I've written posts on this blog before about personalities and the classification systems that I would use personally to assess people; I've also written posts about professional classification systems like the Myers-Briggs personality type system. My own system has 4 personalities, and Briggs has 16 personality types determined by 4 attributes - incidentally my Myers-Briggs type was INFP at the time of writing the previous post, it is now INFJ.
What these classification systems show us is that the population as a whole can be sorted into these groupings, no matter how unique you think you really are, determined by these 4 attributes you can be summed up into one of only 16 classifications. By virtue of the fact that authors create characters that are believable, and even when they deliberately try to make them as complex and unbelievable as possible, they still fit into this same classification system. The reason people have similarities with others real or fictional is because they are based on real people and real behaviours. I often see people say "You're trying to be X from Y" where X is a character from a TV show called Y. This annoys me most of all because the majority of people that do this seem to hold this fixation on the idea that those shows were the first to do that or portray that type of personality. Yet, just as with real-life personalities, our fictional counterparts also fit into the same groups, and just as with real life they are never the first person to behave in that way.
There is a website called TV Tropes which is dedicated to listing tropes - in this case referring to the recurring devices used by writers and actors who portray their characters. The great wealth of tropes listed and the abundance of examples of each shows how originality is not something which has been present for a very long time. Even going back hundreds of years examining plays and stories from folklore and legend, the same tropes can be found again and again because the limit of human imagination when it comes to creativity is a lot smaller than we like to think it is.
One example of a trope relevant to this post is the Four Temperament Ensemble which embodies four recurring personalities:
1 - Sanguine: Extroverted, emotional, and people-oriented.
2 - Choleric: Extroverted, unemotional, and task-oriented.
3 - Melancholic: Introverted, emotional, and task-oriented.
4 - Phlegmatic: Introverted, unemotional, and people-oriented.
Source: tvtropes.org
TV Tropes even goes on to provide a listing at the bottom that lets you explore examples of these tropes, the section specific to TV shows can be found here.
Here are a selection of examples:
3rd Rock from the Sun:
- Dick Solomon (melancholic)
- Tommy Solomon (choleric)
- Sally Solomon (phlegmatic)
- Harry Solomon (sanguine)
Doctor Who (The Eleventh Doctor and his companions):
- The Doctor (melancholic)
- River Song (choleric)
- Rory (phlegmatic)
- Amy Pond (sanguine)
The Golden Girls:
- Dorothy (melancholic)
- Sophia (choleric)
- Rose (phlegmatic)
- Blanche (sanguine)
Sex and the City:
- Carrie Bradshaw (melancholic)
- Miranda Hobbes (choleric)
- Charlotte York (phlegmatic)
- Samantha Jones (sanguine)
As you scroll through the list and see how common this trope is you begin to see how that show you like to compare everyone to was not the first to do it and won't be the last. Yes the people you see will share similarities with those characters but that does not mean they are pretending to be those characters, and in most cases they have probably never even seen the show to begin with.
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