Are We Killing Off Heroes?

I’ve found myself wondering about trends in society and media from time to time. Admittedly my experience in this area is colored by the fact that my exposure is limited to my own lifetime. In other words, I have not studied, and naturally have not lived, through any previous time period going back, let’s say, to the 80s.

Growing up my likes and dislikes, my style, was all a little “old” relative to my contemporaries. Even now, if stressed to choose a favored fashion and music style I’d probably like something like swing and the big band era. I’m probably one of the few that liked classical music as a child, though I’ve no talent for playing music.

I say all that to frame this topic of the seeming “darkening” of heroes. In my eyes it seems like a general lack of, or loss of, hope.

I’m speaking about the heroes presented in many stories nowadays; books, movies, television, and of course anime.

Heroes have never been squeaky clean or completely altruistic. Even classical heroes such as Heracles/Hercules and Beowulf were not completely altruistic. Often their deeds were more about fame and glory. Even so, altruism was a clear and significant motive. There was always the sense that their actions were precisely directed towards good deeds.

More and more often, however, the heroes in modern tales are selfish. Not just a little selfish, but a lot selfish. If not selfish, they are what I call “accidentally good”, in that they become a hero by circumstance of their being in conflict with someone perceived to be more antagonistic than they are.

This motif is common nowadays, whereas it was once an occasional theme. Code Geass, one of the most popular anime of the last five years or so, is a prime example of this concept. The hero, Lelouch, is not a “good guy”. He isn’t acting out of some sense of greater duty to the world. He repeats throughout the show that his purpose is for the memory of his mother and for his sister. It’s not that these are unworthy for concern and effort. But the main reason he is seen as the hero is because he is fighting, in Britannia and his family, a group of people whose actions are more abjectly objectionable. Because we perceive Britannia as being the worst evil in the show, and Lelouch pits himself against them, his actions gain some degree of “honor” to them. As such, his actions and sacrifices are terrible when viewed independently, particularly as we get into the second season, but Britannia only seems to get worse, so even then Lelouch’s actions in relation remain justifiable, if not acceptable.

Aside from that, many heroes come across as people with bad personalities. I look at the Gundam series, Attack on Titan, even One Piece; these are all great, fantastic, entertaining shows which generally have main characters who are either not-so-great personality wise, to outright criminals, but are nonetheless the heroes of the story.

My contention is not that these shows are somehow bad or shouldn’t be accepted, but that there is a dearth of the other flavor. In fact, we tend to see attempts at this lambasted as being a sellout or somehow wrong. One of the starkest examples of this I’ve seen is with the Medaka Box series. Now, there are a number of issues I think that intertwine into some people’s critiques of the story, but I can remember the point in the manga where Medaka is convinced that, not because of anything they knew about her past, or any such thing, that instead of trying to save everyone she should focus on her friends and get together with her would-be boyfriend Zenkichi. To me this would be the equivalent of telling Superman, forget about saving the world and helping people, just do what you want and go get married to Lois Lane.

It is not so much as the idea that this is what happened, but that the reaction is that this is unquestionably a good thing. This was seen as a great thing without doubt, and that it absolutely had to happen.

I think a lot of this is more from cynicism. There is a vein of cynicism that has grown more and more over the last few decades. In general fans don’t seem to want squeaky clean heroes. They don’t even want mostly clean heroes. They want heroes who are grimy, dirty, mean, selfish, and angry. They want heroes who are only differentiate from the villain by which side of the issue they stand on. More often than not fans seem to prefer heroes like those in Hollywood blockbusters such as Die Hard, Riddick, or Red – movies where the hero runs about killing everyone, blowing stuff up, and just doing as they please, regardless of the cause.

The last few decades have seen that more and more individuals have harbored a deep cynicism about the future. For a time in the late 90s that feeling did seem to abate somewhat, but that did not last long. People in general seem to have this persistent paranoia, that is more pronounced than before and seems to grow more and more entrenched, that somehow the world will end soon, or that we are on the precipice of destruction. You had Y2K at the end of the century, 9/11 in 2001, and then the Mayan 2012 prophecy. Together, added to the economic morass that began taking hold in 2007, and the very basic fact that we are all more aware of all the bad things that happen in the world by nature of our ability to communicate all over the world in an instant, there is a pervasive feeling, I think, that there are no truly “good” people in the world anymore. That gets reflected in the movies we watch, where our heroes are as bad as we are, or often times worse, fighting villains who are merely a degree or two worse than they are.

Again, I am not disparaging any of these stories, or even directly criticizing the artistic choice that led to these movies and shows. All I am saying is that it would be nice if there were a few more shows, a few more movies, where the hero is worthy of being aspired to, instead of just a representation of the “not quite worst” of us. At the very least it would be nice if the few times a hero who didn’t happen to be all about themselves and unabashedly violent wasn’t raked over the coals as being weak or a bad hero for no other reason than this.

Here's today's sample track. Love this song, this music video, this album, this group. Awesome!