An Antihero is not a Hero from Qward

…Wow, even I think that title was a little geeky. Wikipedia exists, if you don't know what Qward is.

Anyway, so, apparently it's become ever-so-hip to have heroes who are complete tools. I’m sorry if you think the modern antihero is more complex than that—it usually isn't. There are a number of difficulties with this.

First off, the paragonish set of perfections that the antihero is supposed to be the antithesis or deconstruction of…never existed. Hector, Achilles, Aeneas, Roland, Beowulf, Arthur—all supposed to be heroes, right? Well they're nothing like perfect, now are they? They're all quite flawed; if you made up a character with the traits of any of them, nowadays, people would tell you how hip and edgy your antihero was. Of course, this might not be a problem with antiheroes as such, but with the half-educated simply assuming that any hero with flaws is an antihero—I've even heard Spider-man called an antihero, and if Peter Parker is an antihero, Clark Kent is downright Byronic.

It seems that what distinguishes an antihero from the ruck and run of flawed heroes (who have always made up the bulk of heroes) is that a hero struggles against his flaws, and wins (even if it's a Pyrrhic victory), while an antihero loses. Which brings me to my second problem with antiheroes: they're fail. I'm sorry, I don't consume fiction to observe the fail of the person I'm supposed to be sympathizing with. I cannot conceive of why anyone would expend the effort to imagine things sucking—I don't need fiction for that, the real world furnishes me with ample, nay excessive, examples.

My biggest problem, though, is that antiheroes are supposed to be dark and edgy, and yet they're not. The antihero doesn't really question (much less make us question) our values: he questions other people's values. It is not exactly edgy in an egalitarian Western democracy to question authority, wealth, or privilege. The average antihero is basically wearing a t-shirt: One Badass Apple-Polisher. Quite seriously: find me one antihero who isn't just asserting one particular brand of liberalism, either against non-liberalism or some other brand of liberalism. Western democracies' fiction makes Socialist Realism look downright apolitical, and what's really funny is none of them even know it—lit-crit is dominated by Post-Modernism, which is all about emancipation and liberation and…you get the point. The only critics of the Stalinist literature are the Trotskyites; none of them know there's non-Marxist forms of discourse.

There were exceptions for a while, in the 50s and 60s—antiheroes who did truly vile things, really questioning their society's values. But that's not any better; Mein Kampf is not a legitimate critique of Marxism.

PS. It occurred to me as I finished that there is one antihero who really does what antiheroes are supposed to do, and it's no coincidence that so many of them are unintelligent copies of him. Neither is it a coincidence that criticism of him almost always boils down to him not being a "safe" antihero.

I refer, of course, to Dirty Harry, in the first one anyway. Harry actually questions our values, and yet, unlike all those amoral antiheroes, he only works because of his appeal to higher values. Essentially, he asserts natural morals, even where they conflict with his tribe's taboos.

But then again, they probably weren't setting out to write an antihero, just a very flawed hero.