I think Padme's status as a tragic hero is gravely overlooked and underrated, honestly. She arguably fits Aristotle's definition of a tragic hero better than Anakin does, but Anakin is the one often lauded as a quintessential example of the trope.
Aristotle's definition of a tragic hero was that the character needed to be "an intermediate sort of person" who is not wholly good or wholly bad whose fall comes about as a result of human error (ignorance, acting in haste, act of passion) rather than a moral failing and thus the consequences of their error should outweigh the actual error itself.
Anakin's fall is... not truly human error, it's DEFINITELY a moral failing and that's coming straight from the man who made him. Lucas has spoken a lot about how Anakin's selfishness and greed are what led him down the path to darkness. The consequences of his error don't seem unmerited or undeserved given that his "error" is committing a genocide and supporting the rise of a fascist empire.
Modern tragic heroes tend to just need to be sympathetic and fall as a result of their own flaws. Anakin fits that just fine. But the arguably more complex version in Aristotle's definition doesn't quite fit.
But Padme?
You could certainly argue that Padme's fall is a result of a moral failing, that her own selfishness and greed led to her doom, and I have done so more than once. But I think you could also argue that a part of it is Padme wanting to be kind, Padme wanting to HELP someone that she can see is struggling. It COULD potentially fall under an act of passion, even though she continues to make that choice over and over again for years.
She's also never so completely evil that it feels like the consequence of her choice was deserved. She didn't deserve to die the way she did, she didn't deserve to lose everything she cared about. She made a mistake, she was a little selfish perhaps, but she never actually killed anyone or enslaved anyone or supported the rise of a fascist dictatorship. She believed she could help someone who was in pain, she fell in love, and she saw her whole world fall apart before the man she fell in love with killed her when she didn't thank him for it.
Padme Amidala is a quintessential tragic hero and more people should talk about it.
ROBERT CHASE AS A TRAGIC HERO: THE (TUMBLRFIED) ESSAY
as many of you know, when i’m not spreading camchase propaganda i’m busy suffering in the hellfires of [REDACTED] university for my english degree. this term, one of my mandatory papers is on tragedy, and i’ve come to a horrifying conclusion: chase fits the aristotelian model of the tragic hero to a terrifyingly close degree. or definitely close enough for me to write an essay on it. prepare yourself for several thousand words wherein i define 1) tragedy, 2) what a tragic hero is according to aristotle, and 3) explain how chase fits all of those aristotelian convention.
PREAMBLE: WHAT IS TRAGEDY?
well, we’re not really sure. no, seriously, to paraphrase my lecturer: ‘the point of the tragedy paper is to give you a sense of what you personally think tragedy is, and allow you the chance to develop that interest’. there isn’t a right answer. tragic isn’t just a synonym for ‘sad’, at least not in a literary sense—we can all agree that it’s more than that—but the things it encompasses beyond just being sad are the subject of open debate. shakespearean tragedies are characterised by their violent end; my first year shakespearean supervisor once, rather glibly, informed me that the difference between a shakespearean comedy and a shakespearean tragedy wasn’t that the comedy had a happy ending, but simply that everybody lived. dante classed his divine comedy as a comedy precisely because he believed tragedy ‘in its beginning is admirable and quiet, in its ending or catastrophe fouled and horrible’ (1) and that only certain ‘high’ topics could be deemed tragic. chaucer defined tragedy as ‘a certeyn storie… / of him that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is y-fallen out of heigh degree / Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly’ (2). there is an element of predestination in some tragic forms — sophocles’ oedipus at colonus is classed as a tragedy despite ostensibly having a happy ending (oedipus is allowed to die at colonus peacefully on his own terms despite creon’s attempts to return him to thebes) precisely because the play is saturated with constant references to fate and foreshadowing for the events of antigone, written years before colonus but placed chronologically after — but not all. my friends have written tragedy essays on the following topics: get out (2017), interview with the vampire (2022), the charlie kirk shooting, rupaul’s drag race, us (2019), and the poetry of richard siken. tragedy as a genre is kind of whatever we want it to be. so what about the tragic hero?
(2) The Monk’s Tale (http://www.librarius.com/canttran/monktale/monktale077-102.htm)
PART ONE: ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF THE TRAGIC HERO
in poetics, aristotle outlined several features he deemed befitting of both tragedy as a whole and the tragic hero more specifically. here’s aristotle’s definition of tragedy, if you’re interested:
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. (3)
for aristotle, the most important element of tragedy is plot. but it probably won’t surprise you that the second most important element of aristotle’s version of tragedy is character, and more specifically the tragic hero. within tragedy, ‘the change of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us’ (4). in order for us to feel pity, we have to sympathise with the hero enough to feel that their fate is undeserved; in order for us to feel fear, the fate that befalls the tragic hero must feel as though it could some day happen to us. so what features must a tragic hero have in order to arouse both pity and fear?
1) NOBLE BIRTH. this isn’t so much a strict requirement (certainly not in modern drama), but it is important as a means of emphasising the tragic hero’s fall from grace. beyond this, being of noble birth blurs the lines between the personal and the political; it is impossible in hamlet, for instance, to disentangle hamlet’s grief over the murder of his father from the fact that said murderer is now king of denmark, and that the interfamilial conflict between claudius and hamlet affects an entire kingdom and not just one family. it tightens the noose, as it were, and allows the hero to further entrap themselves in their own bad decisions.
2) HAMARTIA, or the fatal flaw. this can be one of two things: a flaw in the tragic hero’s character (think macbeth and his ambition), or an error in their decisionmaking process (hamartia means, quite literally, ‘to miss the mark’). the hamartia is important, because it enables the hero’s downfall; if the hero is too wicked, or too perfect, a change of fortune won’t create the right mix of pity and fear. an aristotelian tragic hero is not all bad, but not all good.
3) PERIPETEIA i’ve already covered this one so we’ll gloss over it, but you get the drill by now; the tragic hero’s character must go from a position of high status and good fortune to the opposite. shakespeare’s a big fan of just, yknow, killing people off violently to achieve this, but it’s not necessary.
4) ANAGNORISIS, or the moment of recognition. this is the moment where the hero realises the truth and gravity of their own situation and/or identity. anagnorisis can be as literal as recognition through physical means (identifying scars or birthmarks), or entirely metaphorical. anagnorisis is often coupled with peripeteia, with the moment of recognition causing the hero’s downfall, but not exclusively.
there are of course other nuances, but this is pretty much the long and short of it. so, how do we apply any (and all) of this to chase?
at first glance, the first of aristotle’s criteria — be of tragic birth — doesn’t apply to chase at all. chase is australian, a country without a nobility (albeit a constitutional monarchy), and his father is a doctor. so that’s that, right?
well, not really. being of noble birth in greek and shakespearean tragedy is really just an easy way of putting tragic heroes in a position of power; pre-capitalism and industrial revolution, there weren’t a lot of alternatives for that. for better or for worse, there are now other opportunities to wield authority. within the world of house md, we can read doctors as nobility with a duty of care and responsibility towards their patients-as-subjects; as cuddy says in the pilot, ‘when we make mistakes, people die’. certainly, it’s a position of modern-day prestige. it helps, too, that there’s a clear hierarchy of power within princeton-plainsboro that translates nicely into the hierarchy of nobility—we talk a lot about ‘kids vs adults’ (fellows vs department heads) in this show, in the same way that discussions of elizabethan tragedy often focus on ‘nobles vs the king’ (see: marlowe’s edward ii). as for that crucial personal/political crossover element: it exists for pretty much any character in the show (famously, this is the hospital where work-life boundaries don’t exist and people can have sex in janitor’s closets), but especially so for chase. chase really is a legacy, the son of a famous doctor himself; we see their estrangement (personal) intrude on chase’s work life (political) in both cursed and the mistake. chase may not literally be of noble birth, but he ticks the same boxes. more than that, being the sole ‘legacy’ of the fellows puts him in a unique position; lest we forget, the original pilot script version of chase heavily emphasised the nepo baby aspects of chase’s character, to the point where i think it’s fair to assume that this is something central to who chase is. i think you could make the argument that all of the fellows fit this modern criteria of ‘being of noble birth, but ‘doctor’ becoming a hereditary position for chase specifically — against chase’s will, at that; we know he wanted to become a priest first, that he only got his job with house because his father made a phone call — is just too perfect. this isn’t the only reason why i chose to single out chase for this essay, but it is what first got the ball rolling for me.
HAMARTIA
i mentioned in the definition section that hamartia can be taken two ways: as a flaw of character, and as an error in judgement. i think chase has both, but the latter is so closely entwined with his moment of downfall that i’ll address that in a separate section—here, i’ll just look at his fatal flaw.
i think chase’s fatal flaw is, devastatingly, his most useful trait: his knack for self-preservation at all costs, and the subsequent inertia it causes. i don’t think selfishness has the right connotations, and spineless doesn’t account for all of it (chase is plenty capable of having spine, just only when he sees fit), so that’s the phrasing we’re going with for lack of a better term. the examples are endless: time and time again, chase picks the easy road. he rats on house to vogler for fear of losing his job. he has to be fired at the end of s3 because he won’t leave the nest, he has to be pushed. he picks house over cameron in the aftermath of dibala because he knows his marriage is over. he comes crawling back to diagnostics in s6, and in s8. ‘you did everything [your dad] wanted you to, and in return you got everything you ever wanted’, cameron tells chase, unkindly but truthfully, in finding judas. chase takes the path of least resistance, always chooses the devil he knows over the devil he doesn’t.
and does it make him happy? not really. chase is rarely rewarded for this behaviour; his rejoinder to cameron in finding judas is that rowan ‘cut me out of his cushy will’. it’s worth pointing out that we know chase is capable of making more ambitious choices and sticking with them—see his s4-s5 boundaries era—and yet, more often than not, chooses not to. all of the fellows, and certainly all of the original fellows, have a fatal flaw of some kind—for cameron, it’s hypocrisy; for foreman, it’s arrogance—but chase’s continual relapse into bad habits makes him stand out in this department, i think. he relapses all the way to the finale, when he accepts foreman’s job offer as head of department. but, y’know, more on that later.
PERIPETEIA
peripeteia: the downfall. i think it’s obvious what chase’s downfall is, and the show even gives us a handy visual cue via his haircut: the fallout of his divorce from cameron. the dibala murder is the second example of hamartia, that error of judgement; regardless of whether you think chase was morally in the right for what he did (the show itself is pointedly neutral), the consequences make it clear that it was nevertheless a grave mistake. dibala’s murder is the catalyst for the camchase divorce, which is bad enough in its own right but also appears to set off its own nasty chain of events: a promiscuous, heavily drinking, ‘dumb whore’ chase who is desperately unhappy compared to the highs of his s4-5 honeymoon phase, and even the seasons before that. post-dibala murder, chase is increasingly compared to house, capping out at the obvious visual comparison between the two when chase is on crutches in chase. it’s not a favourable comparison, and nobody makes that clearer than house himself.
it’s worth pointing out that chase’s version of peripeteia is especially effective precisely because we see him get built up before he is knocked down. sure, taub undergoes increasing humiliation (divorce, cheating on his board exams, double sophias), but he was already on that downhill path when he joined the show and, tbh, is kind of back on the up by the end of s8. foreman gets a lot of very special episodes about his arrogance, but they’re spread out across seasons as opposed to part of an intentionally connected storyline; besides which, he ends the show as dean of medicine and gets a special hint about house being alive, so he too ends the show on the up and up. for all of the other fellows, peripeteia doesn’t really apply. with chase, we experience the full swing from one side of the fortune coin to the other. it’s the perfect evocation of aristotle’s pity and fear.
ANAGNORISIS
the moment of recognition and/or realisation, almost every character in the show gets this: thirteen’s huntington’s diagnosis, cameron’s speech to house about his being ‘poison’ in teamwork, cuddy in bombshells, etc etc. hell, house gets a moment of anagnorisis in practically every season finale now that i think about it. so what about chase?
it’s that ending scene in the finale, i think. chase doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to; we see him walking into what was once house’s office, now his own, and his face says a thousand words. he doesn’t look happy, or excited, or nostalgic. he looks…lost. a little bit sick to his stomach. it’s a moment of confirmation—chase won the race to be the next house md!—and also of tragedy: house has made it astoundingly clear, both to us as an audience and chase specifically, that this isn’t something to aspire to. we don’t get the catharsis that comes from chase’s moment of realisation—we don’t see him as chase md, or anything else from this point on—but arguably we don’t need to. we get that moment of release from house, not chase, just as hamlet ends with fortinbras’s arrival. ‘the rest is silence’, hamlet tells us. maybe we don’t need chase’s fate spelled out for us. we’ve just seen it play out the first time around with house, after all.
so what does it all mean???
i don’t know!!!! i’m not sincerely arguing that chase is the secret protagonist of house md, because we all know that’s not true (hopefully? lmao). but this reading…is there, and i think it’s fun to play with the show in a more formal way. let me know what you think!!!
im turning one of my favorite movies into a childrens book for a school assignment. I know I didn't get the story or details down perfectly but the assignment is to show what kind of hero your character is. I'd love feedback from anyone thats seen the movie (please keep in mind that it will make more sense and be more cohesive once I finish the art for it)(spoiler warning for the 1994 "The Crow")^^
so here's "Eric Draven - The Tragic Hero":
First page:
“Once upon a time, Eric and Shelley lived in an apartment in the cruel streets of 1990s detroit. Eric and Shelley planned on getting married soon. But, the owners of their apartment were crueler than the city of devils itself.”
Second page:
“These men were evil, these men were mean. They’d tore down the happiest home you’d ever see. They mocked the wedding dress, they took Shelley’s breath, and left poor Eric alone in death.
Third page:
“But a crow came and brought Eric back, and made him immortal, to take down the men who’d caused his pain. Eric painted his face with a, sad, crooked smile, and walked in the rain for a while.
Forth page:
“One by one, the bad men fell as Eric paid visits to each of them, leaving his mark behind each time. All out of anger, not pride. However none of this fixed the sorrow he carried deep inside.”
Fifth page:
“Eric found the man in charge of all whom he killed. They fought. But the man knew of what made Eric immortal, and used that against him. Eric fought hard, determined to avenge his fiance, thinking it would fix his grief. He won. But his heart still hurt. And now his body as well. Maybe his visit would be cut short.”
sixth page:
“Each shadow had fallen. But Erics pain was not solved. He still missed, and loved, his Shelley very dearly. So, the city felt quieter, and Eric laid back down where the winds blew, back to where his Shelley rested, and returned to her in darkness. The crow flew over head once more– its dark, all seeing eyes being the only witness of this loss.”
Seventh page:
“So, Eric died a second time at Shelley’s grave. Maybe he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t let down his guard enough for the evil man to take advantage. Maybe he was blinded by grief. But none of that matter. Now, he was at rest with his fiance on this gray, sad detroit night.”
Let's talk about the sheer, overwhelming terror of being Pei Su.
We spend so much time analyzing the mask of Pei Su—the cold, cynical apath he pretends to be—that we sometimes forget to truly consider the terrified child who built that mask brick by brick.
Think about it:
A little boy finds his mother's body. The darkness that descends isn't just grief; it's the horrifying realization that the world is monstrous, and he might carry the seed of that monster inside him. He inherited a legacy he never wanted, a genetic curse that society says makes him a ticking time bomb. His greatest fear wasn't ghosts or bullies—it was becoming like his father. A soulless monster.
Then, Luo Wenzhou appears. A light. A potential anchor. But after the bird incident, that light turns into one of the most devastating things for a scared child: an accusing gaze. Even with his conflicted trust, Luo Wenzhou let prejudice and "science" cloud his vision. He saw the potential criminal, not the desperate boy silently pleading for someone—anyone—to see past the label. Pei Su wasn't asking for help with words; he was screaming it through small, careful actions, hoping someone would decode his desperation.
Thank the heavens for Tao Ze. He became Pei Su's tiny, fragile refuge. The one person who saw kindness where others saw a threat. And I firmly believe a part of Pei Su held him at a slight distance to protect him. Without that weight of "I am dangerous, I must not taint him," Tao Ze could have been the brother he never had.
That's the core tragedy. This sweet, noble soul—the least monstrous person in the entire story—had to endure the injustice of everyone's suspicion. So he did the only thing he could: he wielded their prejudice as a weapon and a shield. He turned the "monster" label into a tool for justice.
But how deep did that self-hatred go? How truly desperate was he to believe their accusations himself? To the point of submitting to physical torture, over and over, trying to eradicate a "nature" that was never there. He was trying to carve out his own humanity with a knife, convinced it was the monster that needed removing.
His warm soul and fierce sense of justice led him to eradicate true evil. But the most heart-wrenching truth, the one that breaks me every time, is this: His final sacrifice ultimately proved one thing. In a world full of monsters—apath or not—the only one who truly wasn't a monster… was him.
The boy they all feared was the purest of them all.
