The above is absurdly condescending and pretentious. Please stop acting as though your knowledge and wisdom trumps the conclusions of people who have actually made an effort to adequately define their terms. I won't deny that you've got experience in the field, but that is absolutely no excuse to place yourself in the lofty world of fiction writers as though it is separate from the rest of us, as though we plebs are so privileged to be exposed to this bastion of all that is literary. I have dealt with this too often from the people around me, and I won't put up with it, nor will I see it be exercised over other members. If you wanted to mash as many of my buttons as are required to thoroughly tick me off, then congratulations—you succeeded.Pound Foolish wrote:Annnd I just explained, writers use the word a different way from the dictionary. We fiction writers in particular have a way of using words and grammar any way we like. I know, it's annoying.
I have no long-term ill will towards you, PF, but you have got to remember that we cannot hear or see you. We have no idea what your vocal inflections are or what your body language is. All we have is language that comes across as the written equivalent of a pat on the head and "that's cute, dear, but let the grown-ups handle this".
All that said—I think a lot of this debate sprang up from poorly defined terms. PF, if in your original post you had defined what you mean by a stereotype, then we would have known that this was part of the dispute, but until your next-to-most-recent post, I had absolutely no idea that the very foundations of what stereotyping is were even at issue.
At any rate, it doesn't even sound like you're correctly defining a stereotype. It sounds more like you're referring to an archetype, which is defined thusly:
So what's the difference?The Oxford College Dictionary wrote:archetype, n. a very typical example of a certain person or thing [...] a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology.