Ok so last night, my terrible horrible no good brain thought "I wonder what would happen if you turned the Scooby Gang loose on Cabin in the Woods"
That immediately caused me to try and match the gang up to the Archetypes introduced in CitW, but I was high and sort of asleep so I could not remember them all. I remembered:
The Athlete: Fred
The Scholar: Velma
The Fool: Shaggy
The Virgin: Daphne
but I could not remember the last one for the life of me, and I eventually fell asleep.
Woke up this morning, still with this burden in my brain, and was like "ok, what was number 5... The Whore. Ok. Hrrm. Wait."
So now I'm sort of reconsidering everything, because there are now... implications to the things I am thinking about.
I COULD make Scooby Doo "The Whore" - he's the one that has the mass market appeal, he's the one that's in all the cameos and on all the merch, he was basically Hanna Barabara's Mickey Mouse for a while... right? Does that work or count?
But if you, like I, am uncomfortable calling the cartoon dog a whore (sentences I didn't think I'd be typing today), then how DO you balance that out? And that got my brain thinking all sorts of other thoughts too.
Like... take "The Athlete". Fred's muscular, but he's not really that... athletic... despite his build. if anybody winds up playing sports in in an adventure, it's usually Shaggy or Daphne, not Fred - Shaggy because he's bait, Daphne because she's insane and rich and has weird hobbies. Or, if we're judging on sheer athletic prowess, Velma *can* canonically carry the entire group with her Raven-esque poweful legs.
Or "The Scholar". Velma is the OBVIOUS choice, but Fred is the master architect, always seems to know general information, builds complicated traps, and in multiple incarnations he built/maintains the very complicated Mystery Machine. And Daphne (especially in later incarnations) has a lot of weird worldly experience. Shaggy and Scooby are probably the least fitted here.
The Fool - This could be anybody other than Velma, especially depending on the show. Shaggy and Scooby are obvious choices, no debate there, but Daphne (especially in Be Cool Scooby Doo) was basically insane - she was at war with ALL DOLPHINS, she deployed puppets and was a mime in one episode. And Fred… well, Fred builds a lot of traps, but how many times do they actually work? And who is that always insists they "split up" to investigate a mystery?
That leaves The Slut and The Virgin, and that's where things get messy (wink wink nudge nudge knowwhatimean) because we're speculating on the sex habits of beloved teenage cartoon characters from my youth, but ALSO because characterization across 60+ years makes this tricky.
Fred and Daphne are almost always depicted as a couple in almost all incarnations, so if they had sex... it would be with each other. That means that they're both going to be candidates for the same Archtype, regardless of their actual canonical depictions.
Velma... is a complicated spacetime sexual event horizon. The internet has definitely changed her depiction and perception from her earliest incarnation, but I think it's implied in most versions that she's probably chaste, if not by choice than by social awkwardness.
Shaggy either absolutely fucks OR is ace/aro, I don't think there's a middle ground for him. He's usually depicted as a simple man whose true passion is food, but in the weird Scrappy cartoons that didn't have Fred/Daphne/Velma, several of the plots are about Shaggy going out on dates, so if those are canon then he's a player... but then Scrappy also exists, and I am NOT getting into that.
Scooby... well, if we're arguing just on the traditional sexual implications, I will point out he is... a dog. He meets a LOT of lady dogs in the show. He's also, in dog years, probably like in his mid-40s or 50s and hanging out with a bunch of teenagers, if you want to think about it in a creepy sort of way. I mean, if Scrappy does exist, then Scooby is old enough to have a nephew, and his sister has had sex in order to produce that nephew, so could Scooby have been laying pipe all over the cartoon universe? Absolutely. And it wouldn't even be that bad or weird please let's stop talking about this now.
