For Want of a Hero...

I don't know if I've ever revealed this before on the blog, but I'm a huge Doctor Who fan. HUGE fan. Old school, new school. Hartnell to Tennant, I love them all. (For the record, my favorite is Davison. Tall, blond, young, angsty and tetchy. Hmm. I don't have a type at ALL. REALLY.) Anyway, I was talking to Flidget on AIM and came to a joyous realization.

I'm not the only person who HATES Torchwood.

Because I do. I'm sorry. I do.

I don't really hate Torchwood because the characters act like total morons most of the time (seriously, HAL JORDAN could think rings around these people...pun unintended) though that does get on my nerves. I don't really mind that they gave Captain Jack more layers, though most of them seem to be angsty and self-pitying. (Laughed my ass off that he kept the damn hand though. STALKER!)

My problem is that they're all anti-heroes! There isn't a damn hero among them!

I'm not saying every series or show or comic necessarily NEEDS a hero. Many work very well without heroes. But there is a concept that really, firmly, needs a hero to function properly. And that's the anti-hero.

Look, I enjoy anti-heroes. I do. They're very entertaining. I love seeing the conventional ideas of morality and hero-dom turned on their head. I like seeing not necessarily good people do not necessarily good things for greater goals (and sometimes lesser). Mr. Bennet is my favorite Heroes character, after all.

But the thing is. Anti-heroes don't mean anything without a heroic presence to offset them. There needs to be a voice of conventional, approachable, relatable morality to make the counterbalance and contrast mean something. There needs to be a hero.

The hero doesn't necessarily need to be LIKEABLE mind you. He or she can be incredibly annoying in fact. They can be the character that we most want to throttle in the whole bunch. Especially since being the voice of conventional morality tends to come along with some measure of the following traits: arrogance, judgement, uptightness, stubbornness, rose-colored glasses, narrow-focus, and so on and so forth.

But that doesn't make them less vital for their presence. Because without them, the anti-hero's rebellion and unconventionality mean nothing.

Torchwood is full of anti-heroes but there are no heroes to balance them out. Gwen seemed poised to be the moral voice of the show, but she quickly became as self-absorbed and amoral as the rest of them. I'm not saying they're not complex characters, but ultimately they mean nothing to me.

Contrast that with Doctor Who. Depending on his incarnation (though all seem to share the traits in varying amounts) the Doctor is manipulative, machiavellian, dismissive, arrogant, possesed of a god complex like nothing else, tetchy, unfriendly, snappish, and all that. But no matter what, at the core of everything. The Doctor is GOOD. He wants to HELP PEOPLE. He wants to stop people from hurting other people. He wants to make things better. And he does it because that's who he is. No more, no less.

I need that in my fiction. I need that one truly GOOD person to make me care about everyone else. If this one person can care so much about someone so self-centered and goal-oriented, who does vile things sometimes for the wrong reasons while doing yet other things for the right...then I can see why they're worth caring about too.

Also, there's a new level of approachability. Anti-heroes tend, I find, to become attached, attracted to, or otherwise emotionally involved with the heroes. Because truly good people do that. They draw other people in and they make other people want to be good, or resent them for being what they can not. Either way, the reaction to the hero tends to bring a lot more of a sense of humanity to the anti-hero.

Mr. Bennet would not be my favorite character if his daughter Claire didn't exist to show me why.

I admit, I'm one of those people who tend to like heroes anyway, even the obnoxious ones. Scott Summers will always be my favorite X-Men, after all. It is HARD to be a good person. It's HARD to live a moral life, knowing you're going to fall short sometimes. It's HARD to be a flawed person and know you can't ever really be the person you want to be. It's so much easier to just blow it off. To be cool rebel without a cause. To sacrifice morality for expediency. To focus solely on your own interests and goals and say to hell with anyone else.

An anti-hero doesn't have to make the tough decisions, to choose their heart's desire over an innocent child's life, for example. Anti-heroes CAN'T make those tough decisions because once they're faced with them, they can't be anti-heroes anymore. Sure an anti-hero can be forced into a facsimile of this situation. Wherein, he/she'll choose his heart's desire, of course. But something will stop him/her. Something will intervene to keep him/her from going through with it, before the point of no return.

Because otherwise, once that line is crossed, once the anti-hero makes that choice there is no turning back. An anti-hero who chooses to sacrifice their heart's desire for what is right is a hero. A flawed hero, sure, but a HERO. If the opposite choice is made...then you have a villain. There is a point where amorality isn't an option anymore, where you have to choose a side.

Torchwood bothers me because they're all anti-heroes. Not a single one of them has truly been forced to the point of no return. Sure, they've come close. They've done some awful things out of self-interest, but they all manage to skirt the edge and remain not-villainous.

At the same time, there's no real accountability. No sign that any of these characters feel any real sense of guilt and remorse. They're awful people doing awful things and occasionally saving the world if quite by accident most of the time.

I don't care. I simply don't care.

However I'm definitely looking forward to the upcoming reunion on Doctor Who. Maybe heroes like the Doctor and Martha can remind me why I liked Captain Jack to begin with. Actually I'm sure they will. Because they're HEROES.