![]() | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
The trickster is a common stock character in folklore and popular culture. A clever, mischievous person or creature, the trickster achieves goals through the use of trickery. A trickster may trick others simply for amusement or for survival in a dangerous world. The trickster could be a personification of the chaos that the world needs to function.
An archetypical example is the simple peasant successfully put to the test by a King who wishes a suitable suitor for his daughter. In this fairy tale, no brave and valiant prince or knight succeeds. Aided only by his natural wit, the peasant evades danger and triumphs over monsters and villains without fighting. Thus the most unlikely candidate passes the trials and receives the prize. Such characters are a staple of animated cartoons, in particular those used and developed by Tex Avery et al. during the Golden Age of American animation.
Hynes and Doty, in Mythical Trickster Figures (1997) state that every trickster has several of the following six traits: [1]
Yet the Doctor has seldom been a straightforward hero. He has often exhibited characteristics of the trickster, for he generally relies on wiliness and rhetorical skill more than martial prowess or physical force, and his character has been frequently tinged with antiheroism
The Doctor needs his own trickster figure to transport him to his own greenworld which, perforce, must be that much more chaotic and magical and insane and governed by all the primal forces even he tries to ignore. And there he can confront those conflicts within himself and find resolution to them before returning, fixed, to his real world. And order was restored with a wedding!