Propps Character theory

Propps Character Theory

Storm, Blade, Nick Fury, Luke Cage etc. 

Representation is the way in which the media portrays particular groups, communities, people, ideas, races or topics from a certain ideological or value perspective. For example women could be represented as being the weak character or the prize that the white male protagonist wins over in the end. 
David Brent in The Office is represented as being a average sort of 9-5 working white man but being a bit dumb and funny whereas Tim Canterbury is represented as being a silly white funny man that just tries to get on with his job and have a joke with David as well.

In The Walking Dead there are 8 character types, The hero is Rick Grimes, the Villain, Negan, The dispatcher, Morgan, The Princess/Prize, Carl, The Princess father, Micheone, The Prize/Princess keeper, Shane etc.

I think this way of approaching characters actually works because there is a good balance between the good people and the bad people.

The Hyperaemic Needle states that a passive audience is one that does not think and decide what the message being told could mean and instead just receives the message being given. A drawback of this it assumes no one has an individual response to media and just takes a simple negative view of the media.

The Uses and Gratification Theory states that consumers are active and respond to questions being asked and make their own idea of the message being portrayed.

A few uses of this are that media offers a brief escape from everyday problems and also keeping up to date with shows in order to be part of a group so that you do not get left out of something.

We portray and define ourselves by the music we listen to and the tv shows and films we watch and we want to be unique and stand out from the crowd. 

I think this way of approaching characters actually works because everyone has a role and no one is just some random person, they all play an important part no matter how small or big it is in the media be it a film or tv show.

I think the benefits are that it is good because some are convenient plot devices. 
I think the drawbacks could be that if a character that the scriptwriter or director has thought of that doesn't fit into any of those character types then what do you have essentially is the question.

Binary Opposition
Binary Opposition is a pair of concepts or terms that are opposite in meaning. It was discovered by Strauss. A few examples of binary opposition are man vs earth, good vs bad, women vs men, video vs photo, warm tones vs cold tones.  

Encoding and decoding
Endowing and decoding is how messages are produced, circulated and consumed and The encoding of a message is the production of the message. Decoding a message is how a member of the audience is able to interpret and understand the message. Its a system of coded meaning and to create that, the sender needs to understand how the world is accessible to people of the audience.  The drawbacks of this are that the message being effectively sent may not be interpreted properly and could lead to confusion if proper steps are not taken to interpret it.