My Love-Hate Relationship With Wise Old Mentors

So, since I've established that books are my one passion (see previous post) I might as well post a post being passionate about book-related stuff.


We all know about wise old mentors, right? You know, that character who shows up in a lot of fantasy stories who's impossibly old and wise and who gets way too much enjoyment out of speaking in irritating riddles and who supposedly loves and trusts the hero he or she is mentoring and yet constantly scolds, condescends to, and gets angry with said hero? Yeah, you know. Merlin. Yoda. Dumbledore. Merriman Lyon.


I have mixed feelings about these characters.


More specifically, my feelings vary from version to version. For example, I love Gandalf. But then again, Gandalf never really looks down on Bilbo or Frodo. Instead of feeling he needs to teach them deep lessons by speaking cryptically or telling them stories with unclear morals he wants them to figure out, he believes in them from the beginning and leaves it to them to learn lessons through experience. Gandalf genuinely feels that these little, non-adventuresome Hobbits lacking in self-confidence are capable of amazing things; consequently, they accomplish amazing things. He guides them to find their own worth through his leadership rather than giving them their worth through his teachings.


I like Aslan, too. Aslan, who will believe in his heroes as long as they believe in him, and who, like Gandalf, learn through experience (and I'm not talking about seemingly arbitrary, "wax on, wax off" experience - actual experience).


But so few mentor characters are like Gandalf and Aslan!


More often, I encounter mentor characters who take their belligerent, impatient heroes and assign them tasks or tell them stories or spout pseudo-profound speeches that seem to have no meaning. When the impatient and belligerent hero impatiently and belligerently demands to know why the mentor is making them do this or telling them this or saying this, the mentor says nothing because apparently the hero needs to figure out the kind of profound-ish point of the task or the story or the speech himself (or herself, I guess, but in my experience very few fantasy books have female heroines).


Take Dumbledore. There are things about Dumbledore I like. There are scenes where I find him amusing. But then there's the way he, just like half the rest of the wizard world, acts like Harry's the best thing since Christmas simply because he had a good mother, an evident opinion that clashes horribly with the way he's almost never forthright about anything with Harry! Like, seriously, does he trust Harry implicitly and inexplicably or not?


And Kilgarrah from Merlin the TV show... no, I can't talk about Kilgarrah. I hate him. I hate him I hate him I hate him. I'm pretty sure that every tragic and upsetting thing that happened on that show can be blamed on Kilgarrah, in exchange for actually helping Merlin, I don't know, once? Maybe twice?


I feel like I could go on about this for a long time, dissecting my individual feelings for as many of these characters as I can think of, trying to figure out why some of them frustrate me so much, but it would take a while and isn't actually the reason I'm writing this post.


Despite my love of some mentor characters, I'm getting pretty tired of them. After a while, it just stops being plausible that every useless incompetent supposed hero is going to run across a really old, really enigmatic, really confusing sage whose pretentious ramblings somehow turn the loser into our great and noble protagonist. And honestly, I prefer heroes who are heroes in their own right, who don't need to hear stories with morals to become good men and who don't need to be forcibly faced with horrors to become brave men and who don't need to hear nonsensical maxims full of paradoxes and vagueness to become wise men.


And thus we come to Robin Hood.


Robin Hood doesn't have a wise old mentor. He isn't chosen to be a hero because of some prophecy and then assigned a befuddling (and all-too-often befuddled) Merlin-esque teacher to make him into the hero he's destined to be. He chooses to be a hero. He chooses to rob from the rich because he's got a temper and a grudge, but he chooses to give to the poor because he's innately noble and he loves his people. In some versions of the story, "his people" aren't even necessarily the Saxons. "His people" are any people oppressed and saddened and heaped with undeserved injustices. Such is the way I've always understood the story, anyway.


And I realize that I love Robin for that. I love that he's just doing what he does because he honestly wants to, from the beginning. I love that no matter how roguish or overconfident or prideful he is, he's always fighting his battles at least partly because he feels in his heart that they're battles that need to be fought, and since no one else is volunteering to fight them, he'll have to.   


And what has led me to realize this?


I'm reading a book in which Robin Hood has a wise old mentor. And MAN is it making me angry.


Admittedly, I wasn't angry at first. When she (yes, the wise old mentor is a she) first showed up, Robin was dying and only she, an expert healer, could save him. That's fine. I even rather liked her, as I assumed she'd be in the book for a few chapters before Robin, having recovered, left to go out and resolve to do battle with the Normans.


100 pages later, Robin was still languishing in her cave and I was getting frustrated.


But I didn't get angry until she told him the story.


So she told him this story. It didn't make any sense and had no lesson or moral that I could discern, except for maybe "don't trust pretty redheads" (on further reflection, that moral might be contributing to my anger just a little). However, Robin evidently found it very meaningful and, where I am now in the book, is struggling with the inner conflict which will undoubtedly lead to his becoming Robin Hood.


I'm thinking I'm probably going to get angrier when it's revealed what the moral he and the wise old mentor are seeing in the dumb story is. I'm guessing it's going to be some folderol about keeping your promises or taking responsibility or something, even though the story was about an idiot who impulsively promised something to a pretty but ultimately dishonest redhead. Naturally, when her dishonesty and manipulation was revealed he refused to keep his promise because it was made under false pretenses. Then his punishment for this covenant breakage isn't really all that terrible, so... yeah, I really don't see the moral here. Beyond, again, "don't trust pretty redheads".


To complicate matters further, I'm about 99% the wise old mentor is the pretty redhead from the story. But she's good, because she's turning Robin Hood from a knave into a hero with her story which apparently has a point. But of course Robin's too dense to realize she's the pretty redhead, despite the fact that she's rather heavily hinted that she is (which reminds me of something else I don't like about non-Gandalf wise old mentors: in order for them to be needed and for their philosophical observations to be warranted, the heroes in stories with them have to be complete idiots).


So, to reiterate: Robin Hood in this story won't be fighting for a cause he's led to believe in by his own affronted sense of justice. He'll be fighting for a cause he's led to believe in by the bizarre legends told to him by an irritating old woman.


Oh, incidentally, she foresaw his arrival on her doorstep and his eventual heroism, so this story's also leaving out the whole "choosing his own destiny" thing.


It's like the author missed the whole point of Robin Hood.


Not cool, man.


Thing is, I finish what I start. Moreover, I'm trying to be optimistic. Maybe it'll get better. Maybe Robin will prove to be noble in his own right. Elsewhere in the book, before the wise old mentor rather rudely inserted herself into the narrative, he did stand up for some defenseless people all on his own. I'm going to finish the trilogy, or at the very least this first book, to see if it gets better. Which it very well might.


But... seriously. Enough with the wise old mentors. Or, if you insist, make them more like Gandalf.


~Pearl Clayton