Comic Heroes versus Real Life Heroes Part II: The Conclusion

Google’s Carboard + Smartphone =Virtual Reality. Source: http://thenextweb.com/

Virtual Reality is a big thing now. Again. Like many technologies, it comes and goes, and sometimes it’s just not ready, not good enough or useful enough for anyone to care (see Virtual Boy). Who can say whether it will catch on this time, whether in the form of Google’s DIY style project, or the more high end, Facebook-backed Oculus Rift.

But–if you will allow me to be a bit corny–we have had virtual reality almost since our ancestors had the ability to speak. Stories have been our built-in VR functionality since the beginning.

I’m not just talking about the concept of stories “transporting us to new worlds” and “other times and places” and so on. I’m talking about stories serving as sort of life simulators, laboratories, testing grounds. Stories are no substitute for actual life experiences, but they allow us to get a taste of aspects of the human experience that we have yet to experience for real, or that we just can’t or aren’t likely to experience due to locale, gender, sexual preference, mentality, beliefs, the nature of reality (stories can change that too), era, lack of radioactive spiders to give us the proportionate strength, speed, and agility of a spider…

Fictional  Hero Stories as Moral & Ethical Simulators

“Experience is the best teacher.” That’s a phrase that has been around for a long time, and I think most of us would generally agree with the spirit of it. But I think it’s important to think past its platitudinous nature, consider that there are certainly other ways to teach and be taught. You could even say that there are certain types of experiences that are “high risk” enough that learning from them might be the last thing you do.

“Oh crap. Parachute. I knew I forgot something. Oh well. Experience is the best teacher.” Source: http://www.skydive.tv/

For example, certainly nothing compares to the “experience” of a pitched wartime battle, but it is probably not the best place for a soldier to learn to fight. Falling alone into deep water will certainly inspire one like nothing else to try and learn to swim, but failure doesn’t exactly leave much chance for lesson number 2.

Luckily, there are ways to “experience” things before the actual experience of them, and stories are one way that people–especially children–can engage in certain aspects of life, mentally and emotionally sample those aspects ahead of the actual experience, or as a supplement to those actual experiences.

I wrote in my last post about all the years I spent as a kid with Peter Parker aka Spider-Man (among other characters in comics and books) as he went through his many struggles and trials and triumphs, faltering and sometimes failing, but always getting back up to keep on keeping on, having learned that any of us who has the power to do something, to help, has a responsibility to do so.

Source: http://www.chasingamazingblog.com

That kind of “virtual” experience through fiction is very powerful, and very valuable. For a child especially, it is a “safe place” to sample aspects of the human social, moral, and ethical experience. But beyond being “safe,” it is also a way to explore situations and scenarios that we might have yet to experience due to age or circumstance, or–as stated above–situations and scenarios that we can only experience via fiction because of who and where we are in the world, or the nature of the world itself.

So, to bring this back to the topic of Fictional Heroes… That “virtual reality” experience allows us to have Virtual Heroes. So, how do these VR Heroes compare to IRL (In Real Life) Heroes?

VR Heroes versus IRL Heroes

VR Heroes: Peering through the Window

First, here’s an interesting advantage of Fictional Heroes: With fictional heroes, comic heroes in particular, we are privy to their internal thoughts and feelings as well as their external words and actions.

Since I love analogies so much, let me try this one out. With IRL people, it can be like trying to learn math by seeing the problem and the solution, but not the method and steps for achieving that solution.

But our VR Heroes show their work, as it were. We get to see the stages they go through as they try to work out, their behind the scenes tirades and breakdowns, their internal monologues (Spider-Man in particular is great at internally monologuing). We see that, so often, the path from a moral, ethical, or personal conflict is not a straight line, but is rather a crooked path, a roller coaster. A well-written fictional hero does not always instantly decide what’s right and do it. He or she waffles and second guesses and missteps and makes mistakes and apologizes and tries again and often just gets it wrong in ways that can’t be undone.

Source: http://www.epic-randomness.com

Obviously, IRL Heroes do the same. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m just saying that we rarely see that side of our real life heroes.

So, is that good? Bad?

IRL Heroes: Intuiting and Thinking for Ourselves

The thing about having something laid out for you completely is that it doesn’t leave much room for you to learn to work things out for yourself.

A big part of life is making observations and intuiting, extrapolating, interpreting. A big part of understanding people–as individuals and in general–is making efforts at communicating, having to work at getting a look at that internal world, the behind the scenes stuff that is so nicely and conveniently laid out for us in comics and other fiction.In that struggle to communicate with others, we learn more than we could ever learn just be reading about relationships, where the communication is so often either extremely smooth or ludicrously hard. (How many times have you been reading a book or watching a movie and  thought to yourself “You know, a lot of this conflict could have been avoided by these people just freaking talking to each other”?)

Ultimately, while there is so much to learn from the IRL person’s experience, that experience is theirs, not ours. We need to draw our own conclusions, apply those lessons to our own experience. And sometimes, the lessons we learn from those external observations are superior to what we might learn from knowing the reality of that person’s internal world. Maybe Joe Hero chose to run into that burning building because he saw news cameras nearby and wanted notoriety, but I could be inspired to put others safety before my own because what I observed appeared to be an act of great selflessness.

Super Sponsorship: Booster Gold (he gets better) Source: http://tvmedia.ign.com

Splitting the Difference

I should hope it’s apparent by now that there is a lot to learn from either VR Heroes or IRL Heroes, and even more to learn from both.

Fictional heroes are a great way to simulate and try out aspects of the human experience, morality and ethics and heroism and pain and struggle and inspiration… But that alone is not a substitute for life, for relationships, for experience.

Heaven forbid any of us live our lives based solely on the lessons and representations and expectations inherent in fiction, in comics. We can see the follies of that approach in our reactions to media of all kinds: women and men alike expecting fairy tale love and marriage to just happen without effort, women and men trying to match some generic, outwardly decreed ideal of appearance, and on and on.

Real life heroes are inspiring and wonderful, but flawed, and apt to fail us. But that in itself is a lesson. We have to learn that people do fail us. People fall and get back up again, but people also fall and give up, don’t bother to get back up.

And we have to learn not to blame those people for our own actions. Just because our role models, our heroes, might end up ultimately being weak doesn’t mean we have to be. It doesn’t change the lessons we learned or the strength we gained from their examples in the first place unless we let it.

So, ultimately, yes, it is incredibly valuable to have “safe” ways to learn about life and living, virtual heroes that don’t fail us, or whose failure only matters very little. It is important that we learn to fight in some other way than being thrown into the thick of war.

But it is also important that we apply those experimental lessons, compare and extrapolate and ask and do and try and fail and learn in real life.

What it comes down to is this: have your In Real Life Heroes. Learn from them, be inspired by them. Just don’t confuse them with your Fictional Heroes who rarely fall. Because ultimately, they are as human as you are.

Next: Yes, I’m done being all preachy and pseudo-philosophical for a while and maybe I’ll actually talk about costume related stuff…

 

The Reliability & Disposability of Fictional Heroes

I used to give my mom a hard time by saying that I had been raised by comic books. FYI: moms do not find that kind of thing funny. Which is why it was so fun to say it, of course.

Now, I know I wasn’t really raised by comic books. Not completely. Comic books didn’t feed me or provide me shelter or clothing. (Arguably, I could have fashioned clothing from comic books, but it probably wouldn’t hold up very well.)

Comics as clothes? But I don’t have the legs to pull this off.

But I do believe that comics played a large role in forming my world view, contributed to my morality and sense of ethics, encouraged and inspired my art and creativity, led to the formation of friendships that otherwise wouldn’t have formed, and provided me with fictional friends and heroes that I care about and have been influenced by as deeply–in a manner of speaking–as anyone I have known since early childhood.

**Possible Spoilers for non-comic readers/comic readers who have not read certain comics…***

Would you believe I still get emotional when I read or see scenes from comics involving the death of Uncle Ben, the death of Gwen Stacy, the death of Superman’s dad… I get inspired by acts of self-sacrifice in comics and comic movies, but also in Disney movies (when Disney’s Hercules plunges into the sea of the dead to save Meg, believing he will die, and becomes a True Hero…still gets me every time).

But let’s focus in on Peter Parker/Spider-Man for the moment. I have spent the better part of 30 years with that guy, seeing him go through empowerment and suffering and weakness and grief and loss, his troubles ranging from mundane struggles like making rent or living on peanut butter because he can’t afford groceries to trying to pay Aunt May’s medical bills by getting pics of himself as Spider-Man while trying to keep his grades up at school while trying to have a normal, healthy relationship with Gwen who could only know half of who he was because she thought Spider-Man was responsible for the death of her father… {whew!}

So, to plug this in to modified versions of the main points from a couple of posts ago…

1) Comic book heroes can be fallible and–well, real

So yeah, I’ve followed Peter’s story, seen his trials and victories and doubts, been privy to his thoughts. He had every reason to give up, to be out for himself, to just try to have normalcy. And he was tempted! He dabbled with crime using his powers! He tried giving up the hero shtick. He even took away his own powers in an attempt to escape.

 

But he kept going back to it, driven by that deep sense of responsibility, a foundation instilled by the Aunt and Uncle who raised him and cemented by the death of Uncle Ben that resulted from Peter’s failure to act when he had the chance.

2) Moral Lessons–that are not as simple as one might presume

This is powerful stuff! This isn’t “Wowee! I have powers, so I’m gonna help people, by golly.” This is not an unstoppable, invincible, trouble-free power fantasy. This is a character with struggles and doubts and the mundane crap of school and family and life and relationships. This is moral ambiguity and the penultimate “who am I?” (I mean, the whole super hero thing…the “masks” they wear are literal, they truly present two faces to the world, two personas, that they have to somehow resolve. This is Jungian/Joseph Smith-ian stuff here.)

3) Ever-changing culture time capsule

Not only are there some core, universal, timeless moral lessons to be gleaned from certain comic heroes, but the nature of comics–the way the ongoing story lines span the decades–allows them to be relevant to prevailing issues of the era surrounding them. This has literary value both in the representation and processing of human experience in the here and now, but also serves as a valuable time capsule for those issues from the past that were being represented and discussed.

We can go back to Spider-Man comics from the 60’s and 70’s and get a glimpse of minor things like fashion and slang, but also see discussions and scenarios involving war, racial tensions, protests, drug abuse, political corruption…

It’s also interesting to me–if I may intersect with some former points from above–that Peter Parker is not always on the right side of these issues, or on any side of these issues! Part of his struggle involved having to duck out on protests or gatherings about causes he believed in because there was some super villain trying to blow up the city, making him look like he didn’t give a crap. Or sometimes he would judge someone by surface appearance or behavior and later realize the mistake he had made.

We can even gain insight into the era in which certain comics were written by how wrongly and unfairly they represent certain groups. Interestingly, while I feel like some pretty decent efforts were made by Spider-Man comics in the 70’s regarding fair representation of racial issues, women were very poorly represented. There are multiple instances where females are described or represented as being overly emotional or excitable, and most the women in Peter’s life were represented as being very weak and dependent and being barely able to define themselves outside of their relationships with men (be those romantic involvements, fathers, etc.).

In any case, there are multiple manners in which comics can serve up lessons on morality and ethics and society from multiple eras.

Comparing & Contrasting Fictional Heroes & Real Life Heroes

So, what’s wrong with real life heroes? Nothing. I think it is just fine and dandy–and healthy–to have real life heroes, and it is important that we recognize those people in our lives–or more generally in the world around us–who inspire us, and model realistic moral and ethical behavior, who sacrifice their time, money, happiness, health, and even their lives for the sake of others, often with no hope of repayment.

But here are some thoughts to think. (Because, you know, what better to do with thoughts than think them?)

1) Real Life Heroes are not only Fallible, but Fail-able–and that is itself can be a good lesson

The “Real Life Hero”

Was there ever a celebrity that you just really loved and looked up to, and then you found out they were a big jerk–either by meeting them or just learning about their jerk-hood via the ever more inescapable forces of infotainment?

Or maybe it was someone closer to home. A friend, uncle, parent, teacher, minister/youth minister… You held them on a pedestal, thought that they could do no wrong, only to have them–well, do wrong.

This is a part of life, and it is an opportunity. When this kind of thing happens, you can react in one of two ways (maybe more, but let’s go with these two):

A) You can decide that people suck and never trust anyone again, or…

B) You can take with you the positive lessons and examples given by that person outside of their foibles and understand that it was always about those core lessons and truths, and not about that person.

The Fictional Hero

Fictional Heroes can actually be fallible or infallible, but the ones we tend to respond to the most–especially as our tastes mature–are the fallible ones. The conflicted ones, at least. We can certainly be entertained by power fantasies, like Superman in his simpler days. But it seems that–especially in these modern times–we get bored by indestructibility, and even more so by moral certainty.

In any case, going back to the examples of Peter Parker’s struggles and moral conflict above… He is a fallible, conflicted character. But he is a character. He is fiction. As such, there is a certain implied assurance that while he may stumble, he is not likely to fall and fail completely because–well, honestly, because that would be bad for business in the eyes of the company that profits from him.

This is connected, I suppose, to the aforementioned ongoing nature of comics, in a sense. Characters like Spider-Man and Superman are more than just characters now; they are Institutions. Fans will only tolerate a certain level of change regarding their basic natures. Marvel can do an “imaginary tale” about Spider-Man turning into a serial killer, but if they try that with the “real” continuity…watch out.

There are forces in place that make it very unlikely that our Fictional Comic Book Heroes will fail us by changing in any significant way. But the point is also that–if they do–we can deal with much less trauma than if the same thing happens with a Real Life Hero.

I don’t just mean you stop reading and they cease to be your hero. Similarly to the scenario with the failure of the Real Life Hero, you can move on, but retain the core lessons and examples provided. You can return to the memories and experiences with that hero that originally shaped you. (In the case of Fictional Comic Heroes, that takes the form of something called “Re-reading Back Issues.”)

But are there other ways that Fictional Heroes are “safer” then Real Life Heroes? And is “safe” Hero Worship desirable or undesirable?

Next Time: Comic Heroes versus Real Life Heroes Part II: The Conclusion (probably)