Title : Hero Hunger
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Hero Hunger
I’ve harped on my determination to provide readers with genuine heroes more than once. There’s a distinct hunger for them in the fiction marketplace, which is part of the reason for the popularity of all the comic-book movies of recent years. While the reader is free to dissent from my conception of a hero, of course, there can be no dissent from the essential characteristic of a hero as a person who acts to uphold and defend what’s right and just, at least within the context of his story. The “gray wave” that overtook speculative fiction from about 1970 onward tried to displace that notion of the hero by “flooding the zone” with antiheroes and persons of deeply compromised values who stumbled into acts of heroism without ever quite intending them.
Thus it is gratifying in the extreme to read that another writer of ability feels the same way:
I grew up with heroes. I grew up with comics during the late Silver Age, Superman was the Big Blue Boyscout, when Batman wasn’t the cowled psychopath, when Robin was starting solo adventures with Batgirl (and while I knew I could never be Batman, I thought maybe Robin was achievable). I wanted to be the hero, dammit, or if not the hero, at least a competent sidekick.Then I grew up and got “respectable”. But a part of me never quite grew out of that.
And so I like to write about heroes that are really heroes because I figure that there are other people out there, like me, who want to read about them.
I gave up on comic books, not because I outgrew them but because they “outgrew” (if you can call it that) me. In the interests of being “real” and “relevant” and “real” they wanted their heroes to be “flawed” by which they meant “scarcely better than the villains”.
I saw it in prose fiction as well. Bleah people living bleah lives with not a hero to be found.
A compact expression of the hunger I sensed. It’s pleasant to see that another writer senses it as do I. But how is hero hunger to be served?
Heh, heh, heh!
There are two approaches to the concoction of a hero-figure. One is to make him human in scale. The other is to make him larger than life in one or more dimensions. In either case he must possess a high moral and ethical character, even if he must struggle with its counterpoise to his personal interests and desires. If this seems “obvious,” you might be surprised how poorly figures of either sort are represented in conventionally-published fiction these days.
The absence of such figures from contemporary fiction as it emerges from Pub World is notable. Everyone in their stories is compromised. Everyone disdains the notion of objective standards of right and justice. The Left rejects the notion of absolute moral and ethical principles, and Pub World has been completely colonized and conquered by the Left.
Indies create better hero figures, but even in the independent-writers’ movement there is a tendency toward the “gray” protagonist: the Riddick figure animated by his will to survive and his desire to avenge himself on his enemies. Such characters can make for compelling fiction, especially in a movie, but they don’t satisfy the hero-hunger David Burkhead and I have in mind. Much closer to the moral-ethical conception of a hero is Boss Johns, who rescues the beleaguered Riddick at the end of the film, despite considerable risk and no reward.
The usual disparagement the Gray Wavers pour on the moral-ethical hero figure is “unrealistic,” or sometimes “Boy Scout.” They have no idea of the condemnation they inflict thus on their own works.
A hero doesn’t necessarily spend all his free time fighting crime, or opposing tyranny. He might have a job, family, debts, and a bone to pick with a neighbor who keeps borrowing his tools and “forgetting” to return them. But when a moral-ethical crisis is put before him, he rises to the occasion. He may indulge in some agonizing and dithering, or searching for a “middle way” that will preserve more of his interests. He may regret what he must sacrifice in the name of justice. But ultimately he steps up. That’s what makes him a hero.
Double credit goes to the writer who can surprise his readers with a “hero out of nowhere:” the character who seems largely secondary through most of the story, but who stands forth when the need for a hero arises. This is a tough move to pull off: so tough that I can’t name an example of it in anything I’ve read recently. If you can cite one, please mention it in the comments.
For examples of heroes of the sort I prefer, consider these characters:
All praise to the writers who show us figures we can honestly admire!
Thus Article Hero Hunger
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