Your question for the day

[kate_nepveu]

Are Trent the Uncatchable and Vash the Stampede cross-cultural manifestations of the same archetype—goofy-seeming pacifists who do improbable things and around whom improbable things happen? If so, what other manifestations are there?

Comments

[schulman.livejournal.com]

Doctor Who, although he's not as pacifist as he used to be. (I just watched the Christmas special, in which he blows stuff up real good.)

[kate_nepveu]

Hmm. The thing that interests me about Vash & Trent is that their pacifism is a defining trait; I don't watch Doctor Who, is that the case for him?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In some eras, yes. It comes and goes. The Doctor is one of those heroes who never carries a weapon, though he does carry tools that can have secondary uses as weapons, and sometimes uses them.

William Hartnell's First Doctor doesn't strike me as pacifist at all, but it became more of a defining trait in the 1970s. Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor was very much the goofy, seemingly mad joker who disdained fighting, though his attitude toward it was more amused contempt than anything else. The Fifth Doctor paid a lot of lip service to pacifism, but always seemed to end up in bloody situations where he was effectively enabling violence or pushing Daleks out of windows. The new series Doctors aren't all that pacifistic but they have contempt for what they regard as needless or excessive violence.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Oh, yes, and the Doctor almost always makes a great show of being anti-military, though the Third Doctor spent years hanging out with an elite United Nations terrestrial-defense squad anyway, carping at them the whole time.