About: The Generic Guy   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

The member of an ensemble cast with no distinctive personality traits. They may be smart, but not as smart as The Smart Guy. They may be strong, but not as strong as The Big Guy. In short, there is pretty much nothing remarkable or distinctive about them. They would be The Everyman or Standardized Leader ... if they were the main character. Usually occurs with a series that has a more distinctive character who also functions as a Straight Man making the addition of an even straighter character superfluous. Examples of The Generic Guy include:

AttributesValues
rdfs:label
  • The Generic Guy
rdfs:comment
  • The member of an ensemble cast with no distinctive personality traits. They may be smart, but not as smart as The Smart Guy. They may be strong, but not as strong as The Big Guy. In short, there is pretty much nothing remarkable or distinctive about them. They would be The Everyman or Standardized Leader ... if they were the main character. Usually occurs with a series that has a more distinctive character who also functions as a Straight Man making the addition of an even straighter character superfluous. Examples of The Generic Guy include:
dcterms:subject
dbkwik:all-the-tro...iPageUsesTemplate
dbkwik:allthetrope...iPageUsesTemplate
abstract
  • The member of an ensemble cast with no distinctive personality traits. They may be smart, but not as smart as The Smart Guy. They may be strong, but not as strong as The Big Guy. In short, there is pretty much nothing remarkable or distinctive about them. They would be The Everyman or Standardized Leader ... if they were the main character. However, they are not the main character. Someone else is The Hero and the fact that The Generic Guy is stuck in a secondary role makes them automatically boring. After all, everyone knows the secondary characters are supposed to be weird or quirky in some way. Normalcy is reserved for the first bananas only. It's the way of the world, right? When the sidekick is the normal one, it usually doesn't work. Thus, the generic guy will typically get very little to do or eventually be written out of the series. Usually occurs with a series that has a more distinctive character who also functions as a Straight Man making the addition of an even straighter character superfluous. As one can see below, there is a tendency for these characters to be Token Minorities, for several reasons. First, they cannot be the star because they are a token. Second, since they have no traits at all, they don't have negative traits; thus, the writers can claim that they are positive role models. Additionally, if your generic guy is the only minority character in the opening credits, there will be heck to pay and cries of "racism!" from Moral Guardians if the producers try to cut the generic guy, meaning that they're much less likely than "regular" generic guys to suffer from Chuck Cunningham Syndrome a few seasons in. If the character is stuck in this role despite their best efforts, then it is a case of I Just Want to Be Special. If they take the lack of recognizable traits to a level where it becomes an advantage on its own right, then they are The Nondescript. A Featureless Protagonist is a protagonist that has had this done to the extreme in a Video Game. In a video game with many playable characters, this character will be the Jack of All Stats. Compare Why Do You Keep Changing Jobs?. Examples of The Generic Guy include:
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software