Adventure Duo

Basic Information

The Adventure Duo is a twist on the classic of the joker and the straight man; the straight man will be literal-minded and serious, while the joker will have some trait that signifies them as 'weird', whether it's through naivety, lecherousness, cowardice etc.

A similar troping trick can be performed with any other radically contrasting pair of characters with complimentary skill sets - the highly intelligent wizard and the idiot warrior for example.

Sources

Bibliography

1. TV Tropes Wiki Entry

Game and Story Use

• "Buddy cop" movies are typically made up like this - although whether the joker is merely a clown (as various Eddie Murphy characters) or actually insane (as Mel Gibson's Detective Reece from the Lethal Weapon series) can vary.
• There is also the potential for culture clash, where a character from a very straight laced background is paired with one from a far more relaxed and pragmatic one - again, in the buddy cop genre Schwarzenegger and Belushi pass these roles between themselves throughout Red Heat - generally Schwarzenegger is the "by-the-book" one … but then his book doesn't have some of the same pages that Belushi's does.
• Schwarzenegger does something similar opposite Danny DeVito in Twins.
• For a more medieval feel, the noble knight and villainous valet is a common pairing - the knight is respectable and honourable and deals with the majority of the violence, whilst his dishonest, cowardly servant does the spying, lockpicking and pilfering.
  • Or on a similar note, we have the pairing of the noble and idealistic Don Quixote with his earthy and practical servant Sancho Panza.
• From the Dragonlance saga, the Majere brothers managed to form an adventure duo on their own… intelligent, cynical and pragmatic (and somewhat evil) Raistilin and dumb, principled and friendly Caramon.
• Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin form an interesting duo - one huge, bluff and relatively carefree English naval officer and one small, intense and extremely international physician, scientist and intelligence officer.