Wednesday, June 11, 2014

There are no Antiheroes

The Dictionary defines an Antihero as "a protagonist who lacks the attributes that make a heroic figure, as nobility of mind and spirit, a life or attitude marked by action or purpose, and the like." We often still see the character as a hero despite their flaws, and my point in this is really that most antiheroes really don't have true flaws. What is batman's real flaw? he is broody and wears black, that kind of makes him sound like me in high school except Batman is a billionaire who has kept on being broody for way longer than most high school kids who shop at hot topic. What does Batman really do that's really makes us question if we should be supporting him? He basically does the same thing as any other superhero but is kind of standoffish, that's it. To me the idea of an antihero is kind of funny because most times antiheroes are still heroes but they just have some flaw that makes them imperfect, having a flaw though doesn't suddenly make someone a bad guy. It seems like most antiheroes are simply not able to be shown as too flawed or else they are a villain, but people have flaws and no person is entirely good so it does not seem like much a of a deviation if your "antihero" simply respond as we might expect an average person would. There are definitely good antiheroes out there with several of the characters from the Watchmen being good examples of truly flawed individuals still trying to act as forces of good. A great example that was brought up to me is actually Magneto from X-men, who is actually the villain in most of the X-men, the thing with Magneto though is that what he is doing isn't to kill humans because he thinks that would be fun its because in the X-men world Mutants are hated and feared by many and what he is doing to try and help mutants could be seen in a way as being something of a Civil Rights movement for Mutants, his methods would be considered morally wrong by most but its not as though this threat to mutant kind is in his imagination its very real in the mutant universe.Magneto is also supposed to be someone who has seen the worst of humanity as he is a German Jew who survived the holocaust and someone who has seen Mutants butchered at the hands of humans. I am not sure if its intentional or not but the difference between Magneto and Professor-X in the X-men world is not that unlike Malcolm X and Martin Luther King junior in the American civil rights movement, Charles Xavier like MLK advocates peaceful interaction and living together, while Magneto advocates Mutant supremacy much like Malcolm X advocated Black supremacy. The end result though is that most people see Magneto as a villain, a complicated villain but a villain nonetheless but he is the level that Antiheroes need to go to if they are truly antiheroes and for the most part that moral ambiguity is not somewhere most story-lines want to go to with their protagonist.

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