The Warrior is a personality archetype that reflects the way the natural human trend to fight for the things that we love. The Warrior is after power, but they do not pursue power to change others (like the Ruler), or for power's sake (like the Magician): they pursue this power in order to prove to themselves their ability to vanquish threats and enemies. They preserve their order, and protect their loved ones.

Background

For those of us just seeing this series for the first time, I'm writing a series on using Pearson's personality archetypes (affiliate link) in storytelling. This profile, of the Warrior, is the fifth of twelve entries in this series, following the Destroyer, Orphan, Innocent, and the Sage (@loreshapergames/using-archetypes-the-sage). You might also be interested in my earlier series on the Hero and Hero's Journey and the Nemesis.

If you just want a quick recap or introduction, here's the gist: archetypes are recurring patterns that have proven to be pretty universal. They're cognitive schemes that allow us to examine behavior and narratives in light of a coherent whole. That makes them valuable tools to audiences and storytellers, since they make stories authentic and lend them meaning.

Understanding the Warrior

The Warrior is an interesting archetype. I suspect, based on my analysis, that there might actually be two variants of the Warrior archetype (the Father and the Son) in fiction, but there isn't enough difference between them to justify breaking them apart except in a more in-depth study that compares them more closely than I want to do right now.

The Warrior strives for power, but it is internal power that they demand. They are not motivated by a desire to be powerful over others (though they may not be opposed to this), but rather a desire to be a protector and defender. They desire to prove themselves, and they way that they do this is by finding and squaring off against enemies and problems.

A good way to think of the Warrior is as one part of a society's immune system. When they have principles (which they often do, since their journey is one of self-improvement as much as domination of the other), they are able to identify problems and threats and excise them or eliminate them. When they lose sight of these guiding principles, they destroy their own society, or things that do not harm their society, because they are too prone to using their power for those purposes.

Sometimes this manifests in physical, raw, violence, but it can also manifest in other ways. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird fights for an ethical code, defending the innocent Tom Robinson against racial prejudice. He is entirely nonviolent in his pursuit, using cunning and being willing to cause people social and emotional harm to pursue the removal of racism (or at least the sort of racism that condemns an innocent man to death on false accusations) in his society.

The Warrior can be manifested in terrific acts of charity and nobility; the chivalric knights of legend are often the ur-archetypal Warriors, who seek to improve themselves by figuring out when to use their power and when to restrain it. The Warrior in its truest form, unblemished by shadow, is the romanticized warrior-poet, or the negotiator who sticks to his guns and gets what he needs while still dealing fairly with others (having a win-win way of solving the problem ahead of them is acceptable to this sort of Warrior).

The Tragic Warrior

The Warrior's Shadow is insecurity, doubt, and a lack of empathy, which can manifest itself in ruthlessness and a need for accomplishments to justify their strength.

This can lead to xenophobia and cruel treatment of others.

Two of the most noteworthy tragic warrior figures in fiction are Okonkwo and Coriolanus (who I would type as falling into the Son variant of the warrior: motivated by others' approval).

Okonkwo, the protagonist of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, is a man who grows up as the son of a profligate and beggared musician named Unoka. Tasting the bitter hardships of his youth, he becomes motivated to push himself harder than anyone else, and ultimately becomes quite successful in his tribe.

He is, however, too focused on appearing strong to others. When a member of his tribe is killed in a neighboring town, he receives a hostage, a boy name Ikemefuna, in return. Okonkwo raises Ikemefuna as his own son while the tribe deliberates an appropriate course of action. Ultimately, they decide that blood must be the cost of blood, and they take Ikemefuna out into the jungle to kill him.

Okonkwo, not wanting to appear weak, joins the party, and kills his beloved adopted son despite being told that he should not do so by other members of his society. This serves as the most dramatic example of the sort of tragedies that befall Okonkwo across the whole novel, including the ostracizing of his biological son when he converts to Christianity.

By desiring to fit himself into the society around him by becoming the perfect example of a man, he fails to ever reach that point, instead being welcomed by the well-balanced men in his society but also considered something of an outsider within his own culture.

Coriolanus, likewise, is a great general of Rome. At the start of Shakespeare's play, he suppresses riots over grain, and displays a certain amount of elitism and lack of concern for the common people of Rome. This is an illustration of the Shadow inherent to the Warrior in the ruthlessness and lack of empathy that it contains.

Later, after the great military victory that earns him the name Coriolanus, he is convinced to run for public office at the behest of his mother and closest political ally.

Although he is successful (riding the wave of public opinion following his military victory) in his bid for election, he finds himself immediately in conflict with the populist faction within Rome, who demand his exile.

At this point, Coriolanus has one of the most passionate and bitter speeches in all of Shakespeare, in which he basically says that he's leaving Rome because he is more Roman than the Romans are, and he goes to join up with the Volsces, who he was warring against previously, and march against Rome.

As the Volscians march against Rome, he is convinced to have a meeting with his family, who tearfully ask him to reconsider his course. This is enough of a shock to him, convincing him that he has gone too far and that his pursuit of approval has turned him away from who he wanted to be, to force him to return to the Roman banner, though he is killed by the Volscians for this betrayal.

Coriolanus, depicted by Gavin Hamilton

The Villainous Warrior

The tragic Warrior has personality flaws that detach them from the very societies they are supposed to protect.
The villainous Warrior has no desire in protecting anything other than themselves. There is a monolithic focus in their life, which is the desire to bring the world in line with what they want. The villainous Warrior isn't necessarily devoid of virtues, but they are very likely to destroy anything that they disapprove of.

The difference between the villainous Warrior and the villainous Ruler, who both seek to control the universe, is why and how they seek to do so.

The Ruler and Warrior both have some ideal of the perfect order they wish to see come about.

The Warrior, however, pursues annihilation for the sake of self-preservation when they have fallen to their Shadow. Frank Castle–the Punisher–always walks the fine line between being a tragic Warrior and a villainous Warrior, depending on whether he is able to maintain a focus on the good things in the world.

The villainous Warrior has given up on protecting entirely. They aren't self-annihilatory like the Destroyer is, but they are locked in a permanent survival mode. Even when they are able to get comfortable for the short-term, their mind develops paranoia and begins chasing shadows, hunting for threats and proactively destroying them even when they are just figments of the Warrior's imagination.

The Warrior in Star Wars

The quintessential Warrior in Star Wars is none other than Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.

While it is traditional for characters to undergo a metamorphosis when they pursue a new identity, it is Skywalker's apprenticeship under Obi-Wan and later Palpatine that turns him into the Warrior.

More militant than the other Jedi even at an early stage, he is proactively involved in the defense of the Republic. Despite his strong mentor figures, I actually consider him to be an example of the Father, rather than the Son, aspect of the Warrior as neither Obi-Wan nor Palpatine limit his ability to excel in his pursuits as a Warrior.

This means that Anakin's fall to the Shadow is driven by his need to consider himself intrinsically powerful. The prophecy that he is to bring balance to the Force haunts his mind, filling him perpetually with a fear of inadequacy, but he has also reached the peak of power and authority, preventing him from having the situation of the Son where this peak is unattainable.

The final moment that cements his insecurity comes when Palpatine asks Anakin to join him so they can rule the galaxy together. In his moment of transformation into Darth Vader, he loses his wife, his mentor, and his children in one moment.

He lashes out at his inferiors when they defy him because he needs to be able to accept himself as a strong person, and his pursuit of the Rebellion is driven by a need to protect himself from the increasing reality that he cannot be in total control of the universe.

It is for this reason that he asks Luke to join forces with him in the original trilogy: he is seeking a validation of his power and a relationship with someone who he can protect without the conflicted feelings of betrayal brought on by Padmé's rejection of his philosophy.

Using the Warrior in Writing

The Warrior combines many other archetypes more than it stands on its own; it contains elements of the Destroyer, Ruler, and Sage without ever fully committing to the final goals of either. This makes them a powerful character for illustrating the process of self-improvement, because their ultimate goal is improving themselves first and their society by extension.

Because of the fact that the heroic Warrior is so connected with others, they can have strong emotional bonds. I separate the Warrior's aspects into the Father and Son precisely because the Warrior cannot exist outside of a family.
When the Warrior is deprived of a cause to fight for, they cannot find it within themselves. Self-improvement is only meaningful when there is a real goal.

The Warrior will then either lie fallow on account of being insecure and weakened by their isolation, or seek to over-compensate by creating a cult of the Warrior, defining the perfect self by the degree to which they are good at tasks that exemplify the archetype of the Warrior. This leaves them prone to extremism, but not in the same way as the Sage; where the Sage is convinced they have found Truth, the Warrior is as aimless as an Orphan. The Warrior requires someone, typically the Innocent or Lover (which is handily represented in war stories of a soldier leaving a family, replete with at least one child, behind) to give them a frame of reference, or else they will wander.

To borrow from Tolkien, not all who wander are lost. Without a supreme force of will aligned to a moral code (think of the chivalric knight fiction or the romanticized depiction of Japanese samurai) the Warrior cannot find anything worth their efforts to protect.

As a result, if you are writing with characters who follow the Warrior archetype, it is important to remember that they need a guiding star to direct their ways more so than any other archetype. Their internal focus, even when they define their value elsewhere, is something that often ends in tragedy.

Using the Warrior in Gaming

Games often focus on fighters, but not on Warriors. Warriors need a cause and a reason to fight. Without some purpose, they will degenerate, and the phenomenon of "murderhobos" in tabletop roleplaying largely stems from situations where characters who are created with this archetype in mind do not have a valid outlet for their aggression.

To use the Warrior effectively, you need to provide the following to your players:

A threat to oppose.

Characters who are in need of protection.

A code of honor or nobility to follow during the fighting.

I think of the Ultimates in Eclipse Phase as archetypal Warriors: they are motivated by the desire to prevent a second apocalyptic fall, and seek to do so by becoming the protectors and vanguards of a new transhuman era.

Wrapping Up

The Warrior is a dangerous and violent archetype: the Warriors are hounds and wolves, and either one can terrify sheep. When they are seated in purpose and meaning, they will pursue goals that help improve society.

If they are not brought into line with what the world needs, however, they are terror and violence visited upon those who have found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Visited by their inchoate paranoia, they become ravagers and devastators in a way that even the Destroyer does not.