Stormpoint Feb 2024 – The Anti-hero’s Weakness
In the wide world of ideas the anti-hero is gaining ground. I find these stories of anti-heroes ugly, unless they grow beyond their selfishness. They have a major weakness, namely, that they never grow stronger. Instead they fail, make themselves victims, and revel in their failure. After they are knocked down, they don’t get up again, not in any true sense. That is repellent in any person, and most of all in a story, which most readers go to for encouragement, enjoyment, and a guiding ethos. (I had to look that word up. It is a Greek word referring to the character of ideals and beliefs of a community, ideology, and so on, including the alignment of passion and caution. –Loosely paraphrased from Google.)
Great fantasy show us the beauty of justified self-sacrifice and the ugliness of it’s opposite, the unjustified anti-hero. How fantasy explores what is worth dying and what is worth living for opens worlds of choice and myriad possibilities before our eyes in wonder.
In The Fourth Scroll, Karen Grunst takes the lead character down the path of a true heroine. Sarah discovers that the life she expected to live must die (figuratively). And she grieves that loss. Suddenly she is forced down a completely different path with only the vaguest notion of what her new life will entail as the novel ends.
And Amy Earls in Forbidden Reign says it well. “Elohim walked with me in those frightening places, and maybe the darkness as well as the light is a part of His plan. Sometimes things must die before the world sees the life they can bring.”
Dying and living can both be dangerous and deadly. That is the nature of choice in life. For whenever we live to one thing, we always die to another. Dying for the sake of hope often brings life. As it does in [the above books]. Paths divide and hearts choose. It is odd that it is often necessary to die, sometimes literally, in order to truly live. —Fantastic Journey pg. 197
The weakness of the anti-hero, his very real despair, propagates a lack of strength and whining, to put it bluntly. We encourage you to see the end of the anti-hero, in more ways than one, and instead to look up to heroes who strive for truth and light and good. Imperfect, but still heroic, still standing. Those who refuse to stay down under the weight of darkness.
Crossover – Find the Eternal, the Adventure
Have a great week!
Azalea
