“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. »Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The Princess Bride is a cultural phenomenon at this point, as a loving satire of the fantasy genre. The film propelled this story into popular culture and audiences fell in love with the heroic Westley saving Princess Buttercup from the evil Prince Humperdinck. But is Westley really the hero of this film? The answer to this question draws interesting parallels with another culturally significant film and highlights the idea that although the film is about the love between Westley and Buttercup, the truly heroic character in this film is Inigo Montoya, the man who will stop at nothing to avenge his father. To establish this assertion, we must first examine Westley's characteristics. Westley is most definitely the protagonist of this story and the main character. His suave attitude, his wit and his intelligence give him an almost divine stature. He is a better swordsman than Inigo, a better fighter than the giant Fezzik, and a smarter man than Vizzini. While Westley's skills give him the wherewithal to play the hero, the film portrays him instead as a mysterious force and someone who may not be entirely good. In The Princess Bride, Westley is intended to attract young boys. He is intelligent, complicit and sometimes chaotic. Westley is a rugged, world-weary man in love with an idealized fantasy girl. To make Westley's role in the film much more obvious, Westley's character in the film is quite reminiscent of a gender-swapped Han Solo. Both men are suave characters who dance dangerously close to the realm of illegality. Westley is the Dread Pirate Roberts while Han Solo is a smuggler. Both men are extremely competent at whatever task they set out to do, and both are somewhat cruel to their love interests over the course of the film. Although Westley is, as such, a very important character in the film, this leaves the fantasy hero role open, as Westley is not the idealized hero that a fantasy story tends to thrive on. Although Inigo Montoya is also not an idealized character in this story, in the satirical world in which The Princess Bride takes place, Inigo's quest for revenge fulfills far more of the requirements for a traditional fantasy hero than the quest of Westley for his abandoned love. His father was murdered by a six-fingered man after he refused to pay for a fancy sword. Inigo, scarred and abandoned in the world, grew up with the goal of becoming the world's best swordsman in order to defeat the Six-Fingered Man in honorable combat. This man turns out to be Count Rugen, an evil man who has devoted his life to the study of torture. At this point, we can start to see the beginnings of a fantasy story developing in the subplot between Inigo and Rugen. Although not the main plot of the story, the climactic battle takes place between Count Rugen and Inigo Montoya, and the battle shows Inigo's almost superhuman desire for revenge, shaking off several stab wounds in order to defeat Rugen. To oppose this surge of heroism, Westley, rendered literally immobile by Rugen earlier in the novel, overtakes Prince Humperdinck, somewhat denying the audience the conflict toward which the film has been building. In this sense, Inigo is idealized as the hero and equipped with means of revenge, while Westley is not presented as a hero, but as a pragmatist,..