Weekend Lounge ~ Are Heroes Dead?

Welcome to the weekend!

Been quite the scorcher around here since July started. I hope you're managing to keep cool. The heat doesn't look to be easing up anytime soon. But enough of that, let us get to today's topic!

Let us talk about heroism.

For a long time, ever since at least the 1990s, there has been a problem in understanding the purpose of heroes and heroism in storytelling. Before that decade that believed subversion was the future (a vision that eventually lead downhill to complete bottoming out completely in the 2010s), writers and authors had a clear vision for what it meant to be a White Hat in a story. That was eventually lost. Now, because of this modern misunderstanding, it has taken an entire industry of people divorced from the mainstream to basically figure out how to get that lost notion back. The 2020s has been a real relearning experience over this and many other subjects. As has been said, a lot of it is like relearning to ride a bicycle.

The above video by The Second Story channel (the same one that exposed "Fantasy" as being a Del Ray formula, not a genre) has decided to weight in on the muted nature of heroism and good in stories these days. What happened to what was once so obvious an idea and why can even a series with such wanton death and subversion like Attack on Titan still manage to understand heroism more than our comparatively simple superhero movies. It is a good video that seeks to answer the question we've all been asking for years now. What even is a hero anymore?

As has been mentioned before, the modern obsession with villains and "anti-heroes" came about because morality was thought of as simplistic and lame. This was brought about because out culture had lost what made a hero so admirable and worthy of imitating. Heroism became a weak frame that holds do-gooders back from "doing what is needed" and keeps them one note "paladins" who have to meekly follow whatever law that binds them. They're all weak and feeble-minded dupes who can't possibly be as cool as the rogues who do whatever they want, morality be damned!

Of course, none of this is what good actually is (nor what real paladins actually do, believe, or act like), but it has been a misunderstanding festering for decades now. In fact, the source might be traced way back to the age of Saturday Morning Cartoons when Peggy Charren told parents that heroes shooting villains is uncouth and it is a moral duty for heroes to spout textbook catchphrases and government approved laws directly back at the viewer so that they don't forget to become a good citizen. School never ends for children, after all.

This generation then grew up, and brought this mutation of morality to full flowering in mainstream storytelling, whether by aping it or by subverting it, but neither side seeming to understand that the entire frame is warped to begin with. That is what has lead the current industry to have such a superficial version of Good and Evil as concepts: it is all filtered through the ACT, and few from back then have realized its influence on every corner of modern life. "You are what you eat" doesn't just refer to food.

It is much how you come across people who speak like sitcom characters or use internet vernacular in real life. It is learned behavior, and it has affected everything.

That's right, much of the modern idea view of heroism, and it being entirely western in creation, comes from the already backwards understanding of morality embedded in the heads of the Saturday Morning Cartoon generation, a medium that was deliberately heavily neutered and watered down to get children to understand the importance of recycling, listening to teachers, and preventing the third (and first) world from breeding by equivocating them to rats (Captain Planet & the Planeteers still airs on TV, by the way), and how all villainy in the end is just one-note buffoonery or evil for evil's sake. To the Saturday Morning Cartoon generation, you either are good by doing what the Good Guys say, or you are an evil scourge to be eradicated. It is this absurd now because we let absurd people talk us into this.

And now you also know why the modern political climate is the way it is, and why a whole generation cannot seem to understand the motives of people they see as cartoon villains needing to be thwarted like the heroes in their cartoon shows always manage to do. Don't you know Sonic the Hedgehog shares my thoughts and beliefs on the constitution! It's this ridiculous now for a good reason. None of this came out of nowhere, and it is not normal or natural to think like this.

Regardless, everyone used to know why The Shadow gunned down villain and why Mack Bolan went on his revenge quest, and they were not called "anti-heroes" at the time, because they weren't, and aren't. They only come across that way when filtered through Saturday Morning Cartoon logic that was picked up by generations under the Baby Boomers who then carried it into other mediums like comic books and video games as they grew older, as well as the ever-popular video essay on YouTube. This misunderstanding of morality has poisoned everything in the west. This is why heroism is so massively misunderstood today. For generations, this was seen as normal and The Way It's Done, which is what lead to the dead end we cornered ourselves into. We had an artificial morality as a frame and we've yet to fully cast it aside into the dustbin of history.

But it is being cast aside. Slowly and deliberately, it is being done.

There is a realization here and that's that we don't live in the Saturday Morning Cartoon era anymore. A generation of kids have come of age never experiencing that mutation of morality and are now working on their own stories without even considering those once expected rules. That leaves the rest of us to make a decision to finally decide whether we want to continue down this path, or finally admit we might have been wrong all along. Heroes are not what we thought they were: they really are so much more.

Heroes were never boring, we just became boring and forgot what heroes were supposed to be in the first place. Once we rediscover that lost art, we'll be on the right track again. It's going to take some time, and a lot of arguments and butting heads, but it will eventually happen. You can see the change everywhere outside the mainstream.

The future is as inevitable as the Truth prevailing in the end. Good always wins, just not always in the way we might expect it to.

In other news, there's only a few days left to get two of my books for a buck! You can get both The Last Fanatics and Y Signal on Amazon for some quality summer reads. I particularly recommend The Last Fanatics if you only read the blog version. It has been edited quite a bit to fit into book form, and those are my preferred version of the texts. Either way, enjoy yourself! Summer should be a good time.

That's all for this week, and I will see you next time!

Check out two books for $0.99 right now! Sale ends in a few days!

Weekend Lounge ~ Real Heroes

Welcome to the weekend, and December! The year is close to done, but we're not.

For this week I wanted to go back a little to the previous subject. That subject being heroes. There is quite a bit more to say on the subject.

One of the major topics has been the failure of enshrining subversion as a storytelling idol. The mainstream has been trying, in increasing efforts, since the 1990s, to cast doubt on and talk down on heroism and the Good as storytelling essentials. 

They've used every trick in the book to warp taste and reshape the audience, from the anti-Tolkien flatline that was People Are Bad And Nothing Matters to the superhero turds of Heroes Aren't Real And We'll Prove It Through Our Strawmen, to even failed satires of books like Alien Bugs Are Good, People Are Always Bad, where the audience satirizes the satire to reaffirm the original book's message and the big brain subverters think not being able to understand that reaction makes them smarter than everyone else. It's pretty much a mess, and it all stems from having a class of creators that hate Creation. And as a result, the audience has left them behind.

Because despite it all, the truth slowly seems to be coming clear. Despite how hard they've tried over the past quarter century+ to do it, heroes cannot seem to be truly subverted. Even the modern "smart" attempts always end up failing in the end.

For a more concrete example of what I'm talking about, I highly recommend watching the above video that shows exactly that. Despite an iron grip on the audience's attention, the tired attempts at talking over them and flipping over what they love has ended in a disaster. No matter what they do they can never escape the truth: heroism is real and it will never go away, be poisoned, or made "grey" with "complexities" by people who have yet to truly do anything interesting or new with their so-called creativity. All they do is make muddier versions of things people already like, and that's quickly losing audience members in the modern day.

What does this mean, in the end? You already know the answer, it's been clear as day the entire time. Despite our endless insistence on jangles keys and Being Surprised, at the end of the day we still want the same thing to happen. Everyone always wants Good to win, and Evil to lose. That hasn't changed, and it won't change, no matter how much one wants to blur the line to make themselves seem greater than they know they truly are.

Nothing really changes, even when it does.

That's all for this weekend and I will see you next time! We've only got one months left to close out 2024, so let's make it count!

My story "Fade Away to Anywhere" is in the newest issue of Starlight & Starsong! Check it out here!

Weekend Lounge ~ The True Hero's Journey

Welcome to the weekend! It's time to talk about writing.

Every since those terrible space opera franchise movies started came out back in 2015 there has been a lot of discussion on the "Hero's Journey" theory and how it is instrumental to making any story with a protagonist in it good. Without following this formula you were doomed to fail. The conversation was understandable given how little those movies understood how to make compelling characters and stories, but it also revealed that somewhere along the way our perception of what a hero was supposed to be became skewed.

No longer did we await new stories from the machine with baited breath--now we started to question how they would fail following the Correct Formula. In many ways, we still do this, but it does seem to have clamed down in recent years. Regardless, it was an enlightening time to be paying attention to what the audience thought about this shifting culture of storytelling.

Was there really only one formula to write a hero story? Had Joseph Campbell set out to write a handbook that all writers had to follow in order to make a story worth anything? Were we all doomed to failure unless we slavishly copied his One True Path to mythmaking? Was he actually infallible unlike every other man Earth?

What is it about men named Campbell that spur on slavish devotion? Seems to be a very odd modern phenomenon. Does this name give you insight to the inner workings of writing stories? These questions are getting weirder and weirder, aren't they?

Regardless, it turns out that all of the above was wrong. In fact, this modern conversation of mythmaking does not even originate from Joseph Campbell at all, but by a Hollywood screenwriter who reshaped his ideas into a completely separate formula. Somewhere along the way we attributed things to Campbell that he never actually said.

Yes, much like the insipid "Save the Cat" formula that posits audiences cannot understand or process protagonists without having their skulls caved in with a subtlety sledgehammer, a Hollywood screenwriter invented a new formula from whole cloth based on an interpretation of his writings and all writers outside the system now rush to defend said very system currently falling apart from slavishly following said broken advice. "Don't Read Anything After 1980" indeed. I don't know how this bait and switch happened, but it happened.

Let's go into it a bit.

What the Hero's Journey was started as Joseph Campbell's attempt to find underlying patterns in all stories that form an overarching myth for all of humanity. What did stories have in common and what could be shared between them in a large overarching monomyth? He did not cobble a one size fits all formula to write stories, in fact not every story has the same mechanism or tropes, but each has at least some aspect that resonates with others. They all, in the end, point to the same Truth overall. What he was doing was seeing that no matter how different a story was they all played into the overarching monomyth of the human race, but in different ways and with different approaches. What he was doing was the opposite of what everyone expects from the Hero's Journey today. There was no one size fits all formula created by Joseph Campbell.

So how did that come about? How did we get the exact opposite intent of what Joseph Campbell wanted from his work into enshrining it as a one note formula meant to be slavishly followed to create Good Stories? This couldn't have happened organically.

Well, it didn't. The warping of the "Heroes' Journey" came from a book by Hollywood screenwriter Christopher Vogler. What he did was take Campbell's work then build his own formula around it by bending and warping the original purpose into a one-size fits all screenwriting guide. He hammered it in awkwardly to get the result he wanted out of it. That's right, this mutation didn't even come from a formula for novel writing, but one for screenwriting--an art that has been in free-fall since the 1980s ended. And this book being published in the 1990s might give you a hint for why that might have been the case.

Not only did Vogler misunderstand Campbell's intent with his work, he also twisted and mangled several aspects of the Hero's Journey idea, and just plain got a large chunk of it wrong. To understand how that happened I would suggest viewing the above video. After watching it, many of the mistakes of modern writing will come into clear focus, including many of our perceptions of it. In essence: we don't know what we think we know.

There are many ways to learn how to write. Some learn by ear and some study intently to become the writer they want to be. There are even some formulas that can help you become the writer you wish to become. Clichés and tropes exist and are unavoidable in writing. All of this is true and no one is denying any of it.

However, there is not one correct way to write a hero or a hero story. This was the whole point of Campbell's original theory to begin with. All stories shade in different aspects of the overarching Monomyth in various ways. But that is not how we look at it today! In fact, we have warped this into formulizing that which was never meant to be formulized. And why not? Everyone's got books to sell and selling to writers is a profitable gig.

To bend and misshape an idea into the formulaic monstrosity it has become by modern writers and, even worse, writers outside the system this mutation has already destroyed, is a sign that we are going down the wrong path. We are dumbing down the monomyth for no real gain. All we're doing is dumbing down what a hero is and what stories are.

It goes without saying that this will not lead to better stories. The proof of this claim is the obvious fact that it hasn't done so. This will not magically change if we keep doing it repeatedly for yet another couple dozen years. It is a dead end.

You might find this controversial to say, but it is what it is. Over the past half century we have made a lot of mistakes that need to be undone, and travel new paths away from failed ones. It will do us no good to continue mockeries like this if we want to build new roads to travel down these abandoned trails. We need to stop giving credibility and attention to a failed system that is currently bottoming out into the abyss. We need other ways. 

I think we can do it, but we're not quite there, and lionizing mistakes like the above failed formula is one of the exact things holding us back from moving on. We need to "Retvrn" harder than emulating years of a decline that had already been set in motion before many of us were even born. It is time to accept hard truths.

Genre expectations, what makes a hero, morality, purpose, and the meaning of good and evil, have all been bungled by the big dogs in charge and were done so long ago. If we want to move past them we're going to have to go even further back while simultaneously pulling even further ahead into uncharted waters. 

We are close to the fringes of a new Golden Age. In fact, we are so close I can just barely see it over the horizon coming ahead. But we aren't going to get there with these old failed roadmaps. It is time to throw them out the window and leave them behind.

Keep awake and we'll get there eventually. I just hope we can stop with all of these detours so we can get there sooner.

8 exciting tales of magic, monsters, guns, swords, crime, and heroes! What awaits in the cracks of reality? Check it out today and be sure to leave a review!

Anti

A long time ago, we actually liked each other, for the most part. Societies run off people who have to like each other on some level, after all. 

Back then, we liked to read and watch stories about normal people just like us who strove to be the best (or those who fell apart under the influence of darker forces) and watched in nail-biting tension wondering if they would survive their ordeals intact. After all, they were just normal people like you or me. All we wanted to do was see them survive, just like we hope to get through our trials in life. Stories reaffirm our love of life and existence and adventures stories were made specifically for this very purpose.

Which is why it is detestable that the mainstream art and entertainment landscape is so abysmal these days. Everything has been flipped on its head, and turned around backwards. And we celebrate this subversion as if it's a good thing. Storytelling has been vandalized and we refuse to clean the graffiti off despite knowing how dirty and soiled our monuments have gotten. Now we are at another crossroads: do we let our art die, or do we fight for something better than the status quo of misery? One thing is for sure, and that is that the path we are on leads to nothing but a cliff into bottom of jagged spires. We're going nowhere worth going.

So I would just like to say this right out. There is no point beating around the bush when we all know part of the issue that's in plain sight, and I don't like to waste time.

Antiheroes are a plague on storytelling, and people who swear by them do no understand heroism whatsoever. Catering to this crowd has obliterated adventure as a genre. This is a truth that should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention over the years.

Back in the 1990s, there was this trend we called Edgy. What it was was simple: the constant danger and harshness of existence is too much and so overbearing that it will even overwhelm so-called pure heroes and drag them into the darkness. This means that in order to win against evil, only the most vicious opponent will win by any means necessary. You must be evil in order to comprehend evil (which is probably actually just a misunderstood victim that the true evil people, "good guys", created) or you will lose. You must stain your soul, otherwise you are no better than an ignorant paladin saying prayers to some useless god who probably doesn't exist don't think about it too hard. Doubt it if you want, but then ask yourself when the last time you saw a paladin character in the mainstream that wasn't a hypocrite or stupid. This wasn't always the case, either, but we let it become mainstream and it ruined the concept of heroism.

This was the decade where heroism was finally overcome by the creeping nihilism of anti-heroism that had steadily been rising since the 1960s. Now good guys were lame and weak--they didn't understand the true depths of evil in this world! To fight fire you have to use napalm and burn yourself in the process. Basically, everything before Current Year was made of childish delusions. Now we're adults and see the world for what it truly is! We went from morally certain Cannon Films-style action movies at the decade's start into amoral Tarantino rip-offs where everyone hates each other and the world but they are cool for it, as you can tell by the wordy and vapid speeches. This all happened in the same decade: the 1990s.

And we've been living in this world ever since. Nothing has improved: we still think evil people are cool, morality is passé, and the only thing worthy fighting for is the right to hedonism. Around a quarter of a century of the same boring archetypes with no change.

To this day you have adults who think Flaws make characters Interesting and that White Hats are inherently less Interesting than Black Hats because of it. They think this due to growing up in a world where good was treated as a banal boring thing for all the lame normies and excitement is being against all authority and for yourself as a hyper-focused individualist. The result of this is the death of communities (no, your hobby group or art scene is not a community and it never will be) and the atomization of people into tiny clusters of detached bugmen who only care about themselves and their own appetites.

Leave that boring small town and come to the exciting city! That's where the action truly is! If you grew up in the latter half of the 20th century, you heard this all the time in media. Anyone who has ever been to a city knows how big a lie this is, but so many still believe such a thing and blindly follow this dead end path to this day. All because of a narrative that has been an objective failure and has nothing to show for it.

The anti-hero is the embodiment of this selfish and empty modernism that has led to no good art, no lasting culture, and has only created a more miserable world from the one they subverted. The will only cease when we finally admit to how utterly worthless the concept of this table-flipping culture truly is.

There are heroes, and there are villains. These are the only two that matter. Obsessing over anything else is just the same sort of paint worship that caused the obnoxious trope reverence that is stifling creative writing these days and being taught in scam artist writing courses. If you want to stand out, try not listening to these people.

Let us start from the beginning, since the term has gotten so diluted over the years that it means almost nothing anymore. Heroism is a very simple concept that anyone can understand. Here it is in a single sentence:

"Heroism definition is - heroic conduct especially as exhibited in fulfilling a high purpose or attaining a noble end."

I have to point this out because definitions have gotten so muddied that there are people who think characters like The Shadow are not heroic, but are actually anti-heroes. How you get that is a mystery to me, unless you don't understand morality from the get-go. This topic was a lot clearer a century ago than it is these days.

What happened is that at some point heroism became equated with upholding the Status Quo against those who wish to change it for whatever reason. The implication being that the modern age is an age that needs heroes in order to even function properly, because without them we would kill ourselves and devolve into an anarchy of animals. The question is never asked as to why the highest cause a hero could fight for is to be glorified police officers for a world of overdoses, morbid obesity, suicide, depression, and societal decay. Heroes would never fight for these things--they would fight to change them.

And these is where we get lost in the reeds a little.

So what you began to have in some places like Italy were films where the harsh consequences of modernism had begun to be apparent to everyone and implode on itself. Now lawlessness began to overwhelm the supposed civilized world. '60s and '70s Italian crime films ("Poliziotteschi" as the genre is known worldwide) bleakly portrayed the outcome of the modern world as it fell to ruin and disorder from entropy. This of course didn't mean such films were guaranteed happy endings, but neither did it mean they featured heroes, such as you and I would know them. That wasn't what these movies were really about. Having a protagonist is not the same thing as having a hero, and these movies weren't meant as classic adventure fare but more about encapsulating the turbulent times they lived in and try to understand them. To call such protagonists "anti-heroes" misses the point of what they were made to actually do.

That didn't preclude heroes from existing, however. Inspector Tanzi from The Tough Ones is an unabashed hero in the classic mold. But many of the genre's movies were more along the lines of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock: stories about moral and spiritual decay and what unfolds from them. They are more like classical tragedies than adventures. 

The same could be said of the spaghetti westerns of the time also being a more fantastical reflection of the era through a different setting. The Italians were not the most subtle, but they were very reflective as they attempted to also entertain their audiences. At the end of the day, Justice still mattered. Even when not telling hero stories this is an important thing to remember. You don't partake in these sorts of movies for heroes and villains, but to see Justice win through any means it can even if through an imperfect vessel. Audiences back then, however, knew that.

So why such a thing such as this is said by spiritual boomers of today is beyond me:

This isn't just a shallow reading of the genre, it's a shallow reading of heroism to begin with. Just about everything from that passage was incorrect.

But did you catch the terminology? There it is again: "realistic" and "interesting" as synonyms for "good" when neither actually mean anything at all in the context given. The above passage was written by a postmodern disciple of misery and meaninglessness who has long since lost the thread of what reality actually is, never mind heroism.

You might understand this, but obviously many do not. So let us repeat it louder for the ones in the back.

John Wayne protagonists are aspirational. You want to be the type of man that can have the kind of courage and bravery he has. That you don't think someone can live up to being the very best of men is "realistic" says more about your morally dead worldview than it does about movies enjoyed by millions back when heroism meant something. Advertising your own spiritual vapidity is a weird way to make declarative statement, but here we are.

On the other hand, the protagonists in spaghetti westerns are not meant to be aspirational. They are (usually) meant to be imperfect instruments that dispense the Justice that is sorely needed in this broken land. As said above, it was a funnel for escapism in the climate that Italy had at the time. It was too show that Justice always finds a way, and things will always find a way to work out, even if not as expected.  In this sort of story, heroism isn't really the point.

These are very two different approaches to the western genre. So why are they compared at all? Agenda and poor education in regards to morality.

Of course the above separation completely misses the point of both in order to say another prayer to the God of Realism and Interesting Characters that he has been told through garbage media criticism of the last 50 years are actually elements of good writing. These are the same people years back that argued Game of Thrones was better than Lord of the Rings because it didn't start with a birthday party. Lightheartedness is childish and bad writing. So says the spiritually hollow.

And yet we let them dictate quality standards to us regardless.

"Shades of grey" as a concept doesn't mean anything. Heroes don't have shades of grey: what makes a person a hero is doing the right thing exactly when he needs to: rising above being a normal passerby and turning into an active Hammer of Justice against the unjust where there wasn't one moments before. There are no shades of grey in that. None. There is only right and wrong. 

And this is why so many (post)moderns have been attempting to muddy up the waters ever since Easy Rider was thankfully murdered by a bunch of trigger happy hillbillies back in the day. Such people hate heroism and wish to overturn the definition of it to something far lesser in order to enshrine their own baser tastes instead.

As a different reviewer says of the same above spaghetti western:

You can already see the contradiction, I assume. Both reviewers praise and love the same bog standard modernist philosophy, and yet they come to different conclusions on the same movie which impacts how good they think it is. Insanity runs deep. This movie is simultaneously a subversive mature epic for smrt people and a cliched kiddy carnival ride for the hicks. It would be impressive if it wasn't so obviously crazy.

So which is it? Is Django a movie about a grim anti-hero in a nihilistic world where nothing matters, or is he a "goody goody" declaring objective moral statements which reaffirm the existence of a natural order of things as he saves the day? It can't be both, but apparently it is. However, you might also notice that the second is considered a Bad Thing.

We have become so morally dead that a character saying a forceful statement such as "That's not right" is considered embarrassing and worth recoiling from. And yet somehow a selfish character that cares about nothing but himself but somehow still does the right thing (which isn't actually realistic, but hey, we ignore that when it's convenient) is somehow Interesting. Except that is isn't, at all. There's nothing interesting about an asshole who just happens to do the right thing because it benefits him in the moment. He's just a villain that walked down the wrong alley at the right time. How does that make for an interesting character? It doesn't, and I'm tired of pretending it does.

Heroes do the right thing because they choose to. The requirement is rising above yourself to dispense the justice that is needed in the moment. That's it. These characters don't have to be aspirational like John Wayne, but they have to exhibit behavior worthy of being called a hero in the first place. That might not be considered "Interesting" to those who think the cool bad people are deeper and more complex than the lame good people, but it is interesting to people who actually do love Justice and desire to see it play out through any means possible.

To return to the earlier example of The Shadow, ask yourself how he could be considered an anti-hero by the above morally grey gruel crowd. The reasons are fairly shallow, just as they are for arguing Flawed Protagonists are inherently more Interesting than aspirational ones. Which of the two is The Shadow? The latter, and one of the best examples of such. This is why the industry has been frantically trying to scrub him from existence over the last few years.

Just look at the arguments one hears about how he falls short of the heroic idea. Warning: they aren't good arguments.

"He kills people!"

Everyone he kills is an objective evil scumbag threatening innocents.

"He thinks he is objective Good! That's dangerous! No man can judge another!"

He IS objective Good. That's part of the appeal of the character. We don't know who sent him or even what he really is, and yet he is so mysterious and all-knowing that we find him intriguing regardless. He is an unabashed agent of Good. There is no grey in The Shadow.

"He laughs like a villain and dresses in black! That's anti-hero behavior!"

He does this to reflect the villains' evil back at them and make them afraid the way they make their innocent victims afraid. For those who love "nuance" or whatever, simple color schemes do confuse them quite easily.

"He doesn't answer to the law!"

Justice is above the law. If the law doesn't run in accordance with Justice then it is evil and must be destroyed. The Shadow proves this over and over again. This is White Hat behavior.

"He's too dangerous and unhinged to be considered a true superhero! Batman would never kill or assert moral superiority!"

The Shadow is a pulp hero, which means he is already morally superior to all superheroes. Superheroes uphold the status quo and bow to the law in order to keep the machine grinding along; pulp heroes fight for Justice and Truth above all else, even if the law or other "good people" don't agree with them. Again, heroes fight for Good, not the Status Quo.

But we've forgotten this, just as we have forgotten that objective good and evil do exist outside ourselves. Corporately owned heroes, however, have another agenda they need to serve instead. That is, how to make sure readers keep buying stories about a hero that will never affix any real change on the world.

That sounds pretty evil, but what do I know. Maybe it's grey and Interesting instead.

The above also explains why the last Batman/The Shadow crossover comic had Batman morally preening to a broken Shadow about how much better he is. This despite the fact that Batman is a pale Shadow ripoff without any of the Justice or search for Truth but with plenty of merchandising opportunities for his safer brand of law enforcement. Upholding the (post)modern order in place as it crumbles under its own weight is quite a heroic feat. He might not have killed the Joker who just escaped Arkham for the fifth time and killed a crowd of 5000 but at least he isn't a murderer! Yes, this is an argument you will hear from supposed hero fans.

This is a sign of how bad it has gotten.

Sorry, Mr. Reeve, that's not "Interesting" or something.

It wouldn't be half as annoying if this view evolved in some way since its first real push into the mainstream back in the 1960s, but it hasn't. It's only gotten lazier. Still the same arguments; still the same examples; still the same shallow worldview at the heart of it. Nothing changes, except the stink of decay getting worse every day.

This was the major criticism thrown at the currently mega popular My Hero Academia manga and anime series. You might have heard it at the time, I know I did. It was called generic and bland, but no one could give examples of it being such or give a reason why. I'm certain said critics are still buying Batman comics and ready to line up for the next movie though. Apparently half a century of declining moral certainty and repetitive plots brought about due to corporate mandate is far less generic than a series that literally deals with the very issue Western comics refuses to address. But you'd have to actually give it a chance to know that. Comic book readers don't like new things very much, as can be gleamed from what actually sells. So a new series coming out to outsell their market must have been quite upsetting.

I'm feel sympathy if the industry didn't deserve it, but it absolutely does.

For those unaware, My Hero Academia has slowly since it started revealed itself as a hero story dealing with the inherent contradictions in modern life, upholding the current status quo at all costs, and burying the inconvenient past to construct a utopic future over the remains. It goes where a corporate western comics refuse to, and that's what makes it generic next to the 500th retcon of Peter Parker's love life over the last decade. Go figure.

My Hero Academia is a hero story exploring what heroism actually means at the root of it, which means there is little room for grey goo. And this is one of the reasons it has achieved the massive success it has. Black and white exist, no matter how you might think otherwise.

Now, I'm not trying to overanalyze this. Kohei Horikoshi is telling a fun hero story at the heart of it, but he never mucks about in the grey. While there can be hard situations and tough choices, a hero still picks himself up again and strives to make the best one he can. He does not stop dispensing Justice and saving the innocent to indulge in his appetites instead. This isn't a western comic. 

The one "anti-hero" in My Hero Academia was designated a villain. He inspired terror across the country, the repercussions of which are costing lives and wellbeing in the series at this very moment. This happened because of his selfish actions that he wrapped in Truth as a shield for his reprehensible actions. In other words, he was still a villain. There was nothing heroic about any of his actions. And unlike a modern western comic fan, the series readily admitted this as the truth of it.

Right now the story concerns itself with the hero society falling apart because of how fragile their lives of carefree modern living were. They got fat and happy, soft, and let it all fall apart around them. All it took were those who hated the world for various reasons of their own to want to tear it down more than people wanted to protect it, and that happened quite easily. There wasn't much to protect aside from comfort held up by organizations stifling things like natural abilities and freedoms which caused even more problems of its own. What is there to protect? Essentially, good rolls out from good and evil rolls out from evil, good intentions or not. Now the question remains how the protagonists can fix this mess before the villains wipe out everything. Can they rebuild society or will they collapse under the weight of the sins of the past? We'll have to see.

Doesn't seem very generic to me, and I've been reading manga for a long time. But you would have to look past the surface level of "shonen" and "superpowers" and actually give it a chance. It isn't a western cape comic, no. It actually progresses and develops as a narrative. Oh, and it will actually end, too.

I should also say the above is a reason that Japanese manga has overtaken comic books in sales and popularity. It has none of the faults which crippled the western industry. The morality is also simply much sharper in manga these days, and that's clearly what audiences actually want after being fed a diet of morally ambiguous garbage for over half a century now in the west.

People want moral certainty and real heroism, not murky grey gunk from limpwristed losers. And they've been wanting it for a long time.

But it will never be the same.

Another recent example of such obvious dichotomy of black and white morality is in the manga series Edens Zero by Hiro Mashima, the creator of Fairy Tail. However, unlike that series, Mashima has really turned up the heat and pulled out all the stops to make something better than he had before. He created a cosmic adventure story between the forces of good and evil. As someone who didn't really like Fairy Tail, I'd say he is definitely succeeding where that one fell flat for me.

For those unaware, Edens Zero is the story of Shiki Granbell who is traveling across the universe on the Edens Zero spaceship to meet Mother, the mysterious supposed goddess of the universe. Along the way he meets the worst scum the cosmos has to offer, and it is up to his crew and himself to set them straight while they head out on their quest. It's only been running for a bit over three years and with over 150 chapters, but so much has happened in its pages that it puts all modern western comics to shame. No one in the mainstream is putting something out like this.

Edens Zero is a shonen adventure series that manages to avoid the power creep problem the genre has become known for since Dragon Ball while also maintaining a high level of excitement throughout its onslaught of action. It's just a good old fashion adventure story. I'd call it sword and planet, except there are also guns, androids, virtual planets and planes, tokusatsu power suits, time travel, space pirates, space cops, and superpowers. Mashima isn't afraid of throwing everything in but the kitchen sink into this one, and he makes it all fit together as a neat whole.

It's a fun read of heroes against villains with some "grey" characters along the way (that will always eventually turn black or white, as it always goes in proper stories) to wild worlds as alien and inventive as anything you can imagine. It is quite a bit different than Fairy Tail, and quite a bit more inspired.

This is because, unlike Fairy Tail, Edens Zero is completely planned out and not done by the seat of the writer's pants. He used everything he learned through both Fairy Tail and first series Rave Master in order to write an epic adventure through the cosmos with cyborgs, magic, spaceships, and aliens aplenty, and a good bit of action to wash it all down. 

But most importantly: the good guys and the bad guys are always clearly defined and the line between them is never blurred. There are characters not on either line that will eventually be made to choose a side when trouble arises. When alliances are tested then you know precisely who everyone really is. This moral certainty is what gives the series its hotblooded drive and spark that makes it a blast to read through.

If it was just a bland hodgepodge of "grey" characters it would be like every other western comic set in space. And none of those are anywhere near as popular as Mashima's work is. 

This is why it feels like the Japanese are dominating the medium where the west is constantly stumbling. It is because their competition has completely ceded the moral ground which has in turn affected the interest audiences have in their anemic comic books. Who wants to read about miserable people being miserable to each other while fighting slightly more miserable people with slightly meaner motivations?

Nobody, apparently. It seems normal people don't care about "interesting characters" or whatever they are calling that grey mush these days. Audiences want heroes and villains. They probably always did despite being told they couldn't have them.

And this is also why movies like Dirty Harry or The Tough Ones still hold up today. They give the audience exactly what they crave, and they do it incredibly well.

Ambiguity of any kind does not preclude depth.

This is the main lesson to take away from the quest for "realism" and "interesting" is that it has led art off a cliff and should be abandoned. there is clearly no future in it, proved even more by how it has directly led to the climate we know live in. It is time to abandon this path just like heroism was abandoned back in the '60s. Enough is enough.

We deserve better.

While NewPub and the evaporating mainstream gives more room for such stories to finally flourish, it won't mean all that much if we don't change our understanding of real heroism. The fact of the matter is that we let this climate exist to begin with. It won't just evaporate overnight.

So let us start today in offering and indulging in more art and entertainment that celebrates the good instead of the evil. Change can only start with us, after all.

Then maybe we can finally turn this whole ship around before we steer right off the world's end. We don't have forever, after all. We can like each other again, and we will. As long as we remember to celebrate the good we can connect again.

The past is over, but the future always has the potential to be better. The more we work on it the more we can turn it around. No more celebrating the corrupted and the tainted: we will bring the good back to where it belongs. Once things are put back in their natural place everything will finally make sense again, just as it was always meant to.

And won't that be good?

A battle of good against evil in a nightmare world!