What Makes You Think Your Fantasy MC Is a Hero?

One of the best things about fantasy as a whole is you get to see so many different types of heroes, from your standard knight in shining armor to dinosaur-riding magic-users who solve crimes.  Even when you get into the gritty stuff like Dark Fantasy, Grimdark, and other anti-hero subgenres, you generally have people you get to root for.  Why?  Because these stories are usually about changing things for the better, even if the characters fail or have the wrong motivation.

It’s the latter I want to talk about today, because as both a writer and a fan of fantasy, there’s one trend in particular that concerns me.  And that’s the use of “gray areas” to effectively whitewash or even glorify main characters who are selfish assholes.

Oh, you know who I’m talking about, as much as you may love them.  Not so very long ago, I posted a list of “40 Things I Learned from Reading Epic Fantasy” that detailed all the laughable tropes that we read fantasy for and therefore gloss over when they’re horribly misused.  Most of the books I read are guilty of 20-30 of them.  Some are more forgivable than others, and again, if a trope is used correctly, it’s what we like.  It’s when they’re used poorly that they point to a story that wasn’t well thought out, and these are the ones that usually star the asshole MCs I’m taking aim at today.

Now, this isn’t to speak of individual political or social ideologies, because it’s not really worth arguing something so subjective in so broad a genre.  But there are things we should universally expect our heroes won’t do – murder; rape; torture; abuse the elderly, children, or animals; betray friends and loved ones or even a nation; and myriad other crimes that we generally associate with villains.  Even when writing an anti-hero, there has to be a line in the sand that they won’t cross, or the story quickly goes from being about an anti-hero to just straight-up glorifying a villain.

Have you noticed we see heroes doing these sorts of things more and more in fantasy?  It’s not just my imagination, right?  It’s one thing for a hero to screw up, whether a minor faux pas or even committing one of the aforementioned crimes if it’s to set up a redemption.  But even then, it has to have context, has to be believable, and has to serve the story in more ways than just giving a so-called hero an outlet to act out their (or dare I suggest the author’s) true inner desires before having some half-baked “Come to Jesus” moment after, say, raping a woman for the hell of it.

So, what makes a hero a hero?  I’m sure a number of responses immediately jumped into your head, but I’m going to tell you right now that they’re wrong.  All of them.  Because in the end, it’s not what your “hero” does, but the MOTIVATION behind those actions that determines whether or not they’re a hero.