Heroes vs Anti-Heroes: The Battle You Didn’t Know You Were Writing

Ever wondered if your character is truly a hero or just a morally questionable anti-hero? The lines are blurrier than you think, and it's time to get clear on the difference.

In this episode, we’ll dive deep into the world of heroes and anti-heroes, breaking down their key differences and exploring the moral complexities that make them tick. Is your character’s flaw pushing them toward redemption—or just leading them further down the wrong path? We'll also tackle why the world needs more true heroes, and how understanding these distinctions can elevate your writing.

But here’s the twist: not all anti-heroes are created equal. Some may challenge our views of morality, but others just reflect the chaos of our modern world. Want to know which category your characters fall into? You'll have to watch to find out.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] So while all truthful stories have value, some types of stories I believe are more urgently needed, especially for such a time as this. And right now what I believe the world needs are stories about heroes.

[00:00:16] And there's a reason why we need this. It's because we have been completely overrun and inundated. with antiheroes to the point that even christians have difficulty Differentiating between a hero and an antihero. We actually don't even hardly know what it means anymore And i'm going to break that down for you.

[00:00:39] ​

[00:00:49] We need stories about heroes in the making

[00:00:54] The reason it should be a hero in the making is because they should already possess certain heroic traits You

[00:01:02] but of course, they're going to have a weakness. They're going to have a flaw that they have to overcome. They're going to have a fear or a wound that still needs to be addressed. But it doesn't mean that at the start of the story, they are primarily morally bankrupt. That is not what it means. And too often, that's what we do with our characters.

[00:01:27] We have them start out with character traits like selfishness. Which is one of the most difficult character traits to redeem and to overcome. It can be done, but oh my goodness is it hard. And most of us aren't good enough to do it. Yet. So if we need characters then who already possess certain heroic traits, it therefore follows that we need a clearer understanding of what a true hero actually is.

[00:02:02] What is a hero?

[00:02:04] the concept of heroes actually hails back to historically ancient Greece. Now in ancient Greece, heroes were not defined by their morality, they were defined by their extraordinariness. 

[00:02:19] You know, even if they were morally ambiguous, they were called heroes. Medea killed her children. But what she did was so beyond, so much bigger than normal human experience that she is considered heroic. And this pattern, by the way, continued all the way through the Wild West, where outlaws like Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy were labeled heroes simply because they defied societal norms.

[00:02:52] They went beyond typical human experience. But today, the concept of heroism has evolved. Now, heroes must not only be extraordinary, But they must also be morally good. They must embody the highest standards of morality while achieving great things. That's what it means to be a hero today. That's what it ought to mean to be a hero today. 

[00:03:27] So heroes, if you think about a hero encompassing these two major traits, one, they are extraordinary, but two, They are morally good or they are driven by more now.

[00:03:45] That doesn't mean they can't make mistakes But they have to know What is good? They have to have a clear idea of it So even if your hero and this can this can be a powerful thing, by the way If you have a character say you're writing a book series And in one of those books the characters just suffered so hard and for so long that they finally make a choice To do the wrong thing Boy, haven't we been there as humans?

[00:04:17] You bet. But the key, and this has always been the challenge, see what tends to happen is, we as human beings want to be justified when we do something wrong. And so then we start changing our perspective on what is right and wrong. Now this thing isn't really bad. I was just, you know, I was just, uh, sort of enslaved to this, uh, monogamous idea of marriage.

[00:04:44] But it's fine to have an open marriage. As long as it's two consenting adults, it's fine. And so we, we change our, uh, perspective of what is morally good to, um, to match what we want to do. But that's bad. That's where, um You know, moral relativism comes in, we get in real trouble there. And, and the Bible warns us against that.

[00:05:12] So we don't want to do that. And we don't want our characters to do that, but that doesn't mean that they can't make wrong choices. It's just that when they make a wrong choice, they have to know that they're doing that. And then you have to allow there to be actual consequences for the wrong choices that they're choosing.

[00:05:29] They have to experience the pain of that. Just like we would in real life. If you make a choice to have an affair. In your marriage, you can do that. Nobody is stopping you. Like you have free will you get to make that choice and boy, you'll justify it all the way to town But because you love the Lord you will be under God's discipline and it is going to hurt and when you finally have to deal with that reality the pain of that decision is going to be awful But we tell the truth about that.

[00:06:08] you also need to usually give your character a superpower. And I'm not talking about an act like, you know, seeing through walls with laser eyes.

[00:06:16] I'm talking about something that they are particular good at every single heroic or potentially heroic character has a superpower that only they can do that they do better than anybody else they're great and they inspire us to transcend mediocrity And they also take big risks, right?

[00:06:39] They take big risks like nobody wants to watch a story about the guy Who's the where the stakes are will he get the last piece of pizza? That's not exciting because it doesn't matter 

[00:06:54] They also provide role models for us in a world that is growing increasingly. I because people no longer believe that there are people who are heroic.

[00:07:06] Typically, anti heroes are a little villainous.

[00:07:10] Traditionally speaking, the protagonist is the main character and they were almost always a hero or at least someone who had the potential to be a hero. Someone who was good and noble and brave. Who cared about others. But the anti hero is kind of like a villain.

[00:07:36] I mean they have a mix of the hero and the villain and the part of the mix of the hero is the fact that they're extraordinary And they're unique and they're they're outside of the norms of even society, right?

[00:07:51] And they are often complex characters, which I think is one reason why they've become so popular But again, is that all we can do or can't we do better? By the way, there are some good reasons for writing anti hero characters like What I'm trying to say here, Is that an antihero? it's not that we just go against type right a true Anti hero a true Anti hero is somebody that has morally dubious Challenges but ideally it's because they live in a world that Where, what do you do in that world? This is what makes like the road by McCarthy, such a powerful book by Cormac McCarthy.

[00:08:47] This is a post apocalyptic world where people are cannibals. And now all of a sudden the moral choices are different, but but the father is a hero. He's good He's not selling his son To get food. I mean he's they're taking care of each other and they are our heroes. So so But they have to make some morally challenging choices.

[00:09:14] Sometimes they have to leave people behind because they can't save them, but it wrecks them. And the reason it does because they live in a world where it's impossible to live up to maybe some of the good heroic challenges. So they're antiheroes, but in a different way. Does that make sense? Are you tracking with me?I think that an anti hero Should be used to show true human nature You Real people are flawed and sometimes have trouble making moral decisions.

[00:09:46] And anti heroes also help illustrate areas of confusing ethical

[00:09:53] reasoning in society. But, the real reason to write an anti hero character, in my humble opinion, the purpose of writing that character is, if you have a world in which, that has become so corrupt, So dysfunctional that, that, that now the character has to really rebel against that dysfunction in order to change it.

[00:10:23] That's the true definition of an anti hero. That's not the definition that we're working with today. See what I'm saying? There's two different definitions of anti hero that, that can be worked with. A legitimate anti hero is the kind that lacks. You know, conventional, moral, or excuse me, convent, conventional, heroic traits, and maybe even has to make morally dubious decisions because of the corrupt world in which they live.

[00:10:49] That's a legitimate anti hero. But the anti heroes that we're writing today are the ones that just reflect our fallen sin nature.

[00:10:59] And we're sort of glorifying that. And that we're, we're just letting that be what they are. We think it's funny that they're just such jerks. That's not legit. That, I think, is the kind of antihero that we write because we have become like our society. We are no longer able to separate ourselves from society when we're, when we're creating that kind of a character.

[00:11:25] So what I'm really trying to do is free you to write an antihero if you have one that you should write. But understand the difference between the two types. Because there's the anti hero that's being reflected in a lot of stories today that I would say are bad, and then there's a legitimate anti hero where it's kind of different.

[00:11:47] Hopefully that makes sense. 

[00:11:49] Part of the reason why we're seeing So many anti heroes In the stories that are coming out of Hollywood and, you know, on the, on the New York Times bestseller list, is honestly because of the decline of real life heroes. The fallibility of historical figures. People expect moral perfection for, from public figures. And when they fall short, we end up discarding them wholesale. Think about Nixon. I am not a crook. But when it came out, what he did, It was, I mean, this really began a distrust. You start seeing a difference after that in Hollywood, the kind of stories that start coming out.

[00:12:44] The fall of Nixon ushers in an age of cynicism and we start reflecting. We no longer trust our government officials. We're suspicious of them. We're suspect. And guess what? We should be because they're pulling the wool over our eyes in many cases. Um, a lot of our heroes were canceled.

[00:13:07] You know, we denounced Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and some of our great heroes. And these men were not like Nixon. These men actually did have a moral code. They were founded on biblical. We want to say that they didn't found the country on biblical principles, but they did. But we need to challenge this modern attitude and cynicism.

[00:13:30] In fact, I would argue that it's an opportunity for us to see their flaws as proof of an even greater greatness. The fact that they are flawed and still accomplish such great things gives us hope that we can be better. Like we should be in touch with our own sin nature and know what we're capable of.

[00:13:59] But if even flawed people like Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves. can accomplish what he accomplished in light of his moral, uh, you know, challenges, man, that means I should be able to overcome my own moral complexities, my, my moral deformities. I should challenge myself to be better. So it actually could give us hope.

[00:14:30] Their moral failings didn't erase their accomplishments and it shouldn't erase ours. In fact, it should inspire us to rise above our own weaknesses. Unfortunately, this demand for perfection has made it hard for us to trust not just our real life heroes, but people in real life. And so what's happened?

[00:14:51] Well, we have actually stopped looking for heroes altogether. 

[00:14:56] now when you test these high school classes and ask them, well, who are your heroes? They don't have anybody. They don't say things, like even their, like my grandfather or my dad, nobody says that. A lot of people will say, myself, how sad is that? You know who was one of the number one stated heroic figures?

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[00:16:32] You know who was one of the number one stated heroic figures? Lady Gaga. When asked why? Because she doesn't care what anybody thinks about her. That is our standard of heroism? That is the The inspiration that is motivating our young, how sad. No wonder so many of them are so lost. If that is the full evaluation of what makes a person great, to just not care what others think about them.

[00:17:15] And yet that is the breakdown of heroes in our society. This is why I think we need to create stories with really great heroes so that kids can have heroes again, because it changes the world. When we have heroic characters, we change the world, but they can't be cookie cutter and they can't be naive and they can't be stupid and they can't be silly.

[00:17:39] You know, they've got to be great. But where we're going to find those characters is actually in the past. We actually knew how to create them back in the day. We have lost the ability to create them in many ways today, which is partly why we're talking about this.

[00:17:56] and by the way, true stories of heroic feats, there's always a market for that. Look at all the books. I mean, there are still books coming out with stories about heroic feats from World War II.

[00:18:10] Things that men did that are just, they defy comprehension almost. So there's always going to be a market for that. And if you find a story about a true life hero, it's amazing. We like those stories, but that's not the only place to find stories. In fact, you might not have a story like that. Fictional heroes are still legit.

[00:18:39] And, in fact, in many ways, fictional heroes have become more important because we tend not to trust that these real world heroes are really going to measure up when we really evaluate who they are.

[00:18:53] So because society has lost faith in real world heroes,

[00:18:58] fictional characters are a safer way to go in many ways because they can have flaws without disappointing us. Without breaking our hearts. And part of this is because we can understand their hearts and their motivations in ways that we could never understand real people. We accept their imperfections

[00:19:29] in a way that we wouldn't. Except the imperfections in real people. So fictional stories then help us make sense of a complex world by giving a form to heroism that allows readers and audiences today to experience a resonance with them. You know, we need heroes that resonate with our audience, and that's what it gives us a golden opportunity.

[00:19:58] I can tell you. That the world desperately craves heroes, and I know this because I was, I went to all the Marvel movies, all of the Avenger movies, I watched them. I was in the theater when, you know, Marvel Endgame, when, uh, Captain America was able to summon Meow Meow to himself, which is Thor's, uh, hammer for those um, moon yay or however you say it, but I'm calling it meow meow.

[00:20:32] Uh, and it's a movie and people went nuts! There was cheering! Why was there cheering? Because we knew what it meant. We knew that that meant that he was so pure that Captain America was so pure in heart that he's able to summon

[00:20:59] Thor's hammer. It was huge. People loved it. And so there's a long and you know what? The main character of the Avenger world is Iron Man, who is a flawed anti hero, and yet, at the end, so his growth, his change, his arc is that he gives his life. He lays down his life for everybody else. He gives up what he could have for the greater good.

[00:21:31] He becomes, finally, at the end of the day, he becomes the hero he was always supposed Always meant to be that he always had the potential to be he finally embraces his true destiny and he dies a fully embodied hero it's a beautiful story and It made billions of dollars and that's how you know people are longing and for personally I think You know, there's a lot of people that uh, you know debate and say oh those aren't works of art or all that You know, they're so silly I disagree.

[00:22:07] I think they are powerful and they give us a glimpse into what people are longing for today, but they can't find.