Everyone loves a hero… OR DO THEY? Sometimes, you need a character that just hates the hero’s guts. Perhaps the hero lives in a utopian magical school and you need to generate some tension, or maybe you want to spice up a political conflict with personal drama. Either way, what you need is a hero hater, and that’s our topic this week. We discuss why hero haters are useful, why they’re so often contrived, and how they can be better handled. Plus, some Zuko discourse, as is tradition.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Space Pineapple. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
(intro music)
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: We have some unfortunate news. There’s a rival podcast out to get us. We’re not exactly sure why… They aren’t regressive or even fan ragers. They just must be jealous of how awesome we are.
Oren: Maybe they hate us because of who our parents were.
Chris: But nonetheless, this is a very popular podcast, so we’re underdogs.
Wes: Sympathize with us.
Chris: They’re called the Miscreants podcast.
(laughter)
Chris: So this week, we’re talking about hero haters, which are characters or even entire groups of people who have an intense personal dislike of the hero, usually for pretty contrived reasons. It doesn’t have to be a contrived reason, but more often than not.
Oren: Here I was going around thinking that we defined a hero hater as having a contrived reason, and now I find out there’s whole depths to them that I didn’t know about.
Chris: They can have a useful role. So I think there’s a lot of conversation to be had about, how do we accomplish the same things but without something that comes off as super silly?
Oren: If we’re defining it as someone who has an intense personal dislike of your hero, that’s definitely something you’re gonna want to use and have it make sense, right? That’s gonna be a big part of your story and it will be very emotional, and if the reason is contrived people are gonna notice.
Chris: Unless that’s just what they really want.
Oren: There are certain wish fulfillment elements of like, that person hates me for no reason. I have none of the traits that might actually inspire hatred because I don’t wanna have those. So I guess they hate me for being too perfect.
Wes: I don’t know. When we see it in media, it’s like, is your first thought “oh man, that person just hates that person for no reason,” or is it, “that person really hates that person. There must be a reason.” Maybe more people are just kind of waiting on it to show up in some backstory episode before that character dies inevitably.
Chris: If it’s presented as a mystery in some way, then that might be possible. A lot of times when I see it there can even be an explanation, the explanation is just not very good.
Wes: Right. Like, “oh you’re from Alderaan. I don’t like people from Alderaan.”
Oren: Or “you’re an elf and I’m from Numenor,” as we talked about last episode.
Wes: I know your people gave us a homeland, but I don’t care.
Chris: So let’s talk about why hero haters are so popular. Obviously, they’re useful for storytellers because they create conflict. If you have a setting that doesn’t have that much inherent conflict to it, bringing in some sort of personal rivalry can be useful. If you had a utopian setting or if you have a magic school that’s supposed to be safe, that can be useful to have a rivalry happen there.
Oren: It can also just add an emotional dimension to a conflict. Avatar is great, but it’s greater because Zuko has a personal vendetta against Aang. And if Zuko was just very detached and didn’t actually care about Aang at all, that dimension wouldn’t be there.
Chris: In that case, I don’t know if Zuko has a personal dislike of Aang so much as he has a personal reason to hunt Aang down.
Wes: And it’s not Aang, it’s the Avatar.
Oren: I would argue that one grows from the other. He doesn’t know Aang at first. I would argue that after a couple of interactions, he doesn’t like Aang because Aang keeps showing him up. Also is frustrating to fight because Aang keeps avoiding him and not giving him the head-on confrontation that he clearly wants. I would argue that there is a personal element to it, but it does start with a divide along a more political or war-type scenario, as opposed to Zuko just deciding he hates Aang one day.
Chris: And most hero haters just immediately, as soon as they’re introduced in the story, have a very strong personal dislike.
Wes: Well, I’m just wondering about, independent of when he learns more about Aang, the intense focus and dislike stems from “this is the thing that’s in my way to what I want, need, or feel I deserve,” and I feel like that hate for heroes can come in when somebody thinks that you’re in a position that you don’t deserve. The hero doesn’t deserve this, the hero didn’t earn this. I got passed up for promotion, or this position should be mine, and that person doesn’t need to have a personality for them to hate them if they just think that they are an obstacle to their own advancement.
Oren: You can do a little bit of mixing and matching. You can have personality clashes that exacerbate a reason why two people wouldn’t like each other. I worked with a guy who absolutely hated me, will not say his name on the off chance he’s listening to this podcast.
(laughter)
Chris: He hated you, but now he listens to your podcast.
Wes: Yeah, well, we can offer him a heaping cup of depression.
(laughter)
Oren: He absolutely hated me because during break, I would talk to other people about movies and critique them, and I critiqued some of the movies he liked. To be clear, he was in the wrong here, objectively, but that does make sense. You can see why, if you hear your co-worker talking shit about a movie you really love, how that could lead to an intense dislike, even though the level to which he took it was pretty absurd. Now, if you wanted to you, could combine that with, if we were both going after the same position, that would be, now there’s personal drama and a financial stake involved. And that fortunately never happened. We worked in completely different parts of the building, but that’s the sort of thing that you can work into your story. But it wasn’t just like I walked into the break room one day and he was like, “I hate that guy.” There was a reason why this happened. It doesn’t mean that he was in the right, it’s more convincing that way because you can see that the personality clash of “I love to critique movies” and “he doesn’t like it, he thinks it’s disrespectful.”
Chris: Another reason why hero haters are so popular is to make heroes look like they’re sympathetic underdogs, especially if the hero is not otherwise in a sympathetic position. A certain boy wizard is an excellent example. If you have a character that is, for instance, famous and widely admired and you want to make him look like an underdog, you just pull up people who have just an irrational personal dislike of your character from the beginning so that you can turn things around and make him feel sympathetic instead.
Oren: Sometimes this manifests as “the angry randos,” as I like to call it, the classic scene that was made fun of in the beloved webcomic Once Upon a Trope, where the hero walks into a bar and a bunch of people are like, “we don’t like you.”
Chris: “We don’t serve your kind.”
Oren: They do it with Geralt once, and a bunch of randos are gonna fight a Witcher. It’s like, how brave do you think random bar people are? My favorite example of that was from a piece of War Machine fiction where this guy who’s literally called the Butcher of Kardev, who is six foot two and wears giant power armor walks into a bar with his huge magic axe and his 20 ton war robot parked outside. He’s also a high-level wizard. Some guys at the bar are like, “oh, it’s you,” and they all stand up to engage him in fisticuffs. What is going on in this story? (laughs)
Chris: The strange one is that it’s often used to give heroes candy. It can be an expression of jealousy, and related to that, common fantasy seems to be to take a beloved character and make it so that everyone doubts them or tears them down or hates them, so that that main character can show all of these people up or show them how cool they are. It’s weirdly common and I’ve seen it in various places, like Janeway, for instance, has episodes in Voyager where she has to go against the entire rest of the crew who doubts her. Now, that’s partly because she’s a leader character, and once again, she doesn’t have a reason to be a sympathetic underdog, so everybody’s turned against her to try to make her in that way, but that kind of people in the Team Good, for instance, just randomly saying mean things about somebody can be a way of making their target look good.
Oren: Sheridan from Babylon 5 does that and is so similar to Janeway, it’s kind of eerie. He’ll have crew members randomly like, “no that’s not how it works, Captain Sheridan, you’re wrong,” and then he’ll have to be like, “actually, I was right the whole time.” Often it’s very contrived, and you guys clearly rewrote the script so that he would be right. That’s what happened here.
Wes: That’s because everyone loves a good “I told you so.”
Oren: I mean, people do love that. People desperately want to tell other people that they told them so. There is a certain amount of wish fulfillment there, and I’m not saying you can’t ever do it. Be aware of what you’re doing when you write that scene especially if you have to use other members of Team Good to do it. Very often, you’re just making them look bad in the process.
Chris: You don’t want to make the rest of Team Good seem like jerks who are jealous of your favorite character. It doesn’t go over very well. But building up that kind of sense of grievance, I can go beyond sympathy to anger, just so that your character can show everybody up, is clearly a popular pattern.
Oren: When we’re talking about a nemesis-type character, I think it just kind of comes down to the fact that writers want an emotionally charged conflict, but creating the context for it is sometimes kind of difficult, so instead they just are like, this character hates you now. It’s less obvious that by not having a good reason, they have created a contrived scenario, then it would be if they just didn’t do that, and then they would realize they have no emotional involvement in whatever this conflict is. River from the Raksura (by Martha Wells) books is kind of like that. Moon shows up and River’s like, I hate you because you’re a cool consort and I’m just a warrior, which is a lower class. But Moon doesn’t want any of the things that River has, because River is into the mean queen and Moon only wants the nice queen. They’re not really in conflict over anything, and so what it ends up feeling like, is that River is being portrayed as bad for wanting to rise above his station of being in the class structure. It’s not the impression that I think the author wanted to give, but that’s what it kind of feels like.
Chris: The Raksura books definitely create a hierarchy of people that’s a little creepy.
Oren: And then you have something like Bakugo from My Hero Academia, where the writers clearly wanted there to be a character who starts off as a nemesis and then, over the course of the show, becomes more and more friendly to the protagonist until eventually they’re friends. And that’s a perfectly cool story if you have a good setup for it, but it feels really weird in My Hero. On the one hand, it’s believable that Deku would be bullied for not having any powers in a world where everyone has powers, but Bakugo is so extreme with it that it just feels kind of contrived. You notice that, after episode one or two, they just tuned it down behind the scenes, because they realized they’d gone a little too far.
Chris: Once you make the hero haters’ reasons less contrived and more reasonable, it starts to become much more realistic for them to hate the hero less as the story goes on, because usually the hero is a relatively nice person, at least with some exceptions. (laughs) So in many cases, you’ll have the hero hater end up even becoming a friend, and then sometimes you have to introduce new hero haters to fill the hero hater role, like in Murderbot (by Martha Wells). Murderbot continually introduces hero haters from book to book so that Murderbot always has a hero hater around to make Murderbot a little bit of an underdog and create some social drama. Those books, of course, their reason is that Murderbot is a security construct, and they’re actually pretty dangerous in the setting, making our hero haters a little bit more reasonable, but they still have prejudice against Murderbot for being a construct. In the course of the story, they naturally learn that, okay, Murderbot is not gonna just murder everybody. They’re fine. And then, in the next book, we bring out another one.
Oren: Or sometimes, twist, they turn out to be bad, and Murderbot murders them. (laughs) And I mean, with any enemies-to-friends or enemies-to-lovers or whatever it is, any kind of enemy-to-not-enemy-type story, you just gotta be careful of how evil you make them at the beginning. You can make them realistically a terrible person and hate the protagonist for realistically terrible reasons, but is that really what you want if you want them to be friends later? Very often, you’ll find that either it’s unsatisfying to the audience, because it’s like, “well, that person was horrible, now we’re being friends with them,” or it’ll just be kind of unbelievable. Owl House had that problem. Luz’s girlfriend Amity, when she’s first introduced, she’s really awful. You could argue whether or not she’s realistic, but then when they want her to be friends, she basically just becomes a new person. I mean, I’m glad she’s a better person now, but that was a little bit contrived.
Chris: The show often doesn’t put in the time to make them grow as a person, especially if they’re not the main character. Giving them a whole arc where they re-examine their behavior, etc., may feel out of reach, so this is like, suddenly they’re on the hero side now. Not one of my favorites.
Oren: And you have to think about, how much do you need to drive them to do something right? Lilith, also from the Owl House, had this problem. Although in Lilith, it was in backstory, so it wasn’t as obvious, but Lilith doesn’t like Eda because of sibling rivalry, basically, but this is supposed to motivate Lilith to put this really horrible curse on Eda. I just didn’t really believe it. I was like, she just doesn’t hate Eda enough to do that.
Chris: So, to summarize the two big problems with hero haters that generally have to be solved, their reasons for disliking the hero were overly silly or contrived, or just a big stretch, kind of like the “I hated your father so now I automatically hate you.” Whenever we do the “I hated your father” thing, the family never actually did anything bad, so even that feels like a stretch. The “I hate you because you’re too nice or too cool” goes back again to the candy thing where the writers really liked the hero, so they don’t want to give the hero haters any legitimate grievances, to the point where they want the hero’s parents to also be perfect. We can’t even make their family have done something wrong. The other issue is, if they’re just cartoonishly antagonistic, to the point where, again with Amity, where are we supposed to go from here? They’re just really evil. They can either have a sudden turnaround, or they just come off as contrived.
Oren: Either contrived or unsatisfying. Sometimes you can just fix that with distance. One of the reasons why Nancy’s Steve is now so much more appealing in Stranger Things 4, is that it’s been like four years since he was horrible to her. He’s also done a lot of work on himself and it’s basically a different person now. Time has gone by. A little less like “you’re with this guy who was being horrible to you three weeks ago.”
Chris: Should we talk about what you can do to create antagonists who have personal grudges against your character that aren’t super contrived?
Oren: (sarcastically) What if they were an oppressed mage?
(laughter)
Chris: Yeah, that’s a very popular one.
Oren: I’ve solved it.
Chris: Just change them into a construct. You’re good. Like MurderBot.
Oren: If you have time, you can employ the escalation of differences. Depends on, when do you need the hero hater to hate the hero? They could start off having a moderate dislike of each other, because one of them likes to critique movies and the other doesn’t. Because of that, they get into a bigger disagreement. They say hurtful things at each other, and that’s harder to forgive. And then, because they don’t like each other, they take opposite sides in some office workplace fight or something, and then now, they really hate each other.
Chris: I would say it’s easier to do it in reverse, where they have something important that they’re competing over, and then it becomes personal. You could even do something where they’re friends. They end up wanting the same thing, they think they can have a friendly competition with each other, but turns out they can’t. Just because writers have so much trouble making people have personality clashes with each other without making it come off as really forced and contrived. It’s possible. I have a post with ideas that people really liked, but it’s a little trickier to write. So, it’s easier if you focus on some mutually exclusive interest, like they’re competing for something, and then let that get out of hand instead.
Oren: You can also just have them come from some kind of opposing value systems, depending on what the context of your story is. If your story is a political drama, you can have two characters who have to work together despite being from different political parties. You want to be careful there, because some political parties are legitimately different, and then some are just evil. Don’t make excuses for the evil ones, but you can have people who are not inherently bad who have serious political disagreements. One of them is an anarcho-syndicalist, and the other is a council communist. They fight crime.
(laughter)
Chris: If your hero breaks the rules, you can use an investigator character who is a big stickler for the law, even in situations where it would be more practical to break the rules. So that’s a good way to create somebody who provides some of that conflict, and that can also turn into a personal grudge. But there’s a reason behind it.
Oren: What about rivalries of “I’m gonna be the best at this,” “no, I’m gonna be the best at this”?
Chris: I think those are fun. I just definitely feel lower stakes, so they’re great for a magical school, for instance, or a teen drama, but I think if our stakes got too high, that wouldn’t work as well.
Oren: Yeah, at that point, it would be like, why are you guys arguing about who’s gonna be captain of the soccer team?
(laughter)
Chris: Suspicion is really great. Selwyn in Legendborn, for instance, starts as a hero hater, and then, of course, he becomes the broody boy love interest. But he starts by being really suspicious of the main character and thinking she’s a spy.
Oren: He does have reason to think that, it should be noted. He doesn’t just pull that out of the air, right?
Chris: Yeah, but he’s so dogged about it, it feels personal. It doesn’t always have to be for strictly personal reasons to create the same effect, but generally, a hero hater is just very persistent and emotional about their dislike of the hero. If you have a character, for instance, who’s suspicious of the hero, and then the leaders are not listening to them, but they have legitimate reasons to be suspicious, that will develop into a grievance, and then they’ll resent the hero even more because of that. Take those more external reasons for dislike and then make it more personal.
Wes: I was thinking about Teen Wolf, when Scott gets his powers and Jackson’s like, what is happening? He just gets so upset and mad which, there’s good reason for it, and he hates Scott passionately for this unfounded success. And suddenly, he’s the star of the lacrosse team, and I thought that was done quite well. It’s just like, I get it.
Chris: Now, you have to be careful to make sure that your hero hater isn’t right.
(laughter)
Wes: Well, yes.
Chris: So, in Little Witch Academia, we’ve talked about this before, but the main character Akko is just the worst. She’s supposed to be one of those peppy characters who, even though she’s really bad at magic, has just believed in herself and believed she’ll be the best. But what we see, and this is clearly an intentional character arc on her part, is that she wants to be super awesome at magic but she doesn’t want to put any work, so she’s constantly slacking off and not doing work, causing problems because of that, and wanting to be the best and not put any work to become the best, which is not sympathetic.
Oren: It’s very odd. I don’t really know to what extent this is an intentional contradiction and how much of it is just, “well, we thought it would be funny,” is that her motivation is she keeps saying she wants to be the best witch. She’s constantly saying that, and yet any time she has any opportunity to actually learn magic, she skips out on it and then will try to cheat to win some magic contest. How much of this is on purpose? Is this supposed to be a weird contradiction that she has?
Chris: I think it’s supposed to be her character arc, and that she’s supposed to grow into it because she has this kind of fantastical idea of how fun and cool it is to be a witch that doesn’t involve any of the actual hard work of doing it. She’s supposed to grow into it. The problem is, of course, that we need to like her before she grows as a person. If somebody watches it and just instantly identifies with her, it might not be an issue, but otherwise, she’s not a great main character for that reason. Writers do make that mistake quite a bit, and sometimes it’s them mirroring their own personal journeys. They’re like, “oh, when I was young, I was always slacking off, and then I learned not to slack, off and now I want to write a character that goes through that,” but they don’t give the character other traits that make them likable to balance it out. Diana in Little Witch Academia is the hero hater but she has a good reason. And she’s supposed to be snobby, but she also clearly just is a person who’s put in the hard work and knows what she’s doing. If she dislikes Akko, she’s basically right, because Akko is slacking off and causing trouble.
Oren: Can be a problem if, for example, people watching the show desperately wish it was about the other character. Why can’t the show be about Diana? She seems cool.
Chris: In Andor, and there may be a few spoilers for the few episodes that have come out, I do really like how they’re doing Syril.
Oren: I’m impressed that you can remember that character’s name.
Chris: Oh yeah, totally off the top of my head. I didn’t look it up at all, no.
(laughter)
Oren: I love Andor but just like I loved Rogue One, I can’t remember any of the characters’ names.
Chris: So, the disadvantage of this character is that he really is, much of the time, on his own plot line. Right now, he’s just kind of stranded, doing his own thing and not really related to everything else, but that’s a plotting issue. But as a character, I like the way that they set him up to have a personal grudge with Cassian. He is an investigator who is just very bright-eyed, and he’s gonna do his best, and even though he’s actually kind of a guard in an impressive corporate system, he believes in it wholeheartedly, and so he’s very dogged and he won’t give up, but when Cassian gets the better of him, that completely embarrasses him and he loses his job, and all those other things. That gives him a very strong reason to be a hero hater and have a personal grudge. We’ve yet to see this story actually turn around and capitalize that, but it could happen soon.
Oren: I don’t think this is worth having several scenes that are just him off by himself, but I am looking forward to the inevitable “you ruined my life” “I don’t even know who you are.”
(laughter)
Wes: Yup. That’s a good example, because we don’t know how it will end. Do you think there’s a sweet spot in terms of satisfaction for how to resolve these hero hater arcs? Is joining Team Good the optimal thing? Like Syril, are we gonna get the most satisfaction if he realizes that the corporate empire is bad and he joins them, or is it just enough for them to maybe help each other pass the neutrality, and then the former hero hater kind of moves on? I know it depends on the story, but it feels like, if somebody comes on strong hatin’, the writers are gonna flip ‘em.
Chris: I think it’s how well received the characters and how the audience feels about them. If we have somebody that is a hero hater but we understand, because their hero hate is somewhat reasonable, they have a good reason and we understand them and we actually get to like them somewhat, probably a lot more satisfying if they end up switching sides so that we can keep them around. Also, sometimes they have great chemistry with a hero. Have that kind of antagonistic chemistry, and even after they switch sides, they have the trace of antagonism left that actually really brings the interactions on Team Good to life. Those are cases where I think it’s really beneficial to turn them around, but if they’re more exaggerated or cartoonish and they’re just plain old antagonistic, sometimes you just need to defeat them.
Oren: I’m not really sure where we’re going with this Syril character in Andor. He seems to be going through a down-in-the-dumps sympathy-building storyline, whereas before, he was the poster boy for these crappy corporate cops, and there was nothing really sympathetic about him. I’m not sure where we’re going with this guy now, honestly.
Chris: Maybe he’s Zuko.
Oren: He could be. He’s not really cool enough to be Zuko. That was one of the things about Andor that’s really interesting, is because Andor is just one guy. We could afford to make his antagonists also kind of incompetent and still be threatening. So that’s what separates this guy from Zuko, is that Zuko is a badass, and this dude folded like a cheap suit the moment he actually had to deal with someone who was shooting back. I like Andor enough that I’ll give it some slack and see where it’s going, unlike every other show, which I judge immediately.
(laughter)
Chris: Okay, that’s it for this episode. If the Mythcreants podcast has helped you with a creative project, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod, then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
(outro music)
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Every now and then I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a reverse-isekai from the hero hater’s POV. After watching King Evilpants murder his family and raze his village to the ground, he vowed to dedicate his life to defeating the evil king. He spent years honing his skills, studying the enemy, learning their weaknesses, venturing across the land to build his strength and gather allies to finally avenge his hometown…
…then this random stranger appears out of nowhere, and despite knowing nothing about anything in this world and having nothing to do with King Evilpants, everyone starts hailing them as the destined hero.
Another idea to be thrown into the ring:
Imagine the following: Lord Evilpants is defeated, and the realm is at peace. But heroes keep coming! They think they are entitled to everything because they are “heroes” even though there is nothing for them to fight! They commit crimes because “oh those are NPCs it doesn’t matter”.
It turns out Lord Evilpants had a prophecy that he would be defeated, and he knew ahead of time. So he channeled all of his power into the hero summoning ritual… to make it work TOO well.
I mean, seeing the world like a dating sim or RPG (or worse yet a dating sim RPG) would probably end badly.
I’ve read a SF story told from the point of view of someone who turned into a hero-hater. He started out as an ordinary guy working on a space station (I think), with a would-be girlfriend he was just getting to know, when aliens take over the space station, kill anyone who fights back and enslave the rest (to work the technology that the aliens don’t yet understand).
The protagonist watches as the hero forces and manipulates himself into a position of power, taking over all the small squabbling groups with different ideas on what to do, and appropriating their best ideas for his plan. He then deliberately delays, allowing the mistreatment of the enslaved crew to continue, until they are desperate enough to fight, even knowing that most of them will die. The plan works, the aliens are wiped out, the survivors hail the leader as a hero, and he gets the girl – the protagonist’s now ex-girlfriend. Even though he acknowledges that the hero did what was necessary, the protagonist still hates him!
The isekai genre could be more useful if they grow beyond wish fulfillment. Usually the transplant goes all in on the new world they are in. A more interesting isekai would be say if a bunch of Communist activists, of the doctrinaire Marxist variety, manage to find themselves in fantasy land and immediately start building a revolutionary organization. At least I think that would be an interesting idea. “Wizards of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your material components.”
What do you guys think of stuff like The Boys (comic or series, but the series was better) or Marshall Law (comic) where superheroes in particular are seen as a class of people who at the very least need to be highly regulated and at worst are a danger to society?
You know, the reversal of the poor “oppressed mage” equivalent (this came up a lot in the X Men) hated for being “better”.
It makes more sense than oppressed mages, but it’s not a genre I love because I usually find it deeply depressing. We already have so much trouble from regular normal people having too much power, adding inborn magic to that just makes it so much worse.
Thanks.
Yeah it can be depressing and it’s not the character’s fault that he or she has abilities that standard humans lack and people with extraordinary abilities could actually be useful.
But the culture of superhero worship in a universe of real supes can be interesting as satire of our glorification of the powerful.
For example Starlight in The Boys is sympathetic and the show made the important step of making her an intelligent person rather than a stereotypical “dumb blonde.” But the system she’s part of is horrible.
I think the idea is that bog standard human plus super abilities is basically a recipe for disaster because the temptations for misuse would be basically too great. You would need somebody with really unshakeable morals and iron discipline, and this person will basically come off as a gigantic killjoy to most people, in order for this not to be happen.
If you ask me, as far as messages are concerned, “oppressor mage” trope is just as harmful as “oppressed mage”, and The Boys and Marshall Law are great examples why.
We’ve already gone here through plenty of detail on the problems of oppressed mage, so let’s just sum it up that usually it doesn’t make sense. And when it does sense, it gives the wrong image on those who are oppressed in real life.
Oppressor mage, however, could use some study.
The first harmful message of the oppressor mage trope is that it makes fighting oppression feel futile. There is already enough problems with fighting opressors that don’t have superpowers, and giving them actual superiorities over the masses makes them feel that much more impossible to overthrow. It’s one thing to fight the man, but how do you fight the god?
In the Boys comic book, the protagonists have Compound V inserted into their veins, which actually makes them rather high class as far as Supes go, and the same with Marshall Law having gone through the same superhero making process as the surplus heroes he fights.
Effectively it tells that “Only one who can fight a mage is another mage”.
The Boys tv show makes it a little better by having the protagonists be muggles. But the message remains mostly the same, because the Boys survive most of the time thanks to good supes like Starlight. So now the message goes “to fight the evil elites, the regular people need help from good elites.”
Secondly, “oppressor mage” can end up glorifying the oppressor. The sad truth is that magic and superpowers are cool. I mean, would you rather be an everyman or someone unique?
Take, for example, Soldier Boy. He’s just as nasty as Homelander, if not nastier, yet Soldier Boy is viewed as a much more heroic character, more anti-hero than villain. One reason why he’s liked is likely because he can effectively counter Homelander, in other words making him stronger of the two. Conversely, Homelander is often viewed by the audience as loser and a weakling, when in-universe he’s anything but.
Similarly, the Boys themselves essentially live in squalor, making them look less like rough underdogs and more like pathetic homeless guys.
Oppressed mage, for all its harmfulness, at least makes the one you’re supposed to root for look cool, look something that’s worth rooting for. With oppressor mage you can end up getting an image that “having something awesome makes you a bad guy and you’re better of being an everyman”. Who’d listen to a message like that? No. It’s the awesome privileged folk you’ll likely end up rooting for.
Thirdly, just like “oppressed mage”, “oppressor mage” fails to consider the nuances of oppression that comes from the fact that privileged and marginalized are physically equal.
Blue Hawk is meant to be an allegorical character to police brutality, but the problem comes from him being a supe. He does things associated with cops, overpolicing PoC areas, giving insincere apologies etc. But the fact remains that while cops do terrible things, they are just as squishy as their victims. As absurd as it may sound, cops tend to overreact, because they’re afraid. Blue Hawk, by contrast, is a supe, meaning he’s in no danger from his victims, and his brutalities come out less as overreacting, and more like hurting marginalized people for fun.
And finally, “oppressor mage” uses the same justifications in dealing with mages as “oppressed mage” does.
Marshal Law is the only superhero in his comics that uses guns, while his opponents use only their powers with an occasional melee weapon associated with them. The only other enemies Law has faced that use heavy arsenal are Persecutor and Private Eye, both regular humans
And in the Boys comic book the supes are regularly slaughtered en masse by muggles armed with firearms and jet fighters.
You could say that “oppressed mage” and “oppressor mage” are two sides of the same coin. Both useless and harmful in portraying oppression and fighting it.
Ideally, if you’re going to have supernaturals as allegory for oppression, have two groups of supernaturals with DISTINCT but EQUAL powers. For example, maybe group X uses lightning while group Y has earth powers. Not Muggle vs Mage but Mage A vs Mage B.
Or better yet, they don’t need to be all that different.
For all its other flaws, Harry Potter did well with its pureblood vs mudblood analogy, as any differences between the two are socially constructed, much like with real-world racism.
Thank you for this. As far as power goes, I’ve always been uncomfortable with this particular manifestation, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on why, since the bad guys are supposed to be more powerful.
It already takes extensive effort to have people see the villain as being such – look at how many people legitimately think Thanos was justified in erasing half the population, with the writers presenting his idea as reasonable instead of giving it the narrative pushback it warranted. Now combine systemic oppression, entrenched with the idea that one group is better than another, and make those people *legitimately* better, and many reactionaries who believe that their group is better than others will see the oppressors as completely justified in what they’re doing. The last thing you should be looking to do is raise arguments about whether being better than others makes oppression justified, like how we hold ourselves above our livestock because we consider ourselves better.
To build on your point, if the special powers in your world are solely the domain of villains, then a major unique element of your world, and thus a major thing that would draw people to it, is how much better evil is than its victims. People who can identify with being oppressed aren’t going to enjoy a story where the message of the superiority of their oppressors is reinforced. People who can identify with the oppressors will love that, and probably won’t enjoy the oppressed winning out in the end despite all common sense indicating that they shouldn’t.
I would avoid writing off police brutality as simple fear and overreaction, however. It *very* frequently occurs while police are in full control of the situation, with the worst acts of documented police brutality occurring in those situations, and it usually involves unnecessary escalation from those cops. How afraid were the people who boiled Darren Rainey alive after locking him in the shower?
The idea of cops perpetually fearing for their lives is commonly used to excuse them for violence and killings committed against helpless victims, and has, in the case of the killing of a helpless Daniel Shaver in a sadistic game of Simon Says, even led to the perpetrator being rewarded with a pension and early medical retirement. Propagating this idea of the perpetually fearful cop as the cause of police brutality, in the face of a cop culture that is frequently shown to idolize brutality and killing (both in voice communications and in *training material*), mainly serves to allow cops to be excused for heinous acts of cruelty, like the ones I’ve mentioned.
That about sums it
Brandon Sanderson’s (yes, that Brandon Sanderson’s) Reckoners Trilogy is exactly the kind of story, where special powers are solely the domain of villains. The superpowered people, called Epics, are all evil, and it is heavily implied that the use of powers makes one evil. It’s hard to say how much the superiority of the, Epics is enforced, though the US Government’s Capitulation Act decrees that they can do whatever they wished, and that normal humans should not even try to stop them. It can certainly give the wrong picture.
The Reckoners of course ignore the Capitulation Act and constantly look for whatever is each Epic’s kryptonite, while hiding in the shadows.
Dunno how the story is viewed in general, but it’s not that well known, especially for Sanderson’s work.
And, yeah, should’ve remembered that cops do brutalize people for fun, especially since it’s in the very comics just mentioned here.
Marshal Law is a cop, and he takes sadistic glee in beating his targets, whom he shows deep loathing to. A racist cop if there ever was one, even if in this case it’s boomerang bigotry.
And the Boys in the comics are CIA agents. Not exactly police, but close enough. The same brutal fun towards those they view as “criminals”.
I suppose this is just another example how the oppressor can end up glorified…
We are in serious need for more stories, where the police are the main antagonists.
Or at least have the superheroes make a come-back to the Golden Age, when they fought authority as well as criminals.
Thanks for this interesting discussion!
“The superpowered people, called Epics, are all evil, and it is heavily implied that the use of powers makes one evil.”
This kind of concept is concerning to me. I’m not saying it can’t work, but it does pose the danger of leading to the conclusion that people should not want the same power that their oppressors have because then they’d be just as bad. Better know your place and be grateful for being oppressed, people!
It can mirror the logic of historical societies with “divinely appointed” kings where anyone who is lower caste and wants to change the system or rise in the ranks is literally demonised and warned they’ll lose their soul and rot in hellm (or whatever equivalent fits).
Again, the premise doesn’t automatically lead there but this is something to look out for. It definitely doesn’t feel like a story that would promote oppressed people to take what the oppressors have and share it (or its benefits) around more evenly. Like how in the real world we might want to actually spread wealth and political power around more evenly.
Unless it’s supposed to be a metaphor for military might and the message is that that is just bad and shouldn’t be spread around but abolished. That I can get behind. Again, it depends on the execution.
What if we had a hero hater who we think is just a jerk based on how they react to certain things, but then we see the story from their perspective, and suddenly all the good hero things come off as extremely obnoxious and self-important from the perspective of the other character. So now we not only understand why they hate the hero, we also hate the hero with them.
You’d have to clarify what you mean by “hate the hero with them.” If you mean that we should want the hero to improve in those perceived faults, that seems reasonable.
If you mean we should then be rooting against the hero, it’s difficult to maintain audience investment when the character you’ve been building their attachment to is then presented as someone they should want to see fail. It tends to work much better in the author’s head than it does in writing because the author often considers things in the scope of the entire story, while the audience, from their perspective, has to take the author at their word.
People who get attached to a story because they like the MC and want to see the MC succeed aren’t likely to care for the story anymore if the story is now telling them that their like for the MC was misplaced from the beginning, due to ignorance stemming from the story’s own misleading presentation.
Hiding specific details within the story until a reveal is one thing, but generally, it’s a really bad idea to hide aspects of the fundamental nature of your story. You’re practically guaranteed to leave a substantial portion of the audience feeling dissatisfied, or even upset. If you build up for a classic showdown at high noon, frame the event as if it were a duel to the death, and then have the characters show up to the climactic duel with paintball guns, you’re going to make the audience feel cheated for being as invested as they were for the stakes they were expecting. If you have characters shooting water guns and throwing water balloons in a lighthearted water battle tournament, only to suddenly have the winners be selected for a deathmatch where they’re shooting SMGs and lobbing grenades in some high-stakes duel-by-champion event where the winning nation gets to subjugate the losers, people who were invested in the MC and co. winning the original tournament will likely feel as if they’re being spited for that wish when half of the MC’s team dies in the climax after being selected because of their victory. (Also, it might be a tiny bit of a tone shift.)
If something you’re considering might make a lot of people go “wait, this is the exact opposite of what I thought the story was going to give me”, then it’s probably wise to consider if it’s really worth doing. The last thing you want is for people to feel like you’re spitting on their expectations for the sake of an attenpt at being clever.
Luz is like the Akko-style character done right, with her also wanting to become a great witch and being a wide-eyed enthusiastic optimist. I don’t like Akko but Luz is one of my all-time favorite characters; Luz actually puts in the work and has a bunch of other redeeming qualities even though she also has tendencies to try to get around problems in a rather stupid way.
I think with Amity she seems like a different person because the first “Amity” we meet isn’t actually her; she was always the nerdy kind Amity but tried really hard to not be since that’s what her parents were forcing her to do. It never rang true for me the way she acted in her first few episodes, and it made a lot of sense because that wasn’t actually her true nature.
Victoria Chase from the first Life is Strange is an example of a problematic hero hater, even though some things about her are done really well.
First, she’s a typical snobby rich “mean girl” in school, and the protagonist Max is a social outcast. Yes, there’s the “girl-on-girl hate” trope, and Max herself is an embodiment of “not like other girls,” so that’s not great. But I also like how the story goes out of its way to establish that Victoria is really insecure and has a lot of pressure and expectations put on her. If you choose to be kind to her during the story, it cuts right through the “mean girl” persona and it’s very disarming.
I only wish they didn’t weaken that message by having Victoria say that “I never actually hated you, I always thought you were super cool” to Max if she’s kind to her.
Surprised you didn’t mention Dr. Pulaski
Pulaski is in the unenviable position of being written like a hero hater while actually being a hero herself. It’s the main reason she doesn’t work as a character.