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.
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…
Spider-Man Mashup Cosplay Costume: 