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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3233040" data-attributes="member: 4937">I haven't read the thread enough to know what all has been said, and consider this reply half tongue in cheek, as I don't really know the answer to the question and I'm not even really sure I believe any of my own suspicions. But, what you describe is pervasive.  You can see it in gaming, pro wrestling, comic books, video games, music, movies, modern literature, modern painting (I kid you not), and well just about everywhere.  I really wish I did know the answer, but I don't.  So here is alot of wild stabbing that doesn't help you with your problem but might explain where it comes from.1) Western society has become machoistic in an effort to absolve itself of the guilt it feels at having been successful and/or its own failure to live up to its high ideas.  As a result, its not politically correct to claim that anyone or anything (Western) can be heroic except for victims.   Literature that claims otherwise is mocked or belittled.   All seemingly heroic figures must be shown to be hypocrites and underlyingly sinister.  All true heroes must be victims, anti-Western, have evil origins, or have obvious 'feet of clay'.   Players which claim that 'heroes are boring' are simply expressing what they have been taught by society to express.2) The West and the US in particular has just finished one of the world's most devestating memetic wars - a war of dangerous and subversive ideas.  The USSR and the USA squared off with one another, and contrained not to use conventional warfare against each other, instead spent billions and billions of dollars on propaganda designed to undermine the other nations faith in itself, its government, its society, and its beliefs.   This is a matter of very public record now that the documents from that 'Cold War' have become part of the public domain.   Even though the war is now 'over', the leftover memetic weapons of that war are still active, like the rogue war machines or biologically engineered plagues of sci-fi fantasy or nightmares.  While the USA 'won' the war, its not at all clear that it hasn't sustained mortal wounds as a result of the USSR's ideological attack on US culture.  The US simply doesn't believe in itself anymore, and hasn't for decades.  One of the ways that these mortal wounds express themselves is a lack of faith in heroes, and a preference instead for ideolizing and glorifying the infamous, the scandelous, and the shallow - preferences which were the stated goals of the KGB propaganda machine.  Players that express disatisfaction with heroes are simply suffering from a left-over memetic infection from the last war.Some people suggest that this is also the cause of #1, although my understanding of history is that the trend in #1 dates to before the USSR's inception.  3) In the USA in particular, as a nation founded by rebels and political and religious dissidents, there is a tendancy to romanticize the dissident and the anti-hero at the expense of the hero.  Every American's first inclination is to write the story with the heroic rebels fighting against the evil Empire.  You'd never expect to find an American story to be about the heroic Empire fighting against the mechanations of the evil rebels.  Likewise, its never the guy in the position of authority who teaches the conventional wisdom who is right in an American story, but rather its always the outsider who is bucking the system who is ultimately prove right in American mythology.  This is especially true of everything written or shown on the screen in the last 40 years.  So a player who expresses a disinterest in the heroic is simply expressing the natural bias of society and can hardly be expected to have any other opinion, given that the vast majority of what he's been exposed to.4) Most D&D players are adolescents or begin gaming as adolescents or are playful people who refuse to 'grow up', and by expressing a preference for the anti-hero they are expressing the natural rebelous tendancies of that age group.  Without the social constraints that discourage encouraging this behavior, economic forces drive content providers to give youths what they want.5) Most D&D players are not socially gregarious or natural centers of social attention by their (non-nerd) peers.  Playing anti-heroes as characters is a way of expressing thier own fantasies about being heroic outcastsAt this point, I consider the anti-hero (or his counterparts the 'victim hero' out to avenge/prove himself and the 'outcast hero' who society doesn't trust) to be more trite than the heroic in just about every form of art, but I lack the skills/persistance to do anything about it but complain.  Make of this what you will, but I've basically found that RPG groups can be divided into two types.  Those that effectively through social pressure ban or players who play good aligned PC's, and those that effectively ban through social pressure those that play evil aligned PC's.  I think that the folks compiling the lists of heroic archetypes just above this post are a good start to solving your particular problem though, since in this particular case simply showing the friend that there are interesting, complex personalities and backstories available to people who lean more 'white' than 'gray' or 'black' is probably enough to solve the problem.   Then again, you may find that ultimately you'll end up losing this friend to 'the dark side' if he finds a group more accomodating of his preferred play style. On the flip side, I've started to see some 'push back' in the 'arts' (for example comic books) as I think more and more people are starting to see that this whole anti-hero thing has run its course, especially since for all the claims of complexity, 'anti-hero's vs. villians' tends to come down to 'us vs. them' with rather interchangable labels.  Good is all too often simply the side you are allied with if the heroes are perfectly willing to use the tools of the villian against them.   Perhaps its a deeper appreciation for the LotR and its meaning, perhaps its just mere boredom, whatever, but its starting to be 'cool' again to have heroes.   So maybe the next generation we'll see a counter-counter-culture where it's hip to be square.   Beats me.</blockquote>

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