The Triangle of Dramatics - explaining a literary technique in Teen Wolf
I’ve explained this a few times today so it’s become apparent it needs it’s own meta. Now before I explain this there is a reason you’ve never heard of it - it’s high level criticism, it’s post graduate level. Your teacher probably won’t have heard of it because you don’t need to know the difference between melodrama and drama yet, because you think melodrama is all over acting and American soap operas, and you don’t need, at most education levels, to know this.
However it explains a lot about Teen Wolf.
The basic definition is this melodrama is any fictional work where the characters stay in one role, where drama is any fictional work where the characters switch between three roles usually in reaction to the shifting of another character.
IE if you go to see Blade, you know Blade is a good guy and you know Frost is the bad guy and they stay the good guy and the bad guy and the bad guy loses, voila! This is a “melodrama”. This does not mean it’s badly written, acted or directed, it just means the characters are never explored beyond the embodiment of one role. Ie Blade is a hero, and Frost is the villain.
This holds true for most TV because shifting roles can make people uncomfortable, which is why it happens, it causes the audience to have a reaction. This is not what people generally want in their basic entertainment because it requires a touch more audience participation than they are used to.
Most episodic TV (and a lot of films) follow a simple model (which Teen Wolf ignores entirely) where every episode follows the exact same formula. An threat is introduced (perhaps a monster, a crime, etc) the characters you know get together and solve it, they end the problem, celebrate. That’s it.
They are all like that, and we celebrate the variations not the change, we look at how the threat is different, how they find out how to deal with it is different, etc, but they’re all the same - this means you can sit down and watch a random episode on the TV without much info. This means it’s impossible to apply the triangle of dramatics because there is no scope for the characters to change like that. You might have an episode where a character is evil, or a victim but basically they revert to factory default as soon as the episode is over, and a good writer will make slight adjustments to the character afterwards so any change happens over a season.
Teen Wolf ignores this, in fact I think it took it out back and pissed on it, then laughed for a while before stumbling back in drunk.
What Teen Wolf does instead is apply the triangle of dramatics, it’s called the triangle because it has three faces, the antagonist, the protagonist and the object. Or to make it easier, the villain, the victim and the champion or hero. I’m going to use champion because it’s not as incendiary as hero.
Now Scott is one arm of a three faced fulcrum, often the triangle is placed in threes, what this means is his shift will shift two others into the other two roles, this would be Derek and Stiles. This means when Scott does something good Derek shifts in the role of Villain, and Stiles into victim, but when he moves into the role of villain, Stiles becomes champion, Derek becomes victim (I’ll give examples in a moment) and when he stands as victim, Derek becomes champion and Stiles becomes villain.
In Magic Bullet where Derek is clearly the victim Stiles takes the role of champion and leaves Scott, who is caught up in Argent family stuff, the role of villain. Not because he is being villainous (callous, maybe) but because there is no other role left.
They are the main fulcrum, but the other characters do this as well, ALL OF THEM, (well except for Deaton, he’s happily under villain atm and not moving, we just don’t know his motivations) for example, Chris spends s1 as villain, by s2 he’s become victim as the code is pretty much all he has left, in s3 he’s champion as he tries to destroy the darach. You must remember that these descriptions are being simplified to make it easier to explain.
You have to think of a dial with three notches that is held in place with two other dials, in a triangle, and when you move one the other two move as well. Or like the triforce where each side is a different colour, like red, yellow and blue, so when one triangle shows a red face, the others show yellow and blue, and when you turn them they all turn so they are showing, together, the three colours in the centre.
So when we consider the triumvirate of Scott/Derek/Stiles we have to remember that the other characters do this too but not as often, they are ALL victim, villain and champion at times (well Peter hasn’t done hero yet), but I haven’t charted who turns with who beyond the main characters.
At the beginning of S1 Scott is a victim, Derek is mistaken for being the one who bit him (and is a bit of an arse), thus villain, and Stiles is the one who trains him ergo the champion. By the centre of the season Derek has shifted into the role of victim, Stiles into villain and Scott into champion as they go up against Peter. Derek snatches the role of villain when he kills Peter putting Scott back into the role of victim, and giving Stiles the role of champion.
In Magic Bullet where Derek is clearly the victim Stiles takes the role of champion and leaves Scott, who is caught up in Argent family stuff, the role of villain. Not because he is being villainous (callous, maybe) but because there is no other role left.
But if we look at the pool scene where Derek is clearly victim (paralysed with a high possibility of drowning) Stiles takes the role of champion (holding him up) Scott becomes the villain for not answering his phone. This is the same set up as the end of S2 where Scott betrays them to Gerard - he takes the role of villain, leaving Derek as victim and Stiles as hero (ramming Jackson with the jeep, bringing Lydia)
But Derek also takes the role of villain a few times, for example the seduction of Erica (a problematic scene which i think was meant to be like a drug deal, I think it was meant to be problematic just not quite as bad as it was) Scott takes the role of champion as he steps into become their protector, which leaves Stiles with victim as he is ignored with his advice.
The “titles” are massively over simplified so they might not always fit as well as I’d like.
In Season 3 Scott took the role of hero more often, although in S1 and 2 he tended to switch back mostly between victim and villain.
So Scott can only be champion when Derek takes the role of villain, and if, as it was shown in 3a, he spends most of the season as victim that means Scott takes the role of villain, giving Stiles the role of champion - which he showed with his manipulation and brains. He saved everyone with Lydia in Motel California (where Derek’s secrecy of his death gave hiim the role of villain) but Scott’s determination to ignore Stiles and reach an accord with Deucalion nearly got them all killed.
It’s a complicated thing to explain and so don’t worry if you don’t get it at first, draw it like a dial (or a turning triforce) it makes it easier to understand. But this means understanding that all the characters take all the roles (yes, even Peter who could be considered for it by sending Derek and Cora away, for fighting the twins in the hospital etc) but it explains why some viewers demonise Derek to promote Scott, because for Scott to be the champion Derek has to be the villain. For Scott’s suffering to be heard Derek has to be the villain, and if Scott is the villain then Derek is the victim.
And some people can’t understand that because they have no precedent, it’s a high level technique that is often much more subtle - for example in Pride in Prejudice, Darcy starts as villain, he becomes victim when Lizzy rips him a new one when he proposes and rises to become champion, just as Lizzy goes from victim (for being scorned) to champion (for explaining exactly why - with examples and possible diagrams) she won’t marry him, to villain for not seeing what he would do for her. Most TV, movies, books don’t bother because it’s difficult and it requires the audience to track it, and can demonise the “hero” of the piece. It only works when others are there to change with the main character. It requires at least two people, usually three. And for teen wolf to do it with all it’s characters is actually kind of epic, because it means they all have that depth.
I have said all along I’m patient with it because Davis is really good at the tiny details, the ones only a lit major would spot, his use of literary tropes and devices is really good (it’s the big broad strokes he sucks at), and this is just one example
but it explains why Scott fans are often so negative to Derek, why Stiles fans can like both Derek and Scott, and why Derek fans are so negative to Scott, because if one character rises then the other must fall.