I been thinking about this for a while. First with a the significant other of a hero without powers or a helping role, where we see their day to day life and how they feel insignificant next to the hero and all the action that take place away from them for the most. See different relations, ones where the hero over compensates for short-comings, one where they are toxic or even abuse panther in their. Mentors for heroes, who start the story with as mentors, mother/parents of heroes. Also when i mean full story, i don’t mean a single episode in a series or a poltline in a book, but a fully completed story centered around them alone.
some archs i thought of:
-the comedic relief -the powerhouse(usually written as dumb) -the villain(that is not just a serial killer) -the future seer/oracle
Feel free to add media/stories use the arch for the full stories
More (anti) war films from the “wrong” side’s perspective. Flags of our Fathers and All Quiet on the Western Front are compelling as they tell stories that we all know but from a fresh point of view making you compare and contrast the experiences from both sides.
Something that fleshed out the lives and motivations of VC or NVA troops during the Vietnam War would be interesting as they’re only ever portrayed as screaming fanatics who’s only existence is to shoot at Americans in most films.
Or the story of a conscripted German teenager sent to Normandy on the eve of the allied invasion and the all-encompassing dread that must overwhelmed them as ships and planes fill the sea and sky.
Or what life must have been like on board a Japanese aircraft carrier before Midway, that unshakeable belief in your own destiny as a people filled with propaganda about your own superiority and stories of your endless victories to be so utterly shattered in a cataclysmic defeat. The ultimate story of hubris.
Watch Die Brücke from 1959 some time. There’s a remake but it’s not worth it. The author of the story was one of those teenagers and wrote it to express his sense of betrayal. Adults had thrown them into battle and then condemned them for fighting. It’s a really good movie. You really get to know those kids as cringy teenagers.
A more modern German movie is Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993). It’s in color and has a bit of budget, though it’s far from Saving Private Ryan. If you are interested in these things, watch it together with Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? (1959).
The differences between those 2 Stalingrad movies say a lot about how German society changed. The older movie wanted to be historically accurate and had input from some of the commanders. If you pay attention, you can tell who was still around to tell their side of the story. You can’t tell who was a convicted war criminal, though. Still, at the time, the movie was controversial for its (rather tame) anti-war message and not for its whitewashing.
In 1993, the conscripted teenagers were just retiring, after the german re-unification. That generation has been termed Flakhelfer generation (Flak-helper since they were made to operate anti-aircraft guns). Hans-Dietrich Genscher had been one of them. He was the (West-)German foreign minister during the reunification and had just retired in 1993. As a 17-year-old, he and, like many others his age, served in the Wehrmacht, in Wenck’s 12th army. If Western forces had marched on Berlin, they would have fought their way past those kids, or more likely over their dead bodies. As that didn’t happen, Nazi elites would have sacrificed them against the Soviets in the Battle of Berlin, as portrayed in Downfall. Wenck instead chose to secure a corridor from the Berlin region toward the West. Sabaton commemorates this in Hearts of Iron. Sabaton does not mention the Battle of Halbe, though. Genscher recalled seeing battle weary Generals marching past, wielding submachine guns.