Heroics

I think that the idea of a hero is an important one for people to have. My whole life--as long as I can remember anyway--I have been enamored with the idea of a "hero" as a person someone can respect, look up to throughout life.

I'm not talking about the "every day" heroes of real life. I recognize the sacrifice and bravery of the single mom working to make ends meet so her kids never realize the delicate thread their lives hang on--the daily struggle that a cancer patient goes through every day to continue living, the millions of people who wear smiles to cover their misery and pain every day. These people are brave, heroic even, and should be admired and supported.

But when I talk about heroes these aren't the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Hero. With the capital "H". I don't know if these sorts of heroes really actually exist in the real world. They probably couldn't.

The real world is a messy place, it's full of questions and doubts and people asking about what's right and what's wrong. That's not the sort of world that heroes like this can survive in, because people would doubt that they were doing, would say that they were wrong to do what they did. Our world is a world where Rikki-Tikki-Tavi would be criticized (rightly so) for murdering unborn babies.

BUT THE BABIES ARE EVIL SNAKES!

That's the sort of world that you need for heroes, the ones I want, to exist in. You need a world where you can point at a person and say "This is evil, this needs to be stopped." And the stop it. You don't have to stop it with force or strength or violence, but you stand up to it, resist it. A hero in this sense, in that perfect world of fiction, is the guy who does the resisting, who stops that evil and saves the good people of the world.

The allure of being that hero resonates with incredible strength to me. I don't know why, for sure. Maybe it's the simplicity of it, the fact that you can know, for sure, that you're the good guy, the guy trying to protect and save people and that the ones you're fighting are the bad ones. I hear words about protecting people, about being heroic, I get a total rush.

Maybe my fascination with heroics is immature. I know that I've certainly told myself that many times. I'm not a fool, I know that the real world is no place for these sorts of black and white stories. I realize that the people who still think in this kind of way in the real world are probably the really bad ones, who'd dismiss all of some group or organization as "evil" and want to just kill all of them without understanding why they do the things they do.

I know all of this, but I still feel the pull of heroics, every damn day.

And I don't think that's such a bad thing. Shouldn't we have stories about people who can do truly amazing things, who can fight for what they believe in and win and defeat forces of evil? I think so. I think that we all want to see the good guys win, and I think it helps us all much more than it harms us to have the concept of a hero to look up to, to want to emulate, even when we know that a person like that could never exist in the real world.

I often feel ashamed of my infatuation with the idea of being a hero. I'm not sure why. I suppose it's because I realize what an immature and foolish idea it is. It's why people hate on Superman but love Batman, why everyone wants to be Wolverine instead of Cyclops. It's why the Romans dug Achilles so much more than Odysseus.

But I think there is a place for this mythical hero, even in our modern days of cynicism and jaded sensibilities. I think that having a person who can show us that we can fight back against the bad, whether that's through physical combat or just believing in yourself is a good thing. The world is a cruel and dark place, even nature itself is concerned with nothing more than pure, simple survival. The only good that we have in the whole universe is the good that we create--and the same can be said of evil, of course.

So why not embrace the unabashed heroes of our fiction? Should we not encourage people to follow their examples? I think we should.

I think the reason that I've spent so much of my life playing video games and, especially, role playing games, is because they allow me to portray that sort of fictional hero that could never exist in the world we live in. I always choose the good options in games that allow me to, and I've never really felt the urge to play an "evil party" in Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder or whatever. I get a genuine thrill from reading about or pretending to be a hero.

I think often in fiction these days people will try to subvert or deconstruct the classical hero of fiction. I think there's nothing wrong with that, but I also think people have gone overboard with it. In this (post?)post-modern world we live in people are deconstructing their subversive deconstructions of heroes and fiction. No one seems to want to have just the heroes of old anymore, they're not "edgy" enough, not "real" enough. I'd argue that people don't always read fiction for the hard hitting reality they so many people want to push (or for sex and vampires or whatever else. Sex paired with something is certain to sell, unfortunately.)

And, like I said earlier, stories about heroes don't have to be simple mind floss. Even things like Avatar can show us heroes being heroic while also teaching lessons we all should know and remember.

So don't be jaded, don't be a cynic. Don't say there are no more heroes any more.

We can all be heroes.

We just have to try.