The Leader, burdened with the crucial responsibility of leading their merry
band of heroes through the plot's tumultuous twists and turns, is unconditionally the most
important member of the traditional Five Man Band. But despite their role in the spotlight,
without their supporting cast the leader is a leader of no-one and the band is a tragically
solo act, and thus despite being less central the other four members are just as important,
and enter the stage a little ways in the leader's shadow. The Lancer, of course,
is a permanent second fiddle, the leader's foil and frequently their dark reflection - an edgier,
grumpier hero, the moon to their leader's sun, the harmony to their melody, the soup to their
sandwich. Many would argue the Lancer is the best character, as they get to be a little spicier
than their more protagonist-y leader, who must lay down the paradigm that the Lancer rebels against.
Suffice to say that lancers are well-liked and may even garner more applause than the leader they're
ostensibly secondary to. Then, bringing up the supporting crew, we get the Big Guy and Smart Guy,
frequently paired together as a foiling duo - one big and strong, one small and smart,
the dynamic practically writes itself. These two are often a little more sidelined than the rest,
filling a more utility-based role in the group than a particularly character-driven one:
the Big Guy solves strength-based problems while the Smart Guy solves wits-based ones,
a very efficient system to keep the plot moving while the Leader and Lancer are off
hogging all the character drama for themselves. But it's called a five-man band for a reason,
and we've only tackled four so far. With our bases covered so thoroughly,
who could possibly be left? Well, last but not least, the fifth character is the heart,
aka the emotional core of the group. But what does being the "emotional core" actually mean? And is
this character really "last but not least", or are we just being polite? Today let's unpack the fifth
and final member of the Five Man Band and what they actually bring to the traditional party comp!
On paper, the heart character can seem pretty superfluous. The leader is generally a heavy
hitter or master planner or otherwise the most protagonist-y hero that keeps the plot moving,
the lancer provides some exciting character drama and interpersonal challenge while also
generally being a near-even match to the leader in badassery, the big guy and smart guy as mentioned
serve very functional problem-solving roles - so what's left for the heart to
do? Maybe we can give them healing powers or super-empathy or something, but really,
practically speaking, what is the point of them? Well, there's one crucial concept we've been
overlooking because we've been taking it for granted. Why is this group… together?
It's an odd question. The five-man band is a band because that's what makes the plot happen,
right? That's what's most interesting to watch. We like seeing these guys hang out
and solve problems together, therefore they form a five-man band. But that's the doylist reason
the group exists. What's the watsonian reason they all hang out, live and work and fight bad
guys together? Why is the five-man band a band? That is where we find The Heart. This character
provides compassion, friendship, emotional intelligence, peacekeeping,
and a driving motivation for the rest of the group that's grounded in caring about
people - specifically each other. Sometimes The Heart is simply a character everyone in the
group individually cares about, but sometimes their compassionate connection runs at a more
profound level than that; sometimes they care so deeply that it in turn inspires
their friends and teammates to care in a similar way. It is often explicitly shown in-story that,
without The Heart, the group either falls apart or never forms in the first place. Every
character has a motivation to act in the plot, but the heart motivates them to do it together.
The Heart may or may not have something to offer outside of predominantly emotional
character-driven situations, but in those situations they're the master of their
domain. The Heart is often the first character to admit that they're hanging out with the other
characters because they genuinely like them, rather than just out of necessity or a common
enemy. They often show their love for their teammates in clear, tangible ways - gifts,
compliments, open concern for their well-being - and they are, in many ways, the glue that holds
the group together because they genuinely and openly want the group to be together. The other
members of the group may be a bit too cool for school to be willing to admit they like having
friends they can rely on, but The Heart has no such weakness and will often be first in line
to set up the secret base and start handing out communicators and friendship bracelets.
The heart is often the character that the other characters get along with most easily
and unconditionally, and it's comparatively easy for even more guarded or jaded characters to admit
that they like them, because of course they like them - they're friendly, kind,
compassionate and otherwise precision-designed to be easy to love. The Heart is therefore also the
character that it's easiest to motivate the other characters with by putting them in danger. Thus,
we establish the Heart-To-Damsel Pipeline. Once it's established that everyone likes The Heart,
endangering the Heart is a very easy way to get the group together and working towards a common
goal. And as a bonus, if the Heart really isn't much good in a fight, that handily
justifies their endangerment and keeps them out of the fray during the rescue plotline.
On that note, there is a big, pink elephant in the room we should probably touch on before
continuing, and that is the fact that The Heart is kind of my term for this character; before,
this character archetype was referred to as The Chick. This is because, for a lot of reasons,
a lot of older ensemble cast stories skewed rather heavily in the dude direction when it came to
actually important, fleshed-out main characters, and for other reasons, many of these ensemble
casts would be accessorized with the addition of A Single Girl. Sometimes it was a token effort
to appeal to a wider audience, more frequently it was to give at least one of the actually important
characters a good clean heterosexual love interest - but whatever the internal logic, the end result
was you'd often end up with stories where all but one of the protagonists would be guys with
diverse and intriguing personalities, backstories and motivations, and then there'd be one lady
protagonist who had to do all the heavy lifting of representing All Women and consequently had
very little room left for an actual personality. This didn't always produce flat non-characters,
but it definitely stacked the deck against the writer, and it was often indicative of a general
difficulty the writer might've had with writing female characters in the first place, like they
were unable to fully relate to them or conceive of them as full-fledged characters in their own right
without defining them by the dude protagonist they were most relevant to, making it almost impossible
for these writers to genuinely consider putting a female character in any role with agency or
self-determination or the kind of relatable drive that made audiences vibe with the protagonists.
A persistent social pressure characterizing women as a Mysterious And Incomprehensible
Other Species certainly didn't help matters for these poor guys, and as a result, a lot
of classic Five Man Bands would have dudes in the leader, lancer, big guy and smart guy roles,
and then with all the actually important bases covered, they could afford to slot in one lady
in a nice, out-of-the-way spot where she wouldn't mess anything up and could fill the role of "at
least one person in the group likes her, typically because she's their love interest." Now, to be
both clear and fair, The Chick was not always a poorly-written character - hell, technically
speaking Princess Leia qualifies, and she's an absolute ass-kicker and a very nonstandard
protagonist - but The Chick was frequently the weakest-written protagonist, and her role in the
group dynamic as The Heart often came from a kind of generic sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice
situation with a little bit of "team mom" thrown in for flavor, essentially making
her the gentle and feminine caretaker to the irresponsible and manly protagonist squad,
because everyone knows the best and most appealing love interest a guy could ask for is Your Mom.
In later ensemble cast stories it was actually not uncommon for The Chick to very pointedly
not be the emotional core of the group, and to instead be an ass-kicker whose defining character
trait is that she can Totally Keep Up With The Boys and carved out her emotional stability to
make room for more kung fu. This was a clumsy but well-meaning effort to subvert the obvious
problems people had started to notice with The Chick archetype, namely that she was typically
aggressively useless and often only existed to get smooched by the hero and kidnapped,
in either order. Of course, being an ass-kicker didn't prevent these characters from still falling
victim to that classic damsel-rescue loop because that was more the result of writers who didn't
feel comfortable giving them agency over their own plot, but the effort was there. However, part of
the reason this backfired was because it deprived the party of a character in the role of the heart.
While generally flat and undeveloped, The Chick did in many cases unintentionally fill the role
of The Heart - the only character able to express honest compassion and emotional vulnerability,
because writers who struggle with understanding The Female Of The Species often also struggle
with archaic concepts of who is and is not allowed to express foundational human emotions. So when
The Chick was given the 90s Antihero treatment and written with an aggressive rejection of the
traits that painted her predecessor in fetching shades of feminine weakness, the end result was
a big group of macho ass-kickers with absolutely no emotional core. Many stories with this brand of
Token Lady Ass-Kicker found themselves struggling to invest audiences in a group dynamic that,
for some reason, seemed utterly lacking in emotional cohesion. With nobody in the group
capable of honestly admitting that they liked each other, group integrity got called into question.
But as writers got overall better at decoupling specific character archetypes from stereotypical
gender roles, the role of The Heart began to stabilize into an archetype in its own right.
Modern Hearts can be any gender and often have skills and a personality beyond being blandly,
generally supportive of their teammates' emotional needs. So now that we've done some
fandom archaeology to explore how this role in the band evolved over time, let's talk about some of
the ways The Heart can be characterized now! A fairly common portrayal of The Heart is an
All-Loving Hero - a Heart who makes friends easily, cares about anyone and everyone,
and tends to believe that every conflict can be resolved by everyone just talking things out and
understanding each other. These characters will often be gentle and kind to everyone, even their
enemies, and they can sometimes motivate villain redemption arcs just by being so dang nice and
continually giving them chances to be better. These characters are frequently pacifists to some
degree, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're wimps - it just means on the rare occasion someone
manages to actually get on their bad side, it's a golden opportunity for this character
to unload a level of power and badassery never before seen, not because they couldn't do it,
but because they wouldn't. This is one of a few ways to make these characters interesting,
because frankly the All-Loving Hero is, by their nature, a little one-note. They might play a dual
role as quippy light-hearted comic relief or have the narrative complicated by the twists and turns
of a romantic subplot, or the story might explore that this character actively struggles to express
any negativity they might be feeling, and that this is unhealthy for them. Characters in this
vein can also complicate the plot by insisting that moral conflicts might not be as black and
white as the rest of the band thinks, and might object to them fighting certain bad
guys in certain ways, or even fighting them at all - which, if done disruptively enough,
can actually undercut the lovability of this character. The deciding factor is
typically whether or not they're right about the bad guy. If the villain is, for instance,
some kind of beast-like monster that, despite its terrifying and inhuman appearance, seems to
be trying to communicate, and maybe even rescued the Heart from some kind of peril, it makes sense
that the Heart might think something complicated is going on and would wanna stop their friends
from attacking this monster they think kidnapped their friend. Hearts in this context are typically
rewarded with the information that the monster in question is some kind of friendly character
under a curse, and because they were willing to see past the monstrous exterior, the heart can
save them. But if the bad guy is a known villain doing the same villainy they always do and the
heart is like "oh I just know there's good in you, despite all evidence to the contrary",
that makes this trait a little less lovable. It's said that wisdom is picking your battles,
so a character on a categorical no-battles diet can come across as a little bit dumb sometimes.
Now a partial inversion of the All-Loving Hero trope is the heart that is Beloved By All,
a character who is defined less by how much they care and more by how much everyone else
cares about them. These characters are usually friendly and nice, since that's kinda par for
the course for hearts, but they're not necessarily nice to everyone, you know? They might be a little
more jaded than the All-Loving variant, a little more willing to start swinging when things are
looking grim - but mostly they're just so damn likable that everyone thinks they're great,
and at minimum everyone in the group likes them a lot. If this character is ever in trouble,
everyone will rally behind them. Structurally these characters can fill almost any role in
the group - in some stories this character even works as the leader of the team, and their beloved
status might tie into how they assembled the group in the first place. This character can be
structural to the mechanics of the group, or they might be more supporting, like comic relief or
even a tagalong kid. Now if those phrases made you feel a quick pang of dread, that's a reasonable
reaction, because "funny guys" and "tagalong kids" are character demographics that are notorious for
being intended to be lovable but actually coming across as incredibly obnoxious. It's nowhere near
universal, but when a character is defined, not by their internal traits, but by how the audience is
supposed to feel about them, this can result in a bit of a backlash if the traits the author thinks
are cute and charming instead hit the audience as annoying and frustrating. And unfortunately,
this effect can be exacerbated if every single character seems to find these characters and their
quirks absolutely endearing. Essentially, it's the same core principle that drives the popular
classification of a character as a Mary Sue - an audience recognizes that they're being told to
love a character without that feeling necessarily being earned. So beloved-by-all characters are a
bit of a minefield, but they're not actually that complicated - the writer doesn't need to convince
the audience that they love this character, they just need to show why the rest of the main
characters like them. That's a much less harrowing endeavor! Beloved-by-all hearts can be liked for
all kinds of reasons - kindness, charm, loyalty, a sense of humor, or really anything that their
specific teammates might find especially lovable. But some Hearts are defined more by what they do
than by who they are, like the Peacemaker variant - a Heart who mostly serves as a mediator for
conflicts, trying to make everyone settle down and be nice to each other. This character tends
to be very overtly motivated by compassion and friendship and a desire for the people around
them to be happy. This is not always super fun for them! A lot of these Hearts explicitly get
character arcs about how exhausting and emotionally damaging it is to constantly
put themselves between characters in conflict, often with the underlying question of why they
feel the need to do that, and some of them even get arcs about how they're avoiding confronting
their own problems by busying themselves with everyone else's. Unlike other Hearts,
these guys often exhibit an exciting twist of emotional repression or a general difficulty
expressing a side of themselves that's not unconditionally helpful and positive, and on the
rare occasions they do crack it's often very bad. But the Peacemaker is not the only practical role
Hearts can fill. Some hearts instead function as the Moral Compass of their group. These Hearts
have a very strong sense of Right And Wrong and might be the most vocal advocate in their
group for Doing The Right Thing, driving their teammates towards active heroism
when pragmatism or selfishness might otherwise be winning out. These Hearts overlap with the
paragon archetype and may come across as the most classically heroic protagonist, and in
extreme cases might even go rogue if the rest of the group is reluctant to Do The Right Thing. When
you have an ensemble cast of characters it's generally more interesting if each character
is ultimately motivated by different things - self-interest or personal desires, loyalty or
protectiveness for a specific person, a need to prove oneself or atone for a past wrongdoing,
the possibilities are basically endless. With that in mind, it can be helpful to have at least one
character around who will always choose to do the most right thing they can think of, to advocate
for the group to intervene in situations that aren't their business and might well backfire on
them for no other reason than it's the right thing to do. Aside from being a very convenient way to
get your heroes into trouble, this also allows for some interesting variation in the way your
heroes act heroically. By letting one character fill the role of peak goodness you can let other
members of the group express less heroic attitudes without this actually preventing them from being
good guys. If one character will always charge into the fray to protect innocents from villainy,
the other characters can bring up reasonable points about needing to keep a low profile or not
necessarily being able to tank the consequences of recklessly charging into a situation that
much bigger than them - and even if the other characters agree that they should intervene, the
Heart's morally spotless motivation can highlight the other character's motivations by contrast.
Maybe one of them is just as down to Do The Right Thing, but only because they're personally
enthusiastic about the chaos it's going to cause, or because they really, really want revenge on
the bad guy they'll be incidentally stopping in the process. Giving the team a token moral
paragon can be very interesting, and can make the other members of the party more interesting too.
When discussing Five-Man-Band party composition, it can be easy to fixate on the tangible,
plot-moving characteristics each member brings to the table. The Leader is typically hooked into the
main storyline, the Lancer challenges the leader and can make the point-A-to-point-B trajectory
of the plot more complicated, the Big Guy solves physical obstacles and the Smart Guy solves mental
ones. But framing these characters as nothing more than tools to make the plot happen is doing them
a disservice. The Heart is the character whose role is to remind the audience that
these are characters with thoughts and feelings and a drive beyond just moving the story along.
They encourage character-driven subplots even in heavily plot-and-story-driven narratives,
and their dynamics with the rest of the team deepen the characterization
of everyone involved. So I guess they're not really vital unless the writer cares about,
you know, the audience actually liking their protagonists. Sounds pretty niche.
So yeah!