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Message: <blockquote data-quote="haakon1" data-source="post: 4362345" data-attributes="member: 25619">I don't know what PT is.I believe what made Star Wars ("A New Hope" and the universe it spawned) so popular is that it was counter-counter-culture.  This was the era when America had just lost in Vietnam, we were in between two gas crises, and the global economy was in a tailspin -- a lot like now, actually.The popular culture was full of darkness and ennui.  "Good movies" were supposed to be about how the Man is keeping us down and meaningless of it all.  Even action genres were about the decline of civlization and the Man With No Name or Charles Bronson gunning down masses of mooks.Into this darkness stepped rosy-finger Lucas.  Lucas studied classical mythology (Joseph Campbell's hero with a thousand faces academic work) and wrote a classic heroic myth.  Lucas also studied Golden Age movies of the 1930s-1950s and borrowed liberally from them -- Westerns like "The Searchers", samurai flicks like "The Hidden Fortress", etc.  He totally changed what Hollywood and popular culture focused on with the movie that created the blockbuster genre.As for whether classical heroic storytelling or gritty anti-hero stories are more likely to draw in the masses now, let's compare the revenue for "Kung Fu Panda" -- as classic hero/martial arts story in cartoon form -- with the revenue for "Hellboy: The Golden Army" -- a classic evil-looking dude who doesn't take any crap and kicks Drow butt in bodacious ways story.  I'm guessing the hero wins.Other pop culture playoffs: Spider-Man 3 (ooh, in black!) versus 1 & 2.  Or "Hancock" at the beginning of his movie versus Hancock at the end.  For me, the heroic versions are more interesting.As for what "anti-hero" means, Wikipedia and TVtropes give complicated, conflicting answers.  What I mean is main characters who are characterized by their kewlness and in-your-face-itude, whose greatness comes from pwning other characters and hopping on their corpses, in contrast to the classical hero who struggles to triumph over evil within and without, for a cause greater than himself, and is neither vindictive nor cruel.  Think the Predator versus Samwise Gamgee.Back to the point here . . . umm, something about D&D?  Whatever, I guess.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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