The Red Baron
My friend Jordan recently made a post in which he invents a term, and then lays claim to it. The post is relatively small, and doesn’t really serve any purpose other than marking the time and date and claimed word.
It is, in short, a kind of linguistic submarine patent.
That said, the term isn’t that bad. He calls it the Red Baron Ploy, the use of a particularly standout evil villain to become the defining face of his otherwise vaguely defined countrymen (or group members of some other kind). Red Baron Ploy doesn’t sound very good, however… too many words. And in being so specifically about a black and white good/evil dichotomy, its utility is somewhat muted.
Instead, the term ought to be just “The Red Baron”. The Red Baron is often the villain, or at the very least, the antagonist, but his defining characteristic is his group membership.
A Red Baron can never work alone. The Red Baron is the representative, the face, the avatar, of a much larger group which the author does not characterize more widely (either because the group is so large as to make that unwieldly, or the author is simply uninterested).
The Red Baron is often flamboyant. Is often Jeremy Irons in Dungeons and Dragons o’er the top. It is in his nature specifically because he must become the character representation of tens if not thousands of other bodies (whom our protagonist perhaps slaughters by the dozens [if there are more than tens]). He must think for thousands. He must move for thousands. He must emote for thousands.
The Red Baron is a useful trope, and appears frequently. I recently watched a piece of shit called Death Race, a not-really-a-remake of a particularly good cult film called Death Race 2000. Our protagonist spends most of this malformed asshole of a motion picture in prison. There are fights, there are confrontations, there are various meetings with the wierdly-botoxed female prison warden: there are many events in which prison guards are obligated to appear, and frequently do violence to our cranky english hero. In exactly every single instance in which a guard interacts with any character onscreen (usually our main character), it is the same guard. He’s got kind of a freaky looking chin, makes his face look like a crescent moon in profile. In a prison the size of an island, day or night, at any far-flung corner of the prison, he is the guard to show up with his stick in hand, doing violence and muttering some lame Paul WS Anderson dialogue. He also appears at the right-hand side of our botox’ed warden whenever we see her. He is every guard. He is improbably, illogically sadistic… he is the sadism of every guard combined.
He is a Red Baron. Paul WS Anderson violated every rule of logic or sense just to make him so.
Don’t watch Death Race, though. It really sucks.
Look at the costume similarities between Darth Vader and the Storm Trooper. Darth Vader is a storm trooper in a black uniform and a cape. Also, with magic powers. Darth Vader is a Red Baron, effectively filling the characterization gap of a hundred easily slaughtered storm trooper infantry.
But it doesn’t stop at antogonism and villainy. Mel Gibson’s William Wallace very nearly acts as a Red Baron for all of the Scots in Braveheart, at least the bold, fighting kind.
Where the author chooses not to, for reasons good or evil, represent a large group as a diverse set of individuals, but instead, Superions them into a single, usually flamboyant representation, he has made a Red Baron.
It is a useful trope, with plenty of life left in it. Maybe an endless supply of life, really.
If you find yourself disheartened by the facelessness of your hero’s enemies — choose one of them to follow, one of them to deepen and grow. Let your audience learn to hate him, or love him tragically. Make a Red Baron.