On writing the superhero
Our thoughts and beliefs are influenced by stories, sometimes to our detriment.
For many years my Barbie-doll pink frilly dress hating tomboy girl child struggled with the reality that there is no such thing as a fairy-tale ending. I grew up like every girl, with stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. Teased for not fitting in, I somehow held on through an awkward painful childhood with the help of fantasy, reading anything I could to escape my mundane existence. But somewhere down deep in my kid soul, I believed the hype - that there was a not so perfect guy who would come to rescue me.
In time I came to better understand my expected role. In any story, I was destined to be an extra; the humble servant, the wife of a villager, or the ugly step sister, who as everyone knows, never amounts to much. My childhood self still struggles with this failure to self actualize; to rise above my own self imposed plot. Eventually it dawned on me that no Prince Charming would save me from today's modern job market. I would need to be my own hero.
Writing a hero is a challenge because I feel my ideas and my voice are only an echo of a hundred thousand louder voices rephrasing a mythic belief or social ideal in a fantasy style more eloquent than my own. After many years of life in conventional suburbia, in a land where being the biggest and best is the goal to strive for, I felt inadequate to any task. My inner fear is that what I write is not original, and that not being original or unique is somehow a crime. Conundrum. How as a hero do I resolve this?
Most people will say that they want a change for the better; we all want hope, peace, love. We all want to be a hero, (just for one day), even if we don't believe we are capable of the feat.
In popular movies, the Hollywood Marvel Superhero saves the day; the one immaculately portrayed suave character that most people admire because Heroes can do impossible things when you have the right soundtrack. They can fly, fight crime, dance, or become depressed, violent, and slightly ego-maniacal, yet are forgiven for any fault because of their god like powers and visage. Oh, and of course, the cool suit.
(insert photo of Thor here..)
Superheroes are the chosen, the legends, the mythical few that have replaced astronauts, cowboys, and rock stars in our psyche. We no longer want real people as our idols, because this is America and we need our heroes super sized and in your face. We must believe that the mess of our present day world is somehow too confusing and immense for any mere mortal to sort out.
Yet in truth, superheroes are to an extent vigilantes who leave destruction and mayhem in their wake as they duel the villain. Can they really save all the people falling off the bridge they just exploded with their fist? I believe Superheroes are doomed to disappoint, just like Prince Charming, because only one girl can be the princess. And no matter how many superheroes save the day, someone has to clean up the mess they made until the next villain comes along. We have failed to address the root of the problem.
In books, the relics of an age before DVD, heroes can be dorky nerds with an attitude problem. Heroes can be silly spinsters, old men, hunchbacks and aliens. They are the unknown factor, the inventor, the teacher, the innocent. These anti-heroes, like anti-bodies, change the world from within, by fighting off evil at a molecular level. They don't fly around in red spandex and cosplay gear. You may never know they are there, doing their job, until suddenly, they aren't, and you are cast as "patient dying of cancer" in a blue cotton gown.
An average minded ghetto rat can awkwardly save the day with good intentions and the smallest of actions, despite inner conflict and personal hardship, because it's the right thing to do. Ditto the doctor, the scientist or even the politician. In books, anyone, no matter how unlikely, can be the unassuming hobbit who throws the ring in the fire.
While their actions are sometimes simple or accidental, these heroes of the tiny "h" are the catalyst that changes the outcome in the smallest of ways, that overcomes the obstacle, that solves the mystery. They are the meddling kids in Scooby Doo, the plot device in chapter eight. The example is there, so why aren't we following it? What draws us to want a superhuman with special powers to save our asses instead of doing it ourselves? Perhaps, like me, they feel inadequate to the task at hand.
As a world on the brink of environmental disaster, economic decline, political upheaval and moral decay, we are stuck in a sad repeating reality story of war, famine, murder and corruption with evil politicians who want to enslave us and return us to the feudal system of the Middle Ages. Wait, what?
Yes, it seems like that. We as a society are so enamored of dark fantasy and horror that we accept it as reality. It's comfortable, like a remake of Blade Runner or an episode of Duck Dynasty. We watch reality like it is a television show that we can detach from by switching off because we don't have a starring role.
We exist in a melodramatic Dystopian novel where we have become the audience instead of the cast. While we cheer or boo the actors who play the key roles, we wait passively for change, for someone else to write the script, for someone else be the one to sit at the front of the bus, to throw the ring in the fire, to save the universe, to commit a solitary act of bravery or rebellion, which says, "No, I will not be a victim".
Are we all waiting for someone else to be the hero that saves humanity?
A paradigm shift, our way of thinking about how the world works and who can be a hero, does not happen overnight, or even in a year. We may wait in a state of denial while the clock is ticking. The social mind may take decades for a new idea to take hold, even when the solution to an overwhelming problem is staring us in the face, while we live frozen in fear in a world that looks the same but has been hijacked by a mad psychopath.
Change needs to be fought for, sewn into the fabric of our vision, cast into the pigment of our skin until our new perspective taints the way we view ourselves and our world. It isn't one single act or solitary voice but a choir working in harmony. It is a quiet rebellion, a united front, a gentleman's agreement that we will all do our part to fight the encroaching Darkness.
Even if we are only singing the equivalent of Bohemian Rhapsody in Wayne's World, joining a cosplay group dancing the Time Warp, a flash mob, a sleep in, a protest, a letter - that single nerdish impulse when reality becomes vision and the everyday Joe becomes a hero - that becomes the mythic story. And those movie superheroes we love to idolize? Perhaps we need to replace them with real heroes. The ones in our life who matter to us.
Like an artist that creates stone monuments to a living legend, a story is one that will outlast the history we live in. We should each be a carver of our societal reality stone, the writer of our own historical legend.
I've come to the realization that I can rewrite my part in the book. That all of us, we can ALL become heroes in this story. But we need to believe that we can. We need to believe that Marvel does not have the exclusive rights on hero stories.
rewritten as original content for Steemit, 12 Aug 2017. top two photos, to my shame, are free stock from stocksnap. (eventually i'll create my own stock, but not everything fits..) bottom two photos are my own.