Oliver Queen Report

Before the shipwreck Oliver Queen was a billionaire playboy who dated many women and was very irresponsible. So, how can a guy like that become a superhero who wants to bring justice to his city? As many superheroes before him, everything began with an traumatic event.

Oliver lands on the island Lian Yu. There, Oliver starts to learn a lot of survival skills which he will use when he returns to city. He manages to come back home but he isn’t the same man that he once was. Hereby we confirm that leaders are not born but made through training and experience.

After many things he survived, somehow, he managed it to come home again where he became kind and observant to others. During all the episodes he is haunted by the memories of his experiences on the island and decides not to talk about them with anyone. To honor his father’s wishes, Oliver becomes a vigilante. John Diggle and Felicity Smoak assist Oliver in his crusade. During his fight against the evil, he lost his best friend in an explosion and this made him decide to stop destroying the criminals but to protect the citizens from them.

At this point I asked myself, why does he became so cold and controlling? Do his emotional scars run as deep as the physical scars on his body? The answer is very complex. He showed the same symptoms as the people who came from the war. Oliver suffered from insomnia, nightmares and the constant feeling of guilt. He became hyperactive, responded to every single crime alert in the city. Basically, he wanted to help everyone so that the feeling of guilt decreases. After he came back, he started to avoid everyone because he didn’t want to talk about the things he went through since he was afraid that people would see him with other eyes, as damaged. He believed that he was responsible for the deaths of all the people he knew starting from his father, the sister of his ex-fiancée, his best friend etc..

Oliver fits very well with his born traits. He is socially useful, and he always tries to do the best for the society. He is very responsible, organized and determined. He shows the characteristic of conscientiousness because before every fight with someone he prepares himself, he collaborates with his colleagues to get as many information’s as possible so that he knows what he gets into. He shows that he is the leader of the group when he says something to Felicity or John and he expects them to listen to him and to do what he said. If we look at the Maslow’s hierarchy, we can find Oliver on the third level which is love/belonging because he doesn’t care much about love. Oliver had a chance to date Felicity but instead he said that he couldn’t focus on that and being Arrow at the same time. So, basically, he chose to focus only on being the Arrow.

He shows the characteristics of neuroticism during the episodes because he has up and downs in his social relationships, is impulsive and has mood swings. An example is the episode where he found out that his sister (she was drugged) killed Sara and without thinking, impulsed, he goes to fight the person who drugged her. He shows extroversion because he assumes leadership roles and is a social person.

If we go back to the statement that a leader is not born but made through training and experience, we come to the point where we can discuss his personal skills. Oliver Queen is an expert in acrobatics and is a great archer. He can shoot 29 arrows per minute. He is also very intelligent because he has a lot of different arrows which he made alone like at example the bomb-arrow. While he worked with ARGUS he became a great sniper too. Oliver has great survival skills, as he was taught on the island how to survive in the wild. His skills saved him his life a lot of times. In addition to his martial arts, Oliver is also mentally a very intelligent person. He speaks more than ten languages fluently at a native level including Chinese, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Russian etc..

I would say that his character can be described very well using every single theory which we studied because of his varied personality. Hereby I would like to conclude this paper with saying that this is probably the best series I ever watched and that the character of Oliver Queen Aka Arrow shows the best how a leader should behave and how a leader should build a relationship with his coworkers.