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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 8146713" data-attributes="member: 17607">While I do agree that the change in heroic motivation LP mentions in his essay has happened, I'm going to disagree on the reason he provides.For starters, I feel as though his 'bulging biceps' categorization of pulp heroes is a bit simplistic and cherry-picked. Certainly Conan existed, but not every pulp hero was Conan -- if you're referring to the pulp era and not mentioning folks like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or Zorro and the Green Hornet, then you're not capturing the full spectrum of pulp heroes. For every Superman, there was at least one if not more Batmen, who despite still being manly men were definitely not bodybuilders. (And for a real counter-example of LP's thesis in this area, contrast Superman as drawn in the comics of the 1930s and 1940s with the way he's drawn in the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited animated series...there's definitely not a trend of making Supes less bulky and more androgynous there.)But I think the real kicker is that the way heroes and their motivations are portrayed comes less from a change in heroism and more from a change in how villains are portrayed. Contrast the Lord of the Rings (movies or books) with the Avengers movies. In Lord of the Rings, you can pretty much divide most of the characters you meet into Good or Evil camps based solely on whether they've been and how long they've been in contact with something related to Sauron, the Big Bad ultimate Evil of the story. Only Bilbo and Frodo resist easy alignment classification, due to their connection with the ring and being affected but not wholly lost to its corruption. Sauron is Evil and everybody knows it, including Sauron himself; the folks who align with him (Saruman, Wormtongue, etc.) may do so for the best of reasons, but they ultimately reveal their corruption and descent into Evil as well.Meanwhile, in the Avengers films, we start by meeting Loki, a character who can best be described as 'evil and loving it', who is opposed by our heroes. But as the series goes on, not only do we meet villains who have more sympathetic motivations, all the way up to Thanos in the final films, who one could argue actually has a point to his villainy, even if he's chosen the most simplistic method of achieving it, we even challenge the ideas behind the old-style heroism itself (is 'the American way' still the best way if it's secretly being directed by fascists? is violence the best way to resolve disputes between heroes, or does one hero standing against another automatically turn one of the heroes into a villain?). The idea that a hero can still be the antagonist, and the villain a protagonist goes a lot farther to explain the shifts in the portrayal of modern heroism than the idea that heroes aren't as buff as they used to be.LP also name-drops Captain Kirk, but the Star Trek franchise actually goes a lot farther toward undoing traditional heroism than reinforcing it; over the course of the various series, and even sometimes within a single series, Star Trek makes the argument that often the best way of dealing with an enemy is to turn that enemy into a friend -- the Klingon antagonists of the original series become allies in the Next Generation, while the Cardassian enemy of Deep Space Nine becomes an ally against the Founders by the end of the series. Part of the reason that alignment really isn't needed in modern D&D comes from this understanding; 'good' and 'evil' aren't necessarily fixed, immutable traits of the universe, but rather how you portray someone with different beliefs and attitudes than you possess.This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the 'anti-hero' movement where your good guys are basically only different from the villains in degree but not in kind -- Wolverine has walked that line, but other comic anti-heroes of the '90s strode right across it without irony, putting into question the entire concept of what it means to be a hero.A greater sense of exploration of the difference between hero/villain and protagonist/antagonist, and a willingness to put more sympathetic and complex villains and antagonists into stories makes a better starting point for this conversation, IMO, than suggesting that anime has made us all more accepting of androgynous heroes as opposed to the old burly manly-men of the past.--Pauper</blockquote>

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