflessness.

Now their unheroic, manipulative strategies are just a means to a very good end, and the

more helpless and honest the victim, the more justified our hero's scheming will appear.

This is also a very useful strategy a writer can use to make the antagonist more threatening,

since if we only ever see them face off against a trickster hero that knows exactly how to

run circles around them, they're gonna come across as bumbling or even downright comedic,

which is frequently the intent.

But if the writer really wants to convince the audience that this overwhelmingly powerful

bad guy needs to be taken down and they're too powerful for anyone to do it openly, it's

very helpful to demonstrate what their villainous brute force looks like.

So they'll dash an innocent person's dreams, gloat about how untouchable they are, taunt

their victim to just try and make them face consequences and march off with the local

police force in their pocket, overall making it clear how absolutely on top of the world

they are.

These guys are trickster bait.

They are so unbelievably awful that the audience 

wants to see them taken  down, but so well-established

and well-connected that the existing systems of authority that are supposed to stop that

sort of thing are barely more than suggestions in their presence.

Like with most cases of trickster bait, the only thing powerful enough to destroy them

is themselves, and the trickster just needs to convince them it's a really good idea to

do the things that make that happen.

And this ties into one more thing that can make a trickster hero feel completely justified:

if the villain is smug.

Smugness is a very dangerous thing for a villain to indulge in, because villains are, by their

narrative nature, set up to fail, and a villain confident in their victory to the point of

gloating about it is baiting the audience into seeing them defeated.

Plenty of villains get a dignified defeat where they acknowledge a worthy opponent,

or they get in one little token victory that keeps their downfall from feeling absolute.

You can even defeat a villain in a way that does absolutely nothing to disprove their

worldview if you've got a fondness for ambiguity or disappointment.

A strong villain who gets defeated by somebody stronger than them might be like "wow I didn't

know anyone was stronger than me, this defeat reaffirms my might-based values system and

makes me want to get even stronger."

A strong villain who gets defeated by somebody totally weak who did nothing but outsmart

them is the kind of  worldview-shattering experience 

that might leave them rethinking their entire

life.

When a villain is smug, it means they're confident that they're untouchable in every way that

matters.

It's not just about whatever their villainous goal is, it's about making sure everybody

knows how powerless they are to stop it.

We don't just want to see villains lose: we want to see them proven wrong.

And when the villain is smug, that means we want to see them utterly fall apart.

This writing strategy comes up in several episodes of Columbo, an unusual detective

show with an unusual trickster hero.

It's kind of an inside-out whodunnit where every episode starts with the audience seeing

the villain of the week committing a murder and flawlessly covering it up.

They're almost unilaterally ridiculously rich and powerful, and they all very cleverly construct

a scenario that looks like a perfect murder.

Not only are they sure they'll never be caught, most of the time they're sure they'll never

even be suspected.

And when the cops roll up in the opening of the episode, they typically take in the scene

as presented and immediately  come to the conclusion 

the killer wanted them to reach.

All, that is, except for Lieutenant Columbo, a small, jovial man in an extremely rumpled

coat who only ever seems to  be half-paying-attention.

Columbo is an interestingly opaque character, because for the bulk of any given episode

he is being 100% dishonest.

He'll lie about why he's turned up somewhere incriminating, he'll lie about not suspecting

the villain of the week, he'll lie about how he totally buys their bullshit explanation

covering over some flaw he pointed out in their alibi, he'll lie about his wife or his

boss pushing him to spend more time with the villain even though obviously he'd like to

get out of their hair.

This is so extreme that, through the entire run of the show, the audience never sees his

often-referenced wife and for the  first few seasons we never receive  

any evidence that she exists at all,  and we never even learn his first name.

We know almost nothing about this guy, and everything we learn is usually something he's

telling the villain of the week that therefore can't be trusted.

He usually favors softball lies - lies of omission or deflection rather than outright

falsehoods - and most of the time it's still pretty clear to the audience when he figures

something out and broadly what he's planning.

But in general, the first time in any given episode where Columbo even indicates that

he thinks the villain of the week did the murder is at the beginning of the final scene

of the episode where he reveals how they did it - when he starts saying what the audience

already knows he's been thinking the whole time.

He almost never makes an accusation if he doesn't already have the evidence to completely

shred their alibi.

Alongside all the lying, the trickster part of his character is mostly dedicated to hiding

in plain sight.

The bad guys never know exactly how much he knows, how much he suspects, and how much

he can prove.

He won't even give them the satisfaction of knowing for sure that he thinks they did it.

The reason this level of dishonesty works without making Columbo feel in any way bad

or unheroic is because of the context in which he uses it.

On the occasions we see Columbo hanging out with peers or innocent bystanders he's just

as friendly and jovial as ever, showing that that part of him isn't an act to off-balance

the bad guys.

He's kind and compassionate to grieving survivors, whenever a villain of the week tries to frame

somebody he's always very reassuring to them - and every once in a while we get a real

glimpse at how he's honestly feeling, and see a man who is profoundly dedicated to the

pursuit of justice.

We don't get his backstory, we don't get personal angst, we don't get any sort of character

arc - just a guy who's ridiculously good at his job methodically sneaking his way through

a web of lies and misdirection until he can take down a smug murderer in a single stroke.

Trickster heroes aren't really defined by what they're good at.

They're defined by how they use what they're good at.

A hero isn't defined by how much they look like a hero, but by the good that they do.

Or by how funny it is when they tie a shotgun in a knot and let Elmer Fudd blow himself

up with it.

So… yeah?