this is the most perfect hero of all time the absolute Pinnacle of what a hero should be in
every way cliched the point of transcendence with no flaws or weaknesses whatsoever a strong virile
man of course irresistible to women unmatched on the battlefield he's probably from a noble
or even Godly bloodline but even if he isn't he's definitely some variety of the chosen one
the world is his to save he's trued his ideals and would never hurt an innocent hack I bet he'd
spare's enemies if given the choice he doesn't Ravel in violence but fights for those unable to
fight for themselves and of course his goal is to stop the evil villain the ideal hero
extra emphasis on the quotation marks but what would happen to this hero if we started to strip
away some of those qualities what is he without his strength and good looks What If instead of
the chosen one he was a mere commoner or even something lower like a criminal or an invalid
what if he was cowardly rude selfish what if he accomplished his goals by any means necessary even
if it meant betraying his allies or hurting the innocent what if he isn't motivated by any high
ideals or worse just doesn't have any what if he only cares about his own Survival or
revenge on those he feels have wronged him and what if the person standing in the way of that
goal just so happens to be the villain what is this what have we made is he still a hero
or has he become something else well actually we do have a term for it a complex much loved
archetype one you've probably heard of before what we're looking at here is an anti-hero [Music]
thank you did you know that we make more than YouTube videos it's true like this one about the
magic of crafting living beings or this one about angels and why artists surrender them
in the ways that they do you can see all of them over on our streaming platform nebula by
signing up for just thirty dollars a year that's just 250 a month visit go.nebula.tv tailfoundry
and use code tail Foundry for such a well-known well-loved archetype the anti-hero is honestly
a pretty nebulous concept everyone seems to understand this thing in slightly different
ways the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as simply a protagonist or notable figure
who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities Wikipedia takes it a bit further suggesting that
nantyhero usually comes with one or more of the so-called dark Triad traits psychopathy narcissism
machiavellianism what's more if you were to look at its companion article the list of fictional
anti-heroes you would be forgiven for assuming that the term anti-hero pretty much applies to
every character ever written including Donald Duck and at least half the Looney Tunes I think a lot
of this disconnect comes from what we understand to be quote heroic qualities which of course means
something different to every culture and era you may have noticed earlier that I specified
our ideal anti-hero as a man that's because for a long time just being female would be enough to
qualify a character as an anti-hero in Antiquity heroic qualities tended to be less moral and
More Physical strength fortitude bloodline and of course masculinity classical Heroes like Hercules
aren't given a lot of character development we know who they are and what they did and that's
about it and with so little to go on in terms of quantifying the nature of heroism it was pretty
easy to fall out of it back then not of noble or Divine lineage not particularly strong not the
peak of masculine bravado well back then they'd have probably thought of you as an anti-hero but
that's definitely not how we think of them these days in fact by modern standards the earliest
example of nanti hero really just isn't scarcities a Greek soldier from The Iliad is described as
hideously deformed bow-legged hunchbacked head drawn out to a point with a mere tuft of heretopit
in the story he steps forward during a war meeting to criticize King Agamemnon for profiting from
Warfare at which point our hero Odysseus beats him with the King scepter until he cries making the
other soldiers laugh later interpretations of the character including Shakespeare's tend to present
their cities as a hero of sorts himself unafraid to speak truth to power but at the time of the
iliad's writing that wasn't seen as a heroic quality back then Heroes didn't speak truth to
power they were loyal to their King despite how we feel about it now back then the good guy in
the scene was Odysseus who put the freak in his place it was only hundreds of years later when
standing up against tyranny began to be treated as more heroic that the anti-hero interpretation
of their cities caught on but their cities himself never changed the way people interpreted him did
to this day it's pretty rare to see a hero that isn't conventionally attractive even rarer to see
one that's disabled technically by our working definition so far either of those things would
still be enough to qualify a character as an anti-hero today but I think very few people
would identify say Quasimodo from the Disney adaptation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame as
an anti-hero he's a traditional hero who just happens to have a physical deformity and that's
because somewhere along the line moral traits became far more important than physical traits
and how we Define a hero a modern day hero is brave loyal selfless chivalrous it doesn't matter
whether they're a man or a woman child or adult king or ragamuffin considered pretty or not and
okay maybe that's a lot to expect of one character not all characters are going to have all of these
moral qualities sometimes they're going to be missing one or a few or even most of them
so does that technically make them all anti-heroes well contrary to what we saw in our ideal Hero at
the start in modern writing giving their Heroes significant flaws and weaknesses is simply a sign
of good characterization no one wants to read about Mr no personality being perfect for 200
Pages giving their Heroes flaws weaknesses and doubts makes them feel deeper more complex for
instance Spider-Man isn't really possessed of the self-confidence in commanding president's
traditional Heroes tend to have by classical standards this quintessentially adolescent
awkward humble character would be considered an anti-hero but we don't really think of Spider-Man
that way do we he's become one of our classic models for what a hero looks like his flaws
make him more interesting and take nothing from his heroism honestly if I were to pick any of the
big golden age heroes to be a secret anti-hero I think Batman would come closest sure he has almost
as many heroic traits as the unquestionably heroic Superman they're both strong handsome successful
Brave compassionate and follow a strict moral code against killing but Batman is also just so
dark and brooding and tortured makes it sort of hard to reconcile him with the classical image
of a morally virtuous hero doesn't it it doesn't however actually Rob him of any of his heroism
he's not really an anti-hero by modern standards he's more of a byronic hero a heroic archetype
that became popular in gothic fiction during the literary Romantic Era instead of a lack of
heroic qualities a moral fiber byronic heroes are basically just real Moody they're characterized by
their stormy passion and emotional torment instead of a departure from heroism in the way of the
anti-hero the byronic hero is more of an evolution on the tragic hero think Oedipus or Macbeth
so Darkness not the same as villainy you can absolutely be a tortured hero but still
a hero through and through nevertheless I think anti-heroes in the minds of most people are still
fairly dark and that's not surprising given what happened to them in the 90s it was around this
time that anti-heroes really started to enter the popular conscience and they did it in uh Grizzly
fashion the popular anti-heroes of the time were often amoral violent or outright Psychopathic
the bride from Kill Bill is an assassin vicious in pursuit of Revenge for the death of her baby
The Punisher Delights in murdering the bad guys he's pursuing in the most brutal ways imaginable
these are edgy violent characters who don't even feel a little bit bad about what they're doing
they aren't afraid to blow up the city they don't care if they kick the dog all they care about is
getting what they want so there's that dark Triad Wikipedia was telling us about but wait a sec
doesn't this sound a bit more like a villain than a hero kicking the dog blowing up the city that's
certainly not what a hero does right where do we draw the line when do you fall so far from
hero that you finally flip over into villainy and wear it between the two does the anti-hero
exist well first we kind of have to get villains so let's go back to our hero turned anti-hero from
the start we already know that you can do all kinds of terrible things without quite becoming
a villain per our 90s anti-heroes right so what traits can we give him to create a True Villain
here's where I think we start to look at not just morals and traits but methods motives and goals as
well like our anti-hero our villain is probably motivated by purely selfish ends rather than
the greater good the methods he uses are probably similarly distasteful unjustified violence torture
betraying allies and using them as cannon fodder but the goal that's where we really start to draw
a line villains want something bad obviously but unlike our villain even if their motivations are
less than pure in their methods are downright detestable our anti-hero ultimately wants
something good in the movie Deadpool for instance our protagonist wants to take down the evil
scientist Ajax not because of the horrors Ajax perpetrated during his attempts to create super
soldiers but because he wants revenge on the man who tormented him for years and ruined his life he
pursues that goal by ruthlessly interrogating and murdering Ajax Associates even when he's given the
opportunity to continue his question a more lawful manner by joining the X-Men Deadpool in true
anti-hero fashion declines and that I think is the key difference both villains and anti-heroes are
capable of terrible things but in the end we as an audience know that what the villain wants is bad
and what the anti-hero wants is good no matter how dark tortured or morally questionable the
anti-hero is trying to achieve something that we can ultimately agree with although notably this is
not the same as a villain who thinks they're doing the right thing I know the difference seems subtle
but I think it's an important one think of Thanos in The Avengers series he's convinced that he's
saving the universe by killing half the beings living in it somehow his logic is transparently
flimsy even from a distance it nevertheless makes him a more interesting more nuanced villain than
one who knows and accepts that what they're doing is evil more empathetic just look at the subreddit
R Thanos did nothing wrong to see this in action it's a joke but look how resonant this character
has become just because he had what he thought was a good reason for doing what he was doing
the word for this self-deluded type of villain is not anti-hero but anti-villain and we probably
need to do a whole separate video on those at some point too if you really want to see that
be sure to leave a comment so I think we have a pretty good working boundary here a hero by modern
standards is someone with strong moral fiber who may be flawed but tries to do the right thing an
anti-hero doesn't really have that moral fiber may even exhibit the opposite but still ultimately
tries to do something good and a villain no matter their moral qualities or their motivation is
someone who ultimately does something bad there you go easy but there is one tiny problem here
how do we know whether what these characters are trying to do should be considered good or bad to
begin with the obvious answer is that you should use your own moral judgment which is of course
highly subjective based on where you live the era you are born in and so many other factors
beside but I'm going to venture to say here that that is not the right answer you can of course
determine what you personally think the morality of the character's goals are but what about their
cities if we think of him as a hero it suddenly makes the text look very alien and unempathetic
why would the author knowingly cast the story's true hero Odysseus in such a harsh light the
answer is that he wouldn't remember at the time and place of this story's writing it wasn't
seen as a moral for Odysseus to treat this poor soldier in the way that he did I think to answer
this question how do you know what's supposed to be good or bad in the story and therefore who the
heroes and the villains are is that the story will tell you instead of applying your own judgment
here you can use the text itself the context of the story to determine the roles of its characters
you can usually tell who's who through the language used to describe them and their
actions or whether the author ultimately chooses to vindicate or punish them you can always opine
about the morality later but the story will make a lot more sense in the moment if you listen to
its implicit sense of morality first and to that point this is one of the things I love so much
about anti-heroes and one of the reasons I really want to make a video about them by definition they
operate in a gray area who they are Depends so much on what we understand about their ultimate
aims if we don't know what to think the story doesn't tell us the distinction between anti-hero
and villain all that disappears sometimes their goals even change part way through as they slowly
transition into villainy and we barely even notice but in the stories where we just can't quite tell
if their motives are good or bad everyone just kind of becomes a character this is more common in
mature Works where the intended audience is adults and the intended Aesop is none anti-heroes leave
us room to argue they muddy the Ethereal intent in audience interpretation in a way that forces you
to confront not just the story's morality but your own as well these characters want good things but
when do their methods and motivations become so reprehensible that you abort them instead of cheer
them on the most powerful thing about anti-heroes is in my opinion that they make you ask where
is that line for you well certainly feels good to cover that topic this is a video we've been
waiting to make for years and next week's video is also something I've been waiting to make for quite
a long time it's about magic systems and what magic really means to us as storytellers it's
one of my favorite videos we've made in a while unfortunately it's still going to be another whole
week before you get to see it although you could go want it right now if you wanted to it's already
online waiting to be watched ad free over on our streaming platform nebula actually we've got a
bunch of stuff over there that you won't ever be able to see here on YouTube full videos like
this one about a fantasy world that basically has its own gigantic Geographic genitalia or this one
about the morphology of angels and why artists are always giving them Wings even though they
didn't really have them in the source material you can find all our videos there a week earlier
than they upload on YouTube plus all of these exclusive videos we only upload to nebula we even
have an entire original series called worldsmiths over there that we are just so proud of and we are
not the only ones who have been posting there the same is true for so many other amazing creators
YouTube is kind of a crazy place to make content don't get me wrong I'm happy to have this platform
but you have to be so so careful about your topic choices your packaging what you include in your
videos you just start to feel like you're walking on eggshells nebula doesn't have any of those
concerns it's an entirely different environment devoid of the weird YouTube cynicism the entire
platform was built by creators for creators every time you watch a video there Creator you love is
getting paid and far more than they would ever get paid on YouTube and on top of all of that
nebula even helps its creators to fund incredible original content that they never would have been
able to make on their own you know like our series worldsmiths and here's the really fun
part you can get nebula for cheaper than almost any other streaming platform on the internet
like 250 a month that cheap we want you to have access to our nebula content so we've managed to
get tail Foundry fans who sign up using our link a whole 40 off the usual rate oh and I
didn't even mention did I nebula is more than just a video streaming platform it also offers
classes created by creators which peel back the curtain to show you what it means to make your
own content if you've ever been curious what it's like to do what we do this is the best way to find
out and maybe even get started yourself so here's how to see next week's video right now get access
to all our exclusive content all of nebula and all of those amazing Creator classes all you have to
do is click the link in the description or go to go.nebula.tv tailfoundry and sign up for one year
that's it and with our discount that first year is only going to be thirty dollars which again
comes out to just 250 per month frankly I'm not quite sure how they can afford to do this for us
but I'm definitely not complaining seriously take advantage of this offer while it's still
going I don't think any better one exists in the world of streaming anyway that's all for
this one thanks for watching and keep making stuff up I'll see you next week bye [Music]
[Music]