Crafting Character: Heroes and Heroism

By Angela Roberts

December 29, 2010

swordfight

Recently, a study by an economist at Queensland University of Technology examined the conditions under which chivalry prevails in a disaster situation. The scientists compared the sinkings of the Titanic and her sister ship, the Lusitania, and came to the conclusion that a significant factor in the survival rates of certain groups of people was time. The Titanic took two hours and forty minutes to go down, and consequently, social norms took over from the natural impulse for self-preservation. The Lusitania took only eighteen minutes, and the majority of survivors were people between the ages of sixteen to thirty-five, and mostly men. The opposite was true for the Titanic, the social convention of “women and children first” was dominant. So, the conclusion drawn was that with more time to escape, as a group, the survivors of the Titanic were able to process what was happening to them and re-adjust to the ideas of chivalry and consider others before themselves. On the Lusitania, it was every man for himself because there was no time for any other kind of consideration.

I read the article written by this team of scientists and thought of an episode of Definitely Not the Opera that I heard today about rescues and helping others. It could very easily be aligned with this study of chivalry. The radio hosts performed an experiment to gauge peoples’ response to a stranger who appears to be in distress. One of them pretended to collapse in the middle of the CBC food court. She was almost immediately approached by two concerned citizens. The hosts were amazed by the swiftness of the response. And it is surprisingly fast. Certainly, I think the Queensland economists would have been surprised. Economics and certainly social skepticism assumes that people behave with self-interest in mind, for the most part. It should be noted that at least one of the people who came to the host’s aid confessed to it not being the first time they’d been good Samaritans. They considered the act of chivalry to be human nature. So, not everyone are heroes. But some people are.

Heroes are an integral part of literature in general. In fact, it was considered rather uncommon to create protagonists who weren’t heroes or heroic until quite recently in the history of English literature. There were anti-hero exceptions, of course; the great works of literature are riddled with them. But the simple fact that the protagonist of a story is often referred to as the hero says quite a bit about the importance of the hero in literature. For some time, literature was crafted to show us the best of humanity prevailing against the worst. The literary genre has shied away from heroics in the last century, striving for an ideal of ‘realism’. But speculative fiction still holds on in many ways to this idea. Great spec is far grayer than most people think; it’s not black and white, good and evil, only. But heroism, and the impulse towards heroism, is still integral to the creation of characters. Readers and viewers of speculative fiction and film still want to see their characters striving to be good, to be altruistic, and to rescue something or someone. But what do we do as writers who want to create those living breathing characters that won’t be derided as being flat and cliché? First of all, I find it ridiculous to call characters that react to situations with something other than self-interest flat or cliché. The examples I gave above show that it’s not impossible to find these types of characters to be believable. There is heroism in the world, everyday heroism, so it’s not shameful to design characters that are heroic. And I believe that readers do want to read about heroes. It is a way of believing in the possibility of altruism. And in the troubled times we all find ourselves in, there’s nothing more valuable than believing that there is good in the world. So, don’t shy away from heroic characters; you don’t have to make an anti-hero to make a believable character. Eventually, those anti-heroes will become so prevalent that they’ll be the cliché anyway. In some ways, they already are. What makes a character round and realistic is a mixture of strengths and frailties. It’s making a character that reflects the real people who exist in our complex world. Whether that character is a kid working at McDonald’s or an alien from another planet or a swordsman from Middle Earth.

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