posted
Ridiculous. Even a character who proclaimed "I am a villain" would be lying. No real person would see themselves that way. And in fiction---and I've encountered enough of them---it breaks any mood the writer is trying to establish.
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"Golly, I think I'll shoot up some heroin," said Abraham Lincoln, actioning angrily.
"Wyeth?" asked his best friend.
"Because I am evil!" said Abraham Lincoln. "Say, shall we get into a fistfight first?"
"What? A fighteth? No! That would just be stupideth."
"And evil!" agreed Lincoln agreeably but in a sort of evil way of agreeing. "I want to fight you out of pure evil, no other reason that makes sense to me. Eeeeevil!"
"Well, OK. We are best friends," said the best friend, actioning. "It is the least I can do to help you achieve your eeeeeevil goals."
posted
He's killed someone (and was horrified that he enjoyed it), he hurts people, and everything he does is horribly false. He wants to do something terrible to everyone around him (indirectly) for revenge against the entity that created him - and secondarily to ensure that nobody like him can ever be created again. He's wracked with guilt over it all, but he can't see any other way forward.
There are heroic things about him, and I can see them, but he definitely sees himself as a villain. If you asked him if he's a good person, he'd say, "Definitely not, and just the opposite."
Given how he sees himself, how can he be the "hero" of his own story?
posted
I've read a lot of Lincoln biography, and I'm pretty sure that excerpt is nonfiction. People did not win fistfights against him.
I'm not sure that I agree that characters are always the hero of their own story. That assumes that the character doesn't completely hate himself. I just don't see a person absorbed in self-loathing as being his own story's hero, unless the idea is put through a lot of illogical contortions first. Perhaps the character is suicidal and the hero in his story is his wife or somesuch.
"Hero of your own story" is a nice dramatic phrase but think of it as "protagonist of your own story" instead so that you can drop the moral baggage and stop expecting him to rescue kittens. It just means that in fiction people don't act arbitrarily, they act for reasons that make sense to them (even subconsciously). You said he acts out of vengeance - so he is the hero in his vengeance story - he is not just randomly killing bunnies for no reason just to be eeeeevil for the sake of being eeeeevil. He's taking actions to further his goal of vengeance, and he may feel bad about some of the stuff he does, but he sure as hell believes he's entitled to vengeance.
posted
BUT what I think you're missing is that the phrase is usually most useful when developing the antagonist and secondary characters - so that they're not just empty plot devices there to serve your protagonist, but have lives and goals of their own.
It doesn't mean your protagonist sits down with his corn flakes every morning and congratulates himself on what a fine heroic person he is.
quote:Argon sat valiantly down to his Wheaties, wondering what heroic thing he'd do today. Most likely he'd follow Brammer around, doing whatever Brammer thought was heroic.
He lifted the milk jug with a well-muscled hand and gallantly poured milk over his cereal. He read the paper as he masterfully munched his bolus, thinking Samsonesque thoughts about current affairs. What a hero I am! he thought. A paragon of the stalwart, a top dog among lions!
posted
trousercuit, I couldn't help but laugh at that! Maybe it's because I'd probably do something like that...
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posted
I think that some people cast themselves as sidekicks, position players, or bards, singing the songs of greater people. I'm not sure that this is so bad. Not everybody is a hero in the grand scheme. I think it's more important to know true heroism when you see it, than to contrive a world where you are a false one.
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posted
Marva, that's what this discussion is about. A villain can perform morally reprehensible acts, but justify those very same actions so that--even if it's only by his own logic, and no other person could possibly understand it--he is heroic.
A villain (not a sociopathic villain, just your typical bad guy) will never think of himself as truly evil. Or Eeeevil, or whatever. He will have some kind of justification for his actions--even if that same justification is unpalatable to the reader.
posted
I realy like this idea. a Protag who is evil, and hates himself for it. imagine the moral dilemmas he can have for himself. imagine just how cruel he can be, and imagine his justification for it. (Imagine imagine imagine... blah) ok, no more imagining. personally, i enjoy writing about the evil more than the good anyway.
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posted
I would say if you want a good example of a villian who knows he is evil, but would still be the hero of his own story, look at the movie Serenity. "the agent" (I don't think he's ever given a name in the movie) murders people etc, and even describes to the protagonist how he's "a monster" but he believes he's doing it to protect/preserve a better world for humanity. Even though he knows that the things he does make him evil, and he has no place in the wonderful society he's trying to preserve, he would still be the hero of his own story, a tragic hero as it were, as he accepts the responsibility of doing what he believes must be done for the greater good, even if that involves murdering civilians.
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pantros, according to you I shall never have a story about me.
Brother Trouser, that was hilarious.
personally, I prefer a guy who is doing evil things, but for a good reason. that way, He has justification. like a guy taking over the world to preserve His faith. good intentions, bad, bad, bad results.
something I just remembered. anyone here read the Death Gate Cycle, Skies of Pern? great book, antagonist who calls Himself evil and is killed, of course, but not by the protagonist. He is killed... well, you will have to read the book to find out.
[This message has been edited by dreadlord (edited August 12, 2006).]
posted
Apologies, Graff, but that's not what this discussion is about. At least, it didn't start that way.
My character is a hero (objectively) if you take a very long view of things and disregard his motives. What he thinks he's doing is picking between two evils (that's all that's left to him), and it so happens that the one he picks - the good one, the one he regards as the greater evil - coincides with his desire for revenge. He doesn't feel very good about himself and he thinks he's a villain.
I have to repeat that this character does not feel anything like a hero - in fact, he despises himself. Because the phrase "every character is the hero of his own story" is about how a character sees himself, I can only conclude that it does not fit.
Heck, he's not even the protagonist of his own story. He's the antagonist.
To reduce confusion, I've put my main points in bold.
posted
Just write it. If it's brilliant, then great. If not, then don't brag about it.
Tanglier had a good point, and one that bears examination. It bears out the idea that there can be a character who acts primarily out of a desire to fulfil the role of "villian" to a hero. I happen to understand this very well. Think of Justice from The Worthing Chronicles. She is acting out the role of a villian, a person who deliberately inflicts harm on all humanity so that they can become heroes in their own stories. In a sense, the entire story is about her dilemma, how can she bear to allow ordinary humans to truly live their own lives when it means subjecting them to so much suffering? As someone who is able to feel that suffering, to truly understand the heroes from their own point of view, she cannot help but know that she is a villian.
And yet Card's story ends up overturning this concept. Because in the end Justice is just as much a hero as anyone else. She can only do what she does because she loves those who suffer as heroes. She doesn't only love their heroism, she loves them, individually. She too, has suffered. It was what enabled her to value sacrifice and courage enough to make herself a villian in order to demand it of humans. But she didn't learn about those as abstract concepts. She lived through loss and fear, and she needed to deal with them herself.
There is danger in reading any solid truism at only it's most trite and conventionalized level. If you ask any thousand people "who is your hero?", only one of them will say "myself." And the person who says that is just as likely to be lying as any of the others. So I think that we can say that almost nobody really thinks of themselves as the hero. Almost by definition, your hero has to be somebody else who champions your cause.
And yet, our causes are usually matters of choice, aren't they? Every character that deserves to be recognized as a character rather than a prop has chosen a cause to champion. In a way you can take the advice as nothing more than that. Every character acts for his own motives, and those motives are a matter of personal choice.
posted
Trouser: oops. I thought the conversation had taken a turn that-away. And that Beth had done a very adequate job of explaining why, in a strange way, your character really is his own hero. Regardless, as off-topic as it may be, I still think my comments stand. Maybe.
posted
OK, but then what about anti-heroes? There's been this trend with MCs who aren't really good guys but not really bad ones, either. I hate to use a movie example instead of a book, but the Punisher was called an anti-hero because he was fighting crime for revenge but his actions were indirectly helpful to those who do good. A friend of mine once described anti-heroes as "Antagonistic Protaginists." Are anti-heroes even considered in the literary world, or do we draw the line between good and evil and place characters in those roles accordingly? You can even argue that there are dark-heroes (Batman) who have a tortured soul but a real desire to do good. Where do we end classification?
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posted
The Punisher and Batman are flawed (potentially tragic) heroes, not antiheroes. They do not need a new term to describe them, as any citizen of ancient Greece would be able to fit them perfectly well into their existing concept of a hero. "Antihero" is a relatively new term, and describes a relatively new kind of story.
Antiheroes are well established in "literary" fiction (and non-fiction). They aren't so popular in other genres, because the idea of an antihero is that he is the exact antithesis of a traditional hero. There isn't supposed to be anything admirable about them. They aren't super-strong, or super smart, or super in any way. Mostly they're just petty.
The narrator in Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky is probably one of the better (that is, more enjoyable) examples of an antihero. Partly this is because he is at least superhumanly honest about his state of detestable misery. At least, to a degree. While he does admit that he has chosen to be what he is, he doesn't seem capable of understanding that, this being one choice, a different choice would logically have been possible. The existentialist movement has made some use of the antihero, but usually existentialist heroes are presented as being heroic by virtue of their existentialism (at least, in the end). Modern "literary" works have purified the concept, their antiheroes lack even the honest self appraisal of the Underground Man.
The distinction between the antihero and any traditional concept of the "hero" is very obvious. A more subtle difference is the distinction between the antihero and the merely object of ridicule, present in many works over time. The key difference is that the author intends that we regard the antihero as being representative of ourselves. We can laugh (though most antiheroes aren't really interesting enough to be funny), but primarily we should feel despair about the pointlessness of our own lives, as reflected in the merely dispicable struggle for worthless ego that the antihero represents.
posted
No apology necessary, it's an interesting question whether your asking about the resurgance of tragic heroes or the development of the antihero.
I think that the answer to the question of why we're more interested in flawed heroes is easier. Our culture has become pessimistic and disillusioned, we no longer have a common set of values sufficient to sustain the type of hero common in literature of the fifties. Basically, because we no longer agree on what virtues a hero should have, most of the heroes seem to most people to be deeply flawed. Most people have become accustomed to viewing our society as doomed by its faults, and thus cannot readily accept any kind of hero other than the tragic. We sense that we are on the brink (putting the truth of this aside for a moment), and we need heroes that validate this basic assumption.
posted
I think the protagonist of "A Clockwork Orange" is a good example of an antihero.
Back on topic... trousercuit said:
quote:...the phrase "every character is the hero of his own story" is about how a character sees himself...
(emphasis in the original)
I am forced to disagree with this statement, 100%. It is a question of grammar. The subject at the end of the phrase is the story, not the character. Here's an informal proof to highlight my point:
Every character is the hero of X, where X = the story. Whose story? The story of the character.
NOT
Every character is the hero of X, where X = the character. Translation: Every character is his or her own hero.
The second example is obviously false.
In the first example - the correct example - we are talking about the story, not the character. The single instance of the noun 'story' is qualified by indication of possession: this story belongs to the character. By definition, a story's protagonist or hero is the character to whom the story belongs - the character that the story is about. And it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how the character feels about him- or herself.
My life story is about me. I am the hero/protagonist of that story. By definition, I have to be, because it's MY story. But I'm certainly not my own hero. Not by a long shot.
[This message has been edited by sojoyful (edited August 25, 2006).]
posted
Wow, what a cynical view of the sociological state of the world.
I disagree as to why we preferred flawed heroes.
1) We prefer flawed heroes because a perfect hero is just plain boring. Without a flaw there is no chance of failure. Without the chance of failure there is no story.
2) Everyone sees themselves as imperfect and by making heroes imperfect we give people the opportunity to think "this could be me" - empathize or sympathize with the character. This is part of any good story. There should be a character the reader can immerse into. We can't immerse into a perfect being because none of us know what it feels like to be perfect.
posted
I don't think that we were talking about "flaws" in the sense of non-invincibilities.
I'm pretty sure that we were talking about "flaws" in the sense of character attributes that might lead the protagonist to do something morally untenable. That's different from a chance of the hero being defeated.
And any explanation of why darker, flawed heroes have become predominant in our popular literature has to apply only to those times in history when such heroes have been the most popular and not to times when they've been unpopular. Your explanation of why flawed heroes are popular now (to the nearly complete exclusion of conventional heroes) cannot explain why these types of heroes have increased in popularity.
I've never preferred flawed heroes. It's not because I think of myself as flawless, it's because I believe that it is possible for a person to be much better than myself. What's more, I believe that I could be better than I am now. So I don't find your proposed reasons for preferring darker heroes compelling. Since your theory also appears to lack explanatory power for the specific phenomenon (increasing popularity of dark heroes) we were discussing, I remain unconvinced.
posted
My favorite characters are usually villains. I enjoy writing about them for the pure and simple reason that I have a lot of fun doing it. The restraints we put on heroes don't usually apply to villains, and that makes it so much more interesting.
Of course, I like making the heroes a little villain-ish (I don't care if that's not a word, it is now) just to satisfy my own twisted logic. My MC is a dark hero and also a young girl who isn't quite sure where she stands all the time. Sometimes she toys with the idea of being the bad guy but always casts it aside at the last minute.
I think it makes the story more interesting when the MC and villain are questioning their values/opinions/allegiance at crucial moments. At the end of the day, though, the reader knows where the character stands.
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