The Hero Complex (Viewer’s Soul, Pt. 2)

This is my second post of the Viewer’s Soul series. I would highly recommend that you read part one before venturing ahead, lest you be confused.

Why is our modern society so obsessed with heroism? Sure, every generation has had some iteration of the heroes journey told in myth, but why does this era make so many? While discussing the hero’s journey and the abstract demigod archetype Doctor Jordan Peterson makes a succinct and compelling case: we “killed god” and are now left in darkness, looking desperately for a new light.

It’s an intriguing theory, to say the least. Modern society has been sanitized in modern science, replacing God with deductive reasoning and empirical truths. Religion has been driven to the recesses and philosophy relegated to a mere collegiate degree. Gone are the days of great men postulating great things while pointing to a higher power. Instead, humanity now has the religiosity of atheism and the ethos of nihilism. To move things to a more personal level, people are told to believe in nothing except their own fickle hearts, which are often dulled and censored at every turn by society.

The physical world has also grown so much more boring. The great, tyrannical evils of the 20th century have been replaced with petty oligarchs manipulating the masses. Once upon a time, even the first world was enveloped in ever-increasing warfare. Men were called to heroically die in the field of battle, while women were ordered to heroically sacrifice in their absence. All of this was for the perceived national greater good, perpetuated by propaganda that may or may not have been true. That same propaganda painted the enemy as vile orcs fit for any Lord of the Rings movie. Survival was at stake!

While the Internet has had many positive impacts for humanity, it has also made the world dreadfully small. Once upon a time, entire empires claimed continents but were ignorant of their peers. Roman and the Chinese dynasties sparsely traded with each other, but each was separated by several oceans and the tallest mountain range in the world. Exploration by brave and adventuresome explorers could yield entire new continents, profitable trade routes, and fame for centuries. In the modern world, only the deepest of seas and the fringes of our planetary atmosphere offer new adventures.

So where does this leave us collectively? The average fictional consumer is now purposeless, bored, and in dire need of an adventure. They can’t even distinguish good from evil in their everyday life, only shades of gray. In short, they need a hero on a journey to inspire them. That’s why there are more superhero stories now than just about anything else. Even the timeless genres of romance and comedy have started to be warped by the insatiable desire for superheroes. The hero complex has subsumed us all. But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t always a bad thing! It all depends on the writer.

Perhaps the epitome of this syndrome is My Hero Academia, a very well written comic book/manga that has become a wildly successful television series. The story is set around an unassuming, normal high school boy in a world full of super-powered people. Early on in the story, the boy miraculously receives his own superpowers. From that point onward, this protagonist sets off on a well-created, but ultimately predictable hero’s journey. Thankfully, it’s at least well executed. Not surprisingly, Hollywood recently announced that they are making a movie adaptation.

Nonetheless, the timeless hero’s journey has now become a well-worn path that is starting to feel like a rut that few authors are willing to leave from. This is largely in reaction to a regularly depressed audience that just wants a glimmer of heroic hope in their lives once a week. Any attempt to forge a new path can lead to literary bumps, resulting in a whiplash of viewer confusion and derision. It’s a vicious cycle between the author and the audience, but it can be broken. Next time, I’ll dive into some stories that do it!

A Timeless Journey (Viewer’s Soul, Pt. 1)

This is my first multi-blog post attempt to provide a unifying framework to many of the fictional aspects I’ve discussed over the last year. Stay tuned over the next few weeks!

Have you ever noticed that heroic stories seem alike in many ways, at least in their paths? The locale may be different, the face might be different, but the journey is still the same. It’s as if a thousand heroes traveled on one journey. One can even go so far as to chart a circle outlining the motifs and tropes of the journey that the hero embarks on. In 1949, Joseph Campbell published his brilliant observational work: The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The book was so influential that George Lucas flat-out followed adhered to it for a little franchise called Star Wars. Below is a video summary of Campbell’s work, but you can see the outline even without watching it:

Okay, so a lot of stories have reoccurring themes when involving epic heroes. There is a call to adventure in the ordinary world, a road of trials in the special world, and a resurrection that brings the story to a full circle. But what does that mean? Does it tell us that authors are derivative hacks, or they simply writing something to please the viewer’s soul? Is there a back and forth between the creator and the audience? Obviously, there has to be. Storytellers aren’t very good storytellers if no one stands around to listen to them, either in a theater or at the community fire pit.

People seek fictional entertainment for a variety of reasons. Some just want a simple distraction or a literal past-time, like a man buying a movie ticket while his wife goes shopping at the mall. They want to see bright lights, a few explosions, and maybe a hot man or woman do something sexy. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, most of these kinds of people view entertainment as strictly entertainment. They are not looking for metaphors, deep ideology, or soul-searching introspection while the credits roll. Instead, they just don’t want to feel like their time and money was wasted in a shoddy story that fails in the basics.

Others who experience fictional work are looking for mental stimulation. This, of course, can take many different forms. Perhaps someone wants to get fired up for another long week at work. Or maybe they’re trying to write a story themselves and are looking for conceptual ideas to build on. Whatever the case, they want to leave the story mentally inspired and ready to tackle whatever problems await them in the drudgery of the real world. No matter the reason for entry, these kinds of people will be highly displeased if the narrative doesn’t have them bursting with synaptic excitement. A feast for the mind is more important than mere entertainment.

Lastly, we have those who are seeking pure emotion. (While mental inspiration can be closely linked with emotion, it is rooted in the brain more than the heart.) These kinds of people want to feel their hearts soar with the story, burn with sympathy for the characters, and feel their emotional status intertwined with the fantastical. They’ll laugh, they’ll cry, and exit the story on the same emotional note that concludes it. Relatability is paramount to these people, even if there are giant monsters and robots present.

Shifting the analysis back to authorship, it fascinates me that there might be a secret formula to pleasing all three of these viewership groups. This hero’s journey takes audiences through visual spectacles, provides relatable inspiration, and has a clear emotional roller coaster ride. At the end of the story, the circle is completed and the audience is brought back to where they started. What more could you possibly want? As I see it, a whole lot more. There’s a reason why there’s not just a single roller coaster in the entire world.

But what challenges are there when dealing with an audience afflicted with the most reverent of hero complexes? Next week I’ll dive into the state of our world and its impact on the fictional world.

You May Have Heard of This Before

As I’ve mentioned before about history, there’s an abundance of source material that can be adapted for fictional writing. So many events in past times were remarkable back in their day and now even appear fantastical in their nature. In actuality, it is the modern day that has become static and boring. Men fought in titanic wars that decided the fates of multiple civilizations, made discoveries that were almost magical and explored lands barely traveled by even the most distant native. Now we just stare at smartphones.

What’s all the more disturbing is that some people in our modern society want to banish history to some dusty old libraries and museums due to its troubling nature, or remake it to suit their own personal agendas. In light of this, most modern Americans seem to have little regard for history and are exceptionally ignorant about even the most basic facts available. In contrast, Americans have an insatiable desire for fiction in a variety of mediums. The result is more people are familiar with major historical events in Middle Earth than the Middle East. While sad, the good news is that history can be the perfect original seasoning to the trope laden fantasies rehashed again and again in the entertainment world.

Perhaps one of the highest profile shows at the moment that is fantastical but demonstrates a commitment to historical fact is the TV series Outlander. In it, the female protagonist is a 20th-century nurse thrust back into 1743 Scotland, a period defined by bloodied rebellion against England. While the show does have time travel elements, it mostly sticks to historical events, albeit on a more personal level. The “War of the British Succession” was an actual event that attempted to restore a Catholic monarchy to an increasingly Protestant Britain influenced by the Dutch. While the ancient struggle between Roman Catholicism and Luther’s Protestantism is a tricky subject, it is worth exploring.

The Shadow Campaigns book series by Django Wexler is another interesting twist to the boring fantasy world genre. The story is centered around a fantasy-adapted Napoleonic war of the early 1800s, featuring a historically simplified Europe rumbling for changes to its status quo. While there are several protagonists in the narrative, the enigmatic central character behind the scenes is none other than a re-creation of Napoleon Bonaparte. While the books don’t follow the real world events beat for beat, they do emulate them in interesting and original ways. Perhaps the most fascinating part is that some of the story elements are based on Napoleon’s own fictional short stories before his rise to power.

Video games also can draw heavily on history. Saga’s Valkyria Chronicles series features the fantasy world of Europa, a continent decimated by a fictionalized world war. Interestingly enough, the story’s antagonist is a unified Russian Empire that is attempting to dominate a small country in a side campaign. Deeply personal, the narrative explores the lives of a single platoon-sized mechanized unit attempting to harass the Russians much like the Finnish did in the 1939 Winter War. While the world has magic and all manner of unrealistic events, much of the in-game weaponry is based on real-world technology created in the 1930s.

As always, a writer needs to focus on the fundamentals while they are sprinkling in the historical elements to their fictional work. Research is paramount, as “new” discoveries by the writer can need to all sorts of inspired narrative changes. History is a complex and nuanced beast, so it sometimes is desirable to simplify the source material into something easily understandable by the viewership. Perhaps most importantly is the forging of characters that are believable in their historical context. Simply plugging in 21st-century Americans into a fantastical ancient land simply won’t do. Every writer needs to go beyond in their attempts to create a story that is truly alien and accurate.

Fiction As Possession

We interrupt this blog with another special guest post. Hope you enjoy!

Think of the last 10 fictional stories you read/watched/played. Of those 10, how many could be described as:

– dark
– gritty
– realistic
– brutal
– adult

If you’re like me, it’s a big chunk of them. A great deal of fiction right now is very dark stuff. It’s the in style and people are eating it up. Sometimes we don’t even realize just how harsh the pool we’re letting our minds take a dip in is.

Pessimism is a just a mindset though, right? You could look at the dark side of any reasonably balanced form of entertainment because just about everything has a dark side. (Mario is caving goombas skulls in, en-masse!) But whether it’s an author writing, a director choosing what music to play, or a game designer having you perform an action, your mindset isn’t actually the most important factor in experiencing fiction. In fact, it’s rather unimportant. It’s the creator’s mindset that makes the rules. When experiencing fiction, someone else has taken control of your mind.

So how does this exterior force actually start kneading your mind? Above all the best way to make your tale brutal is to make it blunt. Have things happen with as little dressing or obfuscation as possible. Show the fatality on screen in simple but sharp detail; perhaps add a little extra gore but don’t be ridiculous. Or if it’s a book, do it quickly and plainly. The way George R. R. Martin writes you can tell he takes a specific joy in making something awful happen. I can picture him hunched over his keyboard rewriting your favorite character’s death scene for hours. He doesn’t drag it out, doing it with a sort of poetic overt detail you might see in a Warhammer 40k book. It just is what it is.

I’ve seen so much postmodern brutalist fiction material that it wasn’t evident to me that things weren’t always done this way. I read a short book named The Sound of His Horn a few years ago. It’s about a British officer who has an out of body experience while being captured during World War 2 in which he ends up in a human hunting ground for German officials in an alternate history where Germany won the war.

Does that sound dark? It is, but it’s 1952 dark, not 2015 dark. The author doesn’t merely fail to revel in the horrors of what takes place, but he focuses your attention elsewhere. The spectacle is downplayed. Your attention isn’t on the mauling of the hounds. It’s on the escape, on what’s next. When an author leaves something to your imagination it is not going to leave the mark that reading three sentences describing it will, because in his silence, he is giving your mind back to you, and you can draw what you like.

Why does it matter? Fiction isn’t meaningless. Fiction (or even non-fictional things presented in the same manner as fiction) is surely at least somewhat important in your real life. I don’t recall where I first heard the idea that fiction is a more powerful influencer of human behavior than the reality we experience. A little googling didn’t show much official research on it. But I suspect it’s either true or has a lot of truth in it. Humans are obsessed with stories, and we have been for as long as anyone can recall.

Anyway, remember to give some different fiction than what you typically tend to like a try. In particular, remember older fiction. You don’t need to fly overseas to experience a different culture. It can be right in front of you, because, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”