Zombies Ruin Everything

It’s funny the types of characters you write that all add up to give a very specific feel. Certain stories may have a variety of types to add a real-world vibe to it all. A Rational type film may include a very cold, distant future where everything is bleak. But  series like Sin City? That’s got Artisan written all over it and Marv is the team mascot.

Wild, violent, and just aware enough of his own dim wit, the original Sin City tale, The Hard Goodbye, features the barbaric Marv on a mission to avenge his dead loved one. I’m sure the story could have been as good with a different type in the lead but we wouldn’t have had the same story; one that features mostly action and just enough story to keep it smart.

In the prequel/spinoff to The Hard Goodbye, A Dame To Kill For, protagonist Dwight happens to catch Marv in a bar. Before he recruits Marv for his own reasons, he gives his thoughts on the brutish hulk-

…”Crazy” just doesn’t explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he’s retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other…He’d have been okay if he’d been born a couple thousand years ago. He’d be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody’s face. Or in a Roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him.

I could see it, yeah.

I don’t think I need to go over Se and what it is, but it should be pretty clear Marv’s driven by it like he’s got a steering wheel attached to him. As soon as he gets an objective, it’s all-out war wherever his Se takes him; from back alleys to the “almighty” cardinal’s mansion.

That feeling you’ve got when you just have to do something right then? That’s one way to understand Se, and it’s why ESTPs and ESFPs can be so hard to talk down from something they really want to do; be it something you need to do or want to do. ISTPs and ISFPs use this function as their auxiliary but since their dominant function is either introverted thinking or feeling, they don’t come off like excited kids every time they feel like doing something that interests them.

Sometimes their hobbies are considered unhealthy or hazardous.

And if each function had a story, Se’s could be The Hard Goodbye. Scene after scene, Marv runs from one place to another looking for Goldie’s killer, a woman he didn’t even know.

Interrogating everyone he gets his hands on in the most violent way possible, another type in this story, as mentioned, would have changed everything. Another type may have been more cautious. Maybe with a more introverted type there would have been more detective work rather than simply beating the suspect to get the information out of them but that wouldn’t be any fun here. Either way, you get the idea of what an ESTP is like just by how ridiculous Marv is.

But he IS a friend to the animals!

And it’s not just The Hard Goodbye he shows up for. As mentioned, he plays a big part in the prequel/spinoff A Dame To Kill For as well as several other stories. And every time we see him, he’s got his own story going on behind the scenes; he’s not a character to just sit around and wait for somebody to invite him to do something fun- he’s always busy himself.

ESTPs aren’t the most interested in theory and those thoughts that may blow a person’s mind- they like what they can see and what’s practical to them in the moment. If whatever you have to say to them can be shown to them to have an everyday application then you can interest them but anything beyond that will just go in one ear and out the other.

Like telling him to “Settle down.”

In Marv’s case of this, no matter who tells him how pointless his revenge-spree is, how it’s not worth dying over a hooker that nobody else will miss when it will get him killed in the process, he ignores all the warnings and goes with what his guts tells him anyway. The man he’s ultimately going after is one of the most powerful in Basin City and Marv is going to throw his life away for no reason so they say.

But the ESTP, like the ESFP, is going to do what they want to do.

A Dame To Kill For, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller is due out this year, August 22nd. It’s the best of all the stories, personally.

This entry was posted on 02/03/2014 at 2:14 pm and is filed under MBTI Artisans, MBTI Stuff with tags a dame to kill for, ESTP, marv, mbti in fiction, sin city. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.