archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Ally (Vogler)

The one who walks beside you and carries what you cannot.

Christopher Vogler’s character archetype for the hero’s companion: the sidekick, friend or partner who travels with the hero and supplies what they lack. A collective term and a stage in The Writer’s Journey before it was a separate archetype; it has no counterpart among Jung’s figures.

Vogler’s Ally is the companion function. It is carried by whoever travels with the hero and helps them through the middle of the story: the sidekick, the best friend, the partner, the loyal servant, the crew. The Ally supplies what the hero lacks, a skill, a strength, a second pair of eyes, someone to talk to so that the audience can hear the hero think, and it is often the place where comedy, warmth or conscience enters a story that the hero alone could not carry. Like Vogler’s other functions it is a role, not a type, and a character may arrive as a rival or a Threshold Guardian and be turned into an Ally along the way.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,And heavily from woe to woe tell o’erThe sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,Which I new pay as if not paid before.But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

Public domain · Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 (closing lines) (1609)

All losses are restored and sorrows end by thinking on one friend: the ally as the one who makes the road bearable.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. a later reading

    Samwise Gamgee

    Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; read as Ally by Final Draft and Schwartz, 1954

    Follows Frodo to the end and carries him when he cannot go on.

  2. a later reading

    Chewbacca

    Star Wars; read as Ally by Final Draft and Schwartz, 1977

    A loyal co-pilot whose strength and steadiness is the crew’s.

  3. a later reading

    Han Solo

    Star Wars; read as Ally by Final Draft, 1977

    Joins as a smuggler with no stake and becomes the hero’s companion.

  4. a later reading

    Alfred Pennyworth

    Batman comics; read as Ally by Schwartz, 1943

    The one who makes the work possible and keeps the person intact.

  5. a later reading

    Short Round

    Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; read as Ally by Final Draft, 1984

    A boy sidekick who helps Indiana out of every scrape.

The wider sky

Where the Ally (Vogler) has been seen

15 exemplars across 5 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’dwith plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night forme that follow’d,And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, stillI was not happy,But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in themorning light,When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his waycoming, O then I was happy,

Public domain · Whitman, When I Heard at the Close of the Day (1860)

Recognition and success leave the speaker unhappy; the day he is expecting a companion is the happy one.

Not the chosen one. The one who stayed.

They bring the skill you lack and the joke you need.

A road is shorter with two, though not by a mile.

The deep layer · what was written

Ally (Vogler): the entry

Definition

Vogler’s Ally is the companion function. It is carried by whoever travels with the hero and helps them through the middle of the story: the sidekick, the best friend, the partner, the loyal servant, the crew. The Ally supplies what the hero lacks, a skill, a strength, a second pair of eyes, someone to talk to so that the audience can hear the hero think, and it is often the place where comedy, warmth or conscience enters a story that the hero alone could not carry. Like Vogler’s other functions it is a role, not a type, and a character may arrive as a rival or a Threshold Guardian and be turned into an Ally along the way.

The Ally has a different history from the rest of Vogler’s eight. For most of the book’s life it was a stage and a collective noun, not an archetype, and it became one of the eight only in the third edition (2007). It has no counterpart among Jung’s figures. The classical entry nearest to it is the hero, whose companions it serves, and that entry is about something else.

History

Allies are in Vogler’s work from the start, but as part of a stage. His studio memo, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, written at Walt Disney in the mid-1980s and dated 1985 on the copy he later posted, has as its sixth stage “Tests, Allies, Enemies”: in the special world the hero is forced to make allies and enemies and pass tests, with the cantina in Star Wars, Rick’s Café in Casablanca and the Western saloon as the places where these relationships are formed. The memo’s list of recurring figures, the young hero, the wise old man or woman, the shape-shifting woman or man and the shadowy antagonist, has no ally in it.

The Writer’s Journey (1992) kept the stage. The second edition (1998), the earliest book text checked for this entry, lists seven archetypes, Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow and Trickster, and in the section on the Threshold Guardian (pp. 57–60) explains the omission when it advises turning a presumed enemy into an Ally:

(Although we will not discuss the Ally as a separate archetype, heroes are aided by a variety of archetypes known collectively as Allies.) — Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Threshold Guardian”, pp. 57–60

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The third edition (2007) makes the change. Its list of the most useful archetypes adds Ally between Shadow and Trickster, giving eight; the contents give the Ally its own chapter (pp. 71–76), which opens on the hero’s need for someone to travel with, as companion, sparring partner, conscience or comic relief; and the parenthesis in the Threshold Guardian section is rewritten to say that the Allies will be discussed in a separate chapter (p. 50). Vogler does not announce the addition: the new material his third-edition introduction lists is elsewhere. The 1992 first edition was not available to check, but nothing suggests it had an Ally chapter that 1998 then dropped, and the 1998 text excludes the figure in so many words. The summary of the archetypes once posted on Vogler’s site describes Allies as the characters who see the hero through change, “sidekicks, buddies, girlfriends who advise the hero through the transitions of life”. Later writers often give the eight without dates; Kendra Levin’s The Hero Is You (2016) lists them, Ally included, as “Campbell’s eight archetypes”, while citing Vogler’s second edition, which has seven.

Where the figure comes from is less a question of Jung than of Campbell and of practice. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) has helpers throughout, from the supernatural aid of the first threshold to the companions of the road of trials, but no stage or figure called the ally. The term in Vogler’s stage name is his, and the late promotion to archetype reflects the plain fact that most films give their hero a companion.

The debate

There is nothing in Jung to compare it with. Jung’s figures personify inner contents; the Ally names a relationship between characters. A psychological reading is possible, through the helpful companions of fairy tales that Jungian interpreters read symbolically, but Vogler does not make it; his own gloss is social, the friends who see a person through change.

The criticism of Vogler’s scheme touches the Ally mainly through its history. That a function could be absent from the list in 1998, excluded in so many words, and then join it in 2007 shows that the eight are a working writer’s set, revised by use, rather than a discovery about the psyche, which is the provenance point the site records for every authored list. David Bordwell (2006, p. 34) described Vogler’s character archetypes as derived from Campbell, Jung and Vogler’s own imagination; the Ally is the clearest case of the third source. Helen Jacey (2010) questioned the masculine assumptions of Vogler’s model, and Vogler’s own web summary, which counts among Allies the “girlfriends who advise the hero”, is an example of what she meant. Vogler’s own answer to the charge that the scheme is a formula, given in his 1998 preface, is that it should be used as a form.

Empirical status

None. The Ally is a craft category and has not been tested as a construct. Friendship and social support have large research literatures, but none of them bears on the claim that an ally function recurs in stories.

Appearances

Craft writing that adopted the eight treats the Ally as standard. Final Draft’s guide to the archetypes (2024) offers Samwise Gamgee, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Ron Weasley and Goose of Top Gun; Leonardo Schwartz (2025), who credits Vogler with the eight, adds Alfred Pennyworth. Julian Woolford (2012) applies the function to the book musical, with Colonel Pickering as Eliza’s Ally in My Fair Lady and Fantine and Cosette as Valjean’s in Les Misérables. Levin (2016) turns it on the writer’s own life: the best way to find an Ally is to be one. These are readings through Vogler’s term.

Sources

Leaving

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,And never brought to mind?Should auld acquaintance be forgot,And auld lang syne!Chorus.—For auld lang syne, my dear,For auld lang syne.We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,For auld lang syne.

Public domain · Burns, Auld Lang Syne (1796)

Old acquaintance remembered over a shared cup: the ally as the people we have walked beside and carry forward.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey⚔ HeroConsciousness, fighting its way out of the dark.Return to the void