Adam Sobel Week 8 - Anti-heroes

     I was thinking of blog topic ideas to write about this week when I opened blogger and saw Ariella's title called "Anti-hero". I thought that was a great topic idea and opened it expecting to see mentions of Deadpool and other famous characters, but instead saw that it was about a new Taylor Swift song. While the post was great, I was disappointed because anti-heroes are found everywhere in stories and are one of my favorite character types because they demonstrate the reality in struggles that a character can fight against and thrive in. Therefore, I decided to write my blog post on anti-hero characters.

    Lots of stories will have basic conflicts between good and evil, light and dark, or whatever else they call it. A great example are superheroes. You have a good person like Superman fighting against a bad person like Lex Luthor, a clear example of rooting for good. Audience members want to root for the hero, but anti-heroes make that so much more complex because they aren't always the hero, and are sometimes even the villain.

    The best example of an anti-hero is Deadpool, a goofy Marvel character who struggles constantly with making the right decision. When reading a story about him, you want to cheer him on to make good decisions, but then he does something wrong. So he tries to become a better person and then messes up again. You're on this constant wave of ups and down where you watch the person you want to win not just struggle against an opponent, but also himself. This is a much better of example of how humans are in the real world. We want to cheer ourselves and our peers on, but we always will mess up at some point.

    Batman is another great example of an anti-hero. He has morals that he can't break to separate himself from criminals, like how he can't murder. However, there are times in comics and movies where he has come close to murdering someone and that torment in him where he wants to cross over. When a character has inner turmoil like that, I think it creates a more complex character and demonstrates the struggles that we deal with more frequently, the struggle between man and himself.

    My last example will be somebody that we are all familiar with: Victor Frankenstein. When I first started reading the story, I was hoping that Frankenstein would make the right decision and reconcile with the Creature or his work and try to be a better person. He is the protagonist, and I wanted him to win. But, as I kept reading, he developed this complex inner struggle deciding whether or not to help the Creature, and ended up choosing the wrong path and creating his worst nightmare. His inner struggle kept him on the fence between being a villain and hero until the end, where he lost everything and only sought revenge for the situation he created.

    Anti-heroes can make a story so much more entertaining. It feels like you are supporting the bad guy in a story because you want him to become good. It creates a complexity in the character that feels more realistic, even in impossible stories. The internal struggles that anti-heroes deal with make characters and therefore the story more complex and entertaining.