Holding Out for a Hero
Another post in the "things I really like" series. (For the record, when I say hero in these posts, I mean it as a term inclusive of both male and female characters--same with "good guys" and "bad guys.")
So, sometime in the 1980s, I think, though I'm not really sure, considering I was born then, it struck people that really, really flawed characters were intensely interesting in a way that had never seemed to catch on in a big way before, and this ended up plunging the world of popular fiction into the wave of antiheroes that dominated the 90s, at least in genre. For me, as a kid growing up, this characterization aesthetic was all over the place. The first superhero I was aware of was Batman, followed shortly by Wolverine; even Disney got in on it--the heroes of two of the first Disney movies I was old enough to remember were the Beast and Aladdin. Now, they're generally pretty harmless in the antihero department, but they're also a big departure from good old Prince Philip. And I'm not even going to get into the endless string of action movie heroes.
Despite this flood of antiheroes surrounding me as a young consumer (though out of the above, the Disney examples are the closest to the traditional definition of an antihero, as a character who lacks the heroic traits that make up a classical hero, rather than a jerk who is a protagonist nonetheless, which is a more modern definition of antihero), despite seeing them all around me, I never got into the trend. In fact, since I watched the first Star Wars movie literally before I can remember (my first memory of Star Wars is watching it with the knowledge that I'd seen it before), I can honestly say that Luke Skywalker has been my favorite character of all time pretty much literally for my whole life, so my preference for the pure hero as a character archetype probably dates back to birth, or possibly the womb. I could go on and on and on about everything I love so much about Luke, but the important part is that he is, genuinely, a good person. A really good person. It is his faith and love and steadfast incorruptibility that manages to effect Darth Vader's return from the dark side. No matter what, Luke really cares (interestingly pointed out in the first film in one of his dorkiest, most embarrassing moments, in my opinion, when Leia scathingly says about Han, "I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody," and Luke responds with, "I care." But it's true, and he proves it again and again). I never found Luke boring in the slightest. Despite his goodness, his journey as a character and a hero, and his vulnerabilities and uncertainties, always spoke to me deeply, and he had a lot of things to learn, a lot of things to do--he was always really dynamic to me, and his story and character arc resonated with me by far the most, even if he was a good person.
Obviously, Luke is a special case to me, but my fondness for goodness in characters has never really gone away. It's manifested over the years as a semi-predictable love of protagonists and heroic archetypes.
In other words, I tend to like the good guys.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fiction lately I've felt like there's been a trend and a general attitude that nice or good people are "boring" because there isn't anywhere to go with them or anything to do with them. I have to say, I kind of have the opposite attitude about the whole thing.
In my introduction to this series of posts, I discussed my feeling that it is difficult for me to divorce my own sense of morality from my experience of fiction, and I think that this has a lot to do with this. I don't necessarily mean this in a judgmental way--I love flawed characters, I love seeing a character struggle, I love moral complexity, I love it when the bad guys and good guys aren't clear--but I do have clear ideas about what I think is right and what I think is wrong, and the more a character does things that I think are wrong and doesn't get called on it or have it shown as a flaw in the work itself, the more distance I feel between myself and the work, until if it goes too far, I find myself feeling actually opposed to it in terms of viewpoint and feeling like the work and I are standing on either side of a great moral gulf. I get this feeling when I perceive what I feel to be moral flaws in a character that the original work seems not to perceive or even seems to think are positive traits, and if it's extreme enough, it can alienate me completely. But my liking for heroic characters stems from the other side of that coin. There's a part of me that really likes to admire and be inspired by characters, and heroic characters really get that part of me going. This actually applies in a larger sense--if there is something I admire about a character my liking for them intends to increase by a lot, even if the trait is not a moral one, though sometimes it's hard to distinguish between characters I admire and characters I just really like. But chances are, if you see me going on and on about a character I totally love, there's something I admire about them. (This actually might be the distinguishing factor between antiheroes I actually like and antiheroes I want to slap really hard across the face, but I'll have to think about that more. Of course, those are not always entirely mutually exclusive.) But being a hero hits me in a really visceral way that few other traits about a character manage to, pretty much ever.
When I say being a hero, I mostly mean trying to help other people, standing up for personal beliefs/what's right, being courageous, often self-sacrificing on some level, and not giving up on that, so it includes a component of standing up for things I think are important, bravery and determination in the process thereof, and a lack of concern for the self, which I'd usually define as a lack of selfishness rather demanding straight-up selflessness, which is kind of its own thing. And right up there with how much I like heroes is how much I like genuinely nice characters (not the kind of "nice guy" who expects attention and often sexual favors from women in a form of payment for being "nice," mind you). People who care about and reach out to others. (In fact, probably the quickest way to have me develop affection for a character is to have them show caring for others. It never fails--even if the other is just one other person.) Nice gets a character really, really far with me--not necessarily undiluted nice, but genuine interest and caring for others.
Something I hear a lot is that nice characters are more boring, or don't move a story as well, but I've never found that to be true. Quite the opposite, in fact. I mean, how many video game RPGs basically run on the assumption that your character is a complete bleeding heart who really will care about those kids' lost puppy and offer to go find it for them? How many superhero comics rely on the fact that their main character is too heroic to ever give up fighting crime? Their being a good person is probably the fastest way to generate plot for a character that I've ever thought of.
One of the greatest examples of this principle (niceness driven plot, we might call it) in action might just be Bertie Wooster, the protagonist and narrator of most of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series. He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but Bertie is unfailingly generous and too nice to turn down any of his friends when they ask him for favors. These character traits basically motivate every single plotline in the entire series, and the thing is that it also works really well to get the reader invested in what's going on, as he proceeds to make the situation worse and worse just by trying to help, and you're feeling sorry for him at every turn, because, after all, he's only in this mess because he's trying to help one of his completely useless friends (until Jeeves solves everything, of course). And you're thinking, oh, Bertie, stop being so nice!, except you're actually thinking, . . . don't stop, this is hilarious. If unfailing niceness and generally gentlemanly behavior can be enough to motivate an entire series, you don't really need to look any further for a character motivation, if so desired. And then, of course, you don't have to get into the thorny question of why, if this guy is such an asshole or so reluctant to save the world, he's doing it in the first place. Good people don't need any other motivation to save the world, after all. (This is probably actually one of the reasons why antiheroes are so popular--having them start to care about other people or a cause or saving the world represents character development for them, rather than the static state of having the good person always care about it. But lately I feel like people have had antiheroes just for the sake of it without bothering to establish the character development bit anyway, which brings me back to this whole idea. I'd also argue that most people would try to save the world, just because they don't want to have to stop playing video games, making money, or flirting with the boy or girl down the street to live a post-apocalyptic wasteland, let alone the potential threat to friends and family, so if the threat is big enough, you'd have to be not just antiheroic but downright nihilistic not to care, but that's a whole different argument.)
But the dynamic potential of goodness in characters doesn't stop there. Goodness presents real moral quandaries, too. It's almost never a cut-and-dried thing, which means that having a really honestly good character doesn't necessarily remove moral ambiguity or questions from a storyline. In fact, in certain stories, the hero's moral standards or goodness can add more conflict, such as in Rurouni Kenshin, where the title character's refusal to kill adds a whole new layer not only to a number of stories where people try to force him to revert to the days of his career as a killer, but also to his duels with several bad guys, as the question becomes how will he actually stop them? Can he? But he's the only one who could possibly beat them! This is a conflict the story couldn't possibly have had if Kenshin weren't so morally bound. And even when a good character fails to live up to personal standards, you get a lot more conflict than you would ever have had if this were a person who crosses lines all the time. It's work to be incorruptible, and that's fascinating to me. And when the people around a person who genuinely cares about them get hurt, it means far more than if the person is a stoic loner who only cares about himself or herself. And all of these character traits--faith, courage, hope, caring for others, selflessness, heroism--have their associated flaws to be examined or deconstructed, if an author is so inclined.
That being said, there is also something inherently satisfying about seeing someone standing up for someone else, for standing firm in the face of danger, taking a stand for what that person believes in, entirely on its own merits. This kind of courage, goodness, and determination is something that I think we all wish was more prevalent in our real lives, so it is somehow vicariously satisfying to see it in fiction. It is also a fundamentally optimistic component of fiction, when it is included--stating that the author at least believes that people have it in them to be brave and good, rather than the other way around (of course, this kind of message can be obscured by all kinds of other things, like if the author manages to problematize it by implying that certain sorts of people are more capable of heroism than others, but the hopeful valance to it is still there just by stating that yes, people can be like this). What with my preference for hope in my fiction, it makes sense that it would be a huge thing for me. There is nothing that has quite the same weight for me in fiction as the purely heroic choice. This might be one reason why one of my favorite superheroes is Superman, who has no reason to be a superhero except that he can be, so he feels that he should. It is an entirely altruistic impulse on his part, because he's just that good a guy, and I just . . . love that (this also kind of shows the power the pure, traditionally heroic archetype has over me, because this is also one of the defining traits of Spiderman, and though I don't hate him or anything, I don't have nearly the same level of investment in his character, which might have something to do with the fact that Spiderman is more of your typical, everyday-guy, original conception of antihero as a heroic character who just isn't as equipped for heroism as your classical hero, while Superman is basically your classical hero straight up, though my preferences in this matter are kind of a mystery to me, as well--why not Spiderman as much as Superman? I'm not totally sure). A vast majority of my favorite characters are ones who at some point make this exact heroic choice at some point--the self-sacrificing choice, you might also call it in a lot of situations. And when it comes right down to it, I think what it rests on is my preference for characters who care more than anything else.
This probably also explains my fondness for characters in some kind of "serving" profession--superheroes, members of Starfleet (an incredibly idealistic organization), policemen and women, and so on and forth. Along with this fondness for characters who care, I really like idealistic characters--not necessarily naive characters, though I certainly don't mind those, but characters who believe in something, especially if they're willing to make sacrifices for that thing, whatever it is, but especially if I see it as something admirable myself. There's some sort of incredible thrill in watching a heroic character willing to make sacrifices for something you, yourself, believe in (which probably encapsulates the power of fiction to serve as a propaganda tool, right there, so it's not all a good thing). Still, it's a powerful thing, on a fairly visceral level, at least for me.
This also most likely goes a long way to explaining my fondness for the protagonist of a given work or series, as typically the protagonist is the most active and/or most heroic, and I naturally gravitate toward that type of character. I don't always like the main character the best, but it's definitely more likely than not that I will, and if you took some sort of accounting of all the works of fiction I really like and in how many of them my favorite character is either the protagonist, the viewpoint character, or both, it would definitely be a substantial portion of all of them, definitely more in which this was the case rather than not. And a lot about why I have this thing for responsible characters, and responsibility in characters, and seeing characters take responsibility for things.
In short, one of the most powerful and compelling tropes or arcs for me in fiction is simply goodness, heroism, or both, and seeing the making of the choice to be heroic, and I tend to actively prefer the characters who are shining examples of goodness--it's their very goodness, their heroic natures, that attracts me to them. And a lot of times, even in characters who are less Shining Examples of the Light, it's the good parts about them, their good traits, their virtues, that makes me love them the way I do. I love characters in spite of their flaws and sometimes for them. But I love characters because of their virtues.
So, sometime in the 1980s, I think, though I'm not really sure, considering I was born then, it struck people that really, really flawed characters were intensely interesting in a way that had never seemed to catch on in a big way before, and this ended up plunging the world of popular fiction into the wave of antiheroes that dominated the 90s, at least in genre. For me, as a kid growing up, this characterization aesthetic was all over the place. The first superhero I was aware of was Batman, followed shortly by Wolverine; even Disney got in on it--the heroes of two of the first Disney movies I was old enough to remember were the Beast and Aladdin. Now, they're generally pretty harmless in the antihero department, but they're also a big departure from good old Prince Philip. And I'm not even going to get into the endless string of action movie heroes.
Despite this flood of antiheroes surrounding me as a young consumer (though out of the above, the Disney examples are the closest to the traditional definition of an antihero, as a character who lacks the heroic traits that make up a classical hero, rather than a jerk who is a protagonist nonetheless, which is a more modern definition of antihero), despite seeing them all around me, I never got into the trend. In fact, since I watched the first Star Wars movie literally before I can remember (my first memory of Star Wars is watching it with the knowledge that I'd seen it before), I can honestly say that Luke Skywalker has been my favorite character of all time pretty much literally for my whole life, so my preference for the pure hero as a character archetype probably dates back to birth, or possibly the womb. I could go on and on and on about everything I love so much about Luke, but the important part is that he is, genuinely, a good person. A really good person. It is his faith and love and steadfast incorruptibility that manages to effect Darth Vader's return from the dark side. No matter what, Luke really cares (interestingly pointed out in the first film in one of his dorkiest, most embarrassing moments, in my opinion, when Leia scathingly says about Han, "I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody," and Luke responds with, "I care." But it's true, and he proves it again and again). I never found Luke boring in the slightest. Despite his goodness, his journey as a character and a hero, and his vulnerabilities and uncertainties, always spoke to me deeply, and he had a lot of things to learn, a lot of things to do--he was always really dynamic to me, and his story and character arc resonated with me by far the most, even if he was a good person.
Obviously, Luke is a special case to me, but my fondness for goodness in characters has never really gone away. It's manifested over the years as a semi-predictable love of protagonists and heroic archetypes.
In other words, I tend to like the good guys.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fiction lately I've felt like there's been a trend and a general attitude that nice or good people are "boring" because there isn't anywhere to go with them or anything to do with them. I have to say, I kind of have the opposite attitude about the whole thing.
In my introduction to this series of posts, I discussed my feeling that it is difficult for me to divorce my own sense of morality from my experience of fiction, and I think that this has a lot to do with this. I don't necessarily mean this in a judgmental way--I love flawed characters, I love seeing a character struggle, I love moral complexity, I love it when the bad guys and good guys aren't clear--but I do have clear ideas about what I think is right and what I think is wrong, and the more a character does things that I think are wrong and doesn't get called on it or have it shown as a flaw in the work itself, the more distance I feel between myself and the work, until if it goes too far, I find myself feeling actually opposed to it in terms of viewpoint and feeling like the work and I are standing on either side of a great moral gulf. I get this feeling when I perceive what I feel to be moral flaws in a character that the original work seems not to perceive or even seems to think are positive traits, and if it's extreme enough, it can alienate me completely. But my liking for heroic characters stems from the other side of that coin. There's a part of me that really likes to admire and be inspired by characters, and heroic characters really get that part of me going. This actually applies in a larger sense--if there is something I admire about a character my liking for them intends to increase by a lot, even if the trait is not a moral one, though sometimes it's hard to distinguish between characters I admire and characters I just really like. But chances are, if you see me going on and on about a character I totally love, there's something I admire about them. (This actually might be the distinguishing factor between antiheroes I actually like and antiheroes I want to slap really hard across the face, but I'll have to think about that more. Of course, those are not always entirely mutually exclusive.) But being a hero hits me in a really visceral way that few other traits about a character manage to, pretty much ever.
When I say being a hero, I mostly mean trying to help other people, standing up for personal beliefs/what's right, being courageous, often self-sacrificing on some level, and not giving up on that, so it includes a component of standing up for things I think are important, bravery and determination in the process thereof, and a lack of concern for the self, which I'd usually define as a lack of selfishness rather demanding straight-up selflessness, which is kind of its own thing. And right up there with how much I like heroes is how much I like genuinely nice characters (not the kind of "nice guy" who expects attention and often sexual favors from women in a form of payment for being "nice," mind you). People who care about and reach out to others. (In fact, probably the quickest way to have me develop affection for a character is to have them show caring for others. It never fails--even if the other is just one other person.) Nice gets a character really, really far with me--not necessarily undiluted nice, but genuine interest and caring for others.
Something I hear a lot is that nice characters are more boring, or don't move a story as well, but I've never found that to be true. Quite the opposite, in fact. I mean, how many video game RPGs basically run on the assumption that your character is a complete bleeding heart who really will care about those kids' lost puppy and offer to go find it for them? How many superhero comics rely on the fact that their main character is too heroic to ever give up fighting crime? Their being a good person is probably the fastest way to generate plot for a character that I've ever thought of.
One of the greatest examples of this principle (niceness driven plot, we might call it) in action might just be Bertie Wooster, the protagonist and narrator of most of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series. He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but Bertie is unfailingly generous and too nice to turn down any of his friends when they ask him for favors. These character traits basically motivate every single plotline in the entire series, and the thing is that it also works really well to get the reader invested in what's going on, as he proceeds to make the situation worse and worse just by trying to help, and you're feeling sorry for him at every turn, because, after all, he's only in this mess because he's trying to help one of his completely useless friends (until Jeeves solves everything, of course). And you're thinking, oh, Bertie, stop being so nice!, except you're actually thinking, . . . don't stop, this is hilarious. If unfailing niceness and generally gentlemanly behavior can be enough to motivate an entire series, you don't really need to look any further for a character motivation, if so desired. And then, of course, you don't have to get into the thorny question of why, if this guy is such an asshole or so reluctant to save the world, he's doing it in the first place. Good people don't need any other motivation to save the world, after all. (This is probably actually one of the reasons why antiheroes are so popular--having them start to care about other people or a cause or saving the world represents character development for them, rather than the static state of having the good person always care about it. But lately I feel like people have had antiheroes just for the sake of it without bothering to establish the character development bit anyway, which brings me back to this whole idea. I'd also argue that most people would try to save the world, just because they don't want to have to stop playing video games, making money, or flirting with the boy or girl down the street to live a post-apocalyptic wasteland, let alone the potential threat to friends and family, so if the threat is big enough, you'd have to be not just antiheroic but downright nihilistic not to care, but that's a whole different argument.)
But the dynamic potential of goodness in characters doesn't stop there. Goodness presents real moral quandaries, too. It's almost never a cut-and-dried thing, which means that having a really honestly good character doesn't necessarily remove moral ambiguity or questions from a storyline. In fact, in certain stories, the hero's moral standards or goodness can add more conflict, such as in Rurouni Kenshin, where the title character's refusal to kill adds a whole new layer not only to a number of stories where people try to force him to revert to the days of his career as a killer, but also to his duels with several bad guys, as the question becomes how will he actually stop them? Can he? But he's the only one who could possibly beat them! This is a conflict the story couldn't possibly have had if Kenshin weren't so morally bound. And even when a good character fails to live up to personal standards, you get a lot more conflict than you would ever have had if this were a person who crosses lines all the time. It's work to be incorruptible, and that's fascinating to me. And when the people around a person who genuinely cares about them get hurt, it means far more than if the person is a stoic loner who only cares about himself or herself. And all of these character traits--faith, courage, hope, caring for others, selflessness, heroism--have their associated flaws to be examined or deconstructed, if an author is so inclined.
That being said, there is also something inherently satisfying about seeing someone standing up for someone else, for standing firm in the face of danger, taking a stand for what that person believes in, entirely on its own merits. This kind of courage, goodness, and determination is something that I think we all wish was more prevalent in our real lives, so it is somehow vicariously satisfying to see it in fiction. It is also a fundamentally optimistic component of fiction, when it is included--stating that the author at least believes that people have it in them to be brave and good, rather than the other way around (of course, this kind of message can be obscured by all kinds of other things, like if the author manages to problematize it by implying that certain sorts of people are more capable of heroism than others, but the hopeful valance to it is still there just by stating that yes, people can be like this). What with my preference for hope in my fiction, it makes sense that it would be a huge thing for me. There is nothing that has quite the same weight for me in fiction as the purely heroic choice. This might be one reason why one of my favorite superheroes is Superman, who has no reason to be a superhero except that he can be, so he feels that he should. It is an entirely altruistic impulse on his part, because he's just that good a guy, and I just . . . love that (this also kind of shows the power the pure, traditionally heroic archetype has over me, because this is also one of the defining traits of Spiderman, and though I don't hate him or anything, I don't have nearly the same level of investment in his character, which might have something to do with the fact that Spiderman is more of your typical, everyday-guy, original conception of antihero as a heroic character who just isn't as equipped for heroism as your classical hero, while Superman is basically your classical hero straight up, though my preferences in this matter are kind of a mystery to me, as well--why not Spiderman as much as Superman? I'm not totally sure). A vast majority of my favorite characters are ones who at some point make this exact heroic choice at some point--the self-sacrificing choice, you might also call it in a lot of situations. And when it comes right down to it, I think what it rests on is my preference for characters who care more than anything else.
This probably also explains my fondness for characters in some kind of "serving" profession--superheroes, members of Starfleet (an incredibly idealistic organization), policemen and women, and so on and forth. Along with this fondness for characters who care, I really like idealistic characters--not necessarily naive characters, though I certainly don't mind those, but characters who believe in something, especially if they're willing to make sacrifices for that thing, whatever it is, but especially if I see it as something admirable myself. There's some sort of incredible thrill in watching a heroic character willing to make sacrifices for something you, yourself, believe in (which probably encapsulates the power of fiction to serve as a propaganda tool, right there, so it's not all a good thing). Still, it's a powerful thing, on a fairly visceral level, at least for me.
This also most likely goes a long way to explaining my fondness for the protagonist of a given work or series, as typically the protagonist is the most active and/or most heroic, and I naturally gravitate toward that type of character. I don't always like the main character the best, but it's definitely more likely than not that I will, and if you took some sort of accounting of all the works of fiction I really like and in how many of them my favorite character is either the protagonist, the viewpoint character, or both, it would definitely be a substantial portion of all of them, definitely more in which this was the case rather than not. And a lot about why I have this thing for responsible characters, and responsibility in characters, and seeing characters take responsibility for things.
In short, one of the most powerful and compelling tropes or arcs for me in fiction is simply goodness, heroism, or both, and seeing the making of the choice to be heroic, and I tend to actively prefer the characters who are shining examples of goodness--it's their very goodness, their heroic natures, that attracts me to them. And a lot of times, even in characters who are less Shining Examples of the Light, it's the good parts about them, their good traits, their virtues, that makes me love them the way I do. I love characters in spite of their flaws and sometimes for them. But I love characters because of their virtues.