by request of a person called insomnius
Hero is a word that can mean a very many lot of things. You’ve got superheroes, personal heroes, sporting heroes, literary heroes, hero sandwiches, and also those people who risk their lives for other people, rescuing children from burning buildings et cetera. And then you get the whole antihero thing, which seems to have become far more common than classical heroes, and among all those uses of the word, when I am asked to write about heroes I am just not sure where I should be going.
Superheroes
Generic Superhero!
Are the closest thing to the original meaning of the word. A step above the rest of humanity, superheroes have superpowers and superlives and superfriends and superenemies and everything is more important and more exciting and ten times as explode-y. I have nothing really against superheroes, but they were never a thing of mine. When stuff is fictional, the higher the stakes are the less I am interested, and even now I just give props to Batman (he is the goddamn Batman, after all) and let the rest lie. I watched Captain Planet, (“He’s a hero!”) but as far as I can remember, the show was mostly about the kids and how much they could get done without the guy. Also, as far as me liking superheroes goes, Captain Hammer … hasn’t helped.
Everyday Heroes
I hate to call a real, flesh-and-blood person a hero for a thing they have done. Doing something extraordinary or altruistic doesn’t make a person less a person. If I, for whatever reason, managed to rescue fifty children from a burning, collapsing building, I would rather be the person who had done so than the hero that had done so. See? Person = who. Hero = that. And I didn’t even mean to write it that way. To name a person a hero wipes out everything else about them that makes them a person. It’s a gripey thing, since I know that hero is a huge compliment, and a lot of people would like nothing more than to be considered one. It’s much like the way my father (Hi Dad if you’re reading, look, you’re famous! And I still dislike this habit of yours!) will say “an elderly” instead of “an elderly person”, or if people say “a black” rather than “a black person”. It just really really really really really gets on my nerves, because people are people, not just one of their characteristics. Thus, a person who is brave is a brave person, not a hero, and a person who is ingenious is an ingenious person, not a hero. Maybe a heroic person, but not a hero. This is my feeling.
Personal Heroes
This is where the word hero starts to align with “idol”, and things get a whole lot subjective, and a whole lot harder to express. I don’t think I have any heroes, not outright ones. There are things about people I would be very happy to emulate, certainly. And these people by no means have to be real in the strictest sense of the word. Here is a brainstorming of things I think of when thinking about my “heroes”.
- Stephen Fry – emotional honesty
- Ron & Russell Mael – something about avoiding convention and incredible long-term achievements
- Boromir! – human enough for weakness, heroic enough to recover and mak,e amends, even more impressive because of earlier weakness
It took about ten minutes to think that stuff up. I’m just not cut out for having heroes I guess. As for why that is, I don’t know. I think it’s just I don’t have one favourite person ever. If I start calling a few people heroes, they will be joined by an insatiable horde of people whom I like and kind of admire. Which dilutes and defeats the concept.
A Note to Note about Sports:
People are all, “Just because a person is good at sport doesn’t mean they are a hero! They are belittling true heroes such as soldiers etc”, but I’m pretty sure being good at sport isn’t the only attribute a successful professional sportsperson has to admire and emulate. My own personal view of heroism makes it easy to separate the admirable qualities from the less so, but people who buy into a warts-and-all brand have a point.
I feel kind of like I have failed to address something important, but since I have been taking my own sweet time getting this thing out in the first place, I might as well give you what I’ve got. If it comes to me later, I’ll write it later. If you need more information, deal 000.
And if you really wanna, you can ask, and I’ll give you some (5) stuff(s) to write about.
This does not encourage me to start drinking coffee.
