Here's something that might surprise you! I am a huge sucker for classic paragon heroes.
What can I say? I like characters that are good!
I like seeing them make friends, help people, turn enemies into allies. I like paragons!
They're hopelessly cliché, and have fallen out of fashion,
but I love them anyway. Now this might be surprising because, as most of you know,
I spend a lot of time talking about how realism can add creativity and meaning to stories
and how textbook characters tend to be pretty boring
and, you know, I stand by that.
But the trick with the paragon is that their character
is almost never as important as how they affect other characters.
What is there to say about a paragon? They're good, they're friendly, they're forgiving
(except in the case of truly evil beings),
they might have a tragic backstory or a grand destiny,
but practically speaking, they're good and open and try to do the right thing.
They don't tend to struggle with the morality or the motivation of their actions,
and their character development tends to be limited to finding new causes to champion.
But what does that do to the characters they interact with?
See, the paragon hero does something to the people around them - they inspire.
Sometimes their open friendliness ties the group together, sometimes
their reflexive desire to help the helpless starts rubbing off on their more jaded friends,
sometimes the sheer trust they place in someone makes that person want to fulfill that trust.
You look at this guy, and you just end up getting a big old case of the Warm Fuzzies
just by the sheer positivity radiating off them!
"Sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth."
Aand, sometimes that happens. Actually a lot of the time.
Now the point is this character, this paragon, is usually mostly important for the effect
they have on the story as a whole. Sure, they have a unique-ish personality in there,
but their behavior is generally going to be very predictable.
I mean there's only so nuanced "good person who does good" can be,
but what that character does do that's a little less predictable
is draw other more nuanced characters into the wake of their do-gooding.
There are two main examples of this, and they're both really obvious.
There's Superman (specifically from the cartoon)
and there's Captain America from the MCU.
Both start off doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do and they can do it,
both end up inspiring an increasing number of other heroes to follow in their footsteps,
and both end up sort of leading an expanding crew of heroes.
None as paragon or as idealistic as they are, but all inspired to try and do what they did.
This doesn't get much focus in the Justice League cartoon, but Cap Civil War actually kind of
dissects this trope in a pretty clever way.
If you've somehow managed to avoid seeing that movie you might want to skip this part,
but basically literally everyone in this movie is of the opinion that,
"Of course he's doing this,
he's Captain Goddamn America."
The only discrepancy is whether or not they're siding with him.
The ones on his side are following him because he's Captain Goddamn America while
the ones opposing him are like "there is no use debating this with him,
because he's Captain Goddamn America, and he's certain he's doing the right thing. "
Now it's a matter of furious debate if he IS in the right.
But the fact is that everyone involved in that whole fiasco is involved because of Cap.
Either because they're on his side, or they know the only way to stop him is by brute force.
Now Cap is actually supremely oblivious to the sheer weight of charisma he's lugging around
Case in point
but more specifically when he asks the other heroes for help,
He's disregarding the fact that most of them will side with him
just by virtue of the fact that he's Captain Goddamn America,
regardless of what cause he happens to be championing.
It doesn't seem to occur to him that he probably inspired most of them to do everything they're doing!
Tony's having to appeal to people's bigger-picture sense of logic,
but Cap just has to flash his stoic handsomeness in their direction
and they're gravitating to his side like it's a thing to do.
BECAUSE he's the focus, because he's the one who inspired them all,
he's also the linchpin that makes them fall apart.
Everything that happens in this movie happens because Captain America is so much
of a presence that everybody is orienting themselves around him by necessity.
Hey!
I think I finally figured out why this wasn't branded as an Avengers movie! Alright, spoiler's done,
the short of it is Civil War is something of a dissection of the "hero inspiring others" effect
and where it can lead. Now of course it's less of an idealistic situation
but it's still a remarkably interesting look into the potential power and
devastation that a Paragon can wreak through sheer force of personality, and whenever this character appears in anime
specifically, the most common thing for them to do is to turn all of their even slightly redeemable enemies into allies
within the space of the season or less. The thing is the most interesting part of the paragon character
is that they're basically a
catalyst for character development in other people. We've touched on how this can turn villains into heroes and heroes into more heroic heroes,
but they can also sometimes trigger Wacky Existential Crises in straight-up Villain Villains
just because of their sheer goodness. Going back to Cap for a minute, if we look at the first movie, we find this moment where
the Red Skull is monologuing about how they're both "gods among men", yada yada yada,
to which Cap responds with, "I'm just a kid from Brooklyn," and
this makes Skull go berserk.
See, Red Skull sees himself in Cap, or rather sees what he should have been: A textbook Übermensch with the looks and power
to make the title appropriate. So when he hears Cap's "just a kid from Brooklyn" thing, his ego
can't handle it. It's a classic case of Evil Can't Comprehend Good,
which is a trope on its own,
but basically Cap's sheer frank humility causes him to actually lose his cool and break down.
And this is actually pretty typical in the cases where the bad guy turns into a good guy later as well. Usually something the hero is
doing is totally weird to them, and their difficulty puzzling it out leads to them
re-examining their priorities in some way, or like Skully up there,
it makes him self-destruct. But see, the paragon themself is a confusing archetype as we've defined them,
what makes them the paragon is their general goodness and their tendency to accumulate people trying, in some way, to live up to their example.
But there are a ton of different Paragons in literature, and they're all very distinct characters. They're not all nice,
they don't all trust easily, some are doing good simply because good needs doing, and some are rising the face of concrete adversity.
I mean, for crying out loud,
Son Goku doesn't even do good on purpose! His
motivation is and has always been to get stronger and fight people, there's no moral compass
involved! And, as crazy as it sounds, on the opposite end of the Paragon spectrum, Batman is a Paragon hero.
He knows right from wrong and does the right thing because it's the right thing to do, that's really all you need. And with the
extended BatFam it's obvious
he's got the inspiring part down too. So given the crazy range of character types that fall under the Paragon umbrella,
how do you write a Paragon? I mean, we haven't even really been able to define Paragons. We've just identified a way
they're used in the story within relation to the other characters,
that doesn't tell us anything about them as a character, it
just gives us a few traits that can each manifest in a whole bunch of different ways.
It seems like it should be the easiest question in the world to answer,
but the more we look at what makes a Paragon character a Paragon character, the less
we seem to know. See the Paragon actually has a lot of leeway
in how they're characterized. We only have two defining traits: That they generally do good when good can be done, and that other characters kind
of flock to them, whether it's allies or enemies or something in between. This gives us a ton of possibilities for the actual character
so long as we adhere to those two traits. They can be bright and optimistic or struggling with trauma,
open and trusting or a little more closed off,
they might have a dark side or just be a straight-up nice person with no caveats. The Paragon can be almost
anyone so long as they act, you know, Paragon. And this also means they can be flawed!
I know! Crazy right? The desire for realistically flawed characters seems to have pulled the image of protagonists away from Paragon
but all you need for a Paragon is a person who does the right thing whenever they can. That doesn't mean
they're a perfect human being. For an example of a flawed paragon, let's look at Cartoon-Era Superman again.
Supes is a lot of things,
hero being the most obvious
but he's not perfect. In fact his biggest flaw is an inability to trust other people to do things right.
See, Superman is the most powerful hero on Earth,
and he knows it. This awareness
manifests in positive and negative
ways. On the positive side of things, he has this tendency to fling himself in the way of stuff that could seriously hurt his squishier
teammates or the world at large because he's very aware of how fragile everything is, but on the negative side of things he kind
of puts himself in charge of everything because he believes on some level that he can take care of everything. See superman never
internalized the idea that he might not be able to do everything on his own. Even Batman is more of a team player than he
is. Unfortunately this becomes dangerous when he disagrees with the League because whenever that happens,
he does things his way anyway. Superman doesn't really respect anybody as an equal, and as a result,
he's pretty quick to drop the Team Player thing when he thinks he could do a better job himself.
This is mostly visible when Lex Luthor is involved since Superman is pretty quick to assume Lex is up to no good, and even though
he's always right, Lex is very good at playing him and making him look like a paranoid demigod holding a grudge. Superman is still
unconditionally a Paragon Hero,
but that specific
character flaw makes him
actually very dangerous, as seen in the popular alternate universe where he decides the right thing to do involves murdering someone and taking over the
world. So yeah, even Paragons can be less than one step away from becoming horrible, horrible dictators
It's just a matter of putting them in situations where their personal definition of the right thing to do doesn't necessarily
mesh with ours, and that's actually one of the most interesting things to do with Paragons.
See it's never really a surprise when your Paragon does something good. Sometimes stories will put a Paragon in a situation where the right
thing to do might be dangerous or personally offensive to them, but because they're Paragons
they're going to do it anyway. If you really want your Paragon Hero to act unpredictably or
dangerously or in a way that has your audience goin' "Hoe Don't Do It," you put them into a situation that appeals to their
Humanity, not their Heroism.
Superman kills President Lex Luthor in the Alternate Timeline
because Luthor had killed The Flash, and Superman,
guided in part by Grief in part by Rage and in part by a Misplaced Feeling of Responsibility,
decided the right thing to do was prevent Luthor from ever doing anything that bad again.
He subsequently took over the world because he decided the right thing to do was preventing anyone from ever doing anything that bad again.
Back on the Marvel side of things Cap kicked off the events of Civil war because his brainwashed buddy (boyfriend) was in danger
and he decided the right thing to do was to protect him even at the cost of his friends being stuck in a Super Gulag.
See, Paragons can actually be really dangerous, and therefore from a writing perspective, really
interesting because if you can get them to think that the right thing to do is something objectively dangerous or bad,
they'll pursue it with the same single-minded stubbornness they do all their good deeds with. Now this actually gives you an interesting possibility:
Making a paragon an antagonist to your hero. See, when the story isn't centered on the Paragon,
they can unsurprisingly come across as pretty annoying. They've got this tendency to assume that their own Moral Compass must be universal,
so if your protagonist
happens to be in more of a grey area, they might take offence, and if your character has the misfortune to be something generally
considered Evil By Default like a demon or monster, a Paragon who sees them as inherently
irredeemable might end up being their greatest threat. See, Paragons are almost never written with any kind of character development that forces them to
re-examine their definition of good. When it comes to right and wrong
they're intensely stubborn and any kind of stubbornness in a character has the potential to become dangerous in the wrong situations. As a result,
it's actually very easy to show the flaws in a Paragon character without compromising their Paragon-ness and this is important because Paragons,
traditional, shining, perfect Paragons have fallen out of fashion as a result of the trend towards gritty, flawed
realism. So as a result of that shift we get to see DC's greatest Paragons, Batman and Superman,
each lose their ingrained sense of right and wrong and start conforming to the letter of their characterization
but not the spirit. Case-in-Point: Batman killing in the more recent movies.
And that's... kind of... I mean it's not really what their characters are for
Let's play "Spot The Typo"
All right,
simmer down. My point is you don't need to sacrifice a character's Paragon-ness to make them less than perfect. Paragons already aren't perfect.
They're stubborn and they tend to think of themselves as the highest authority on their own behavior, and they can be really dangerous if that
clashes with reality. They're not gritty flaws,
but they can be devastating, and you can tell a lot of interesting (and yes, dark) stories about a Paragon's influence on their world without
sacrificing their Paragon nature. So I guess... maybe... instead of making all our heroes and villains gritty flawed Moral Gray Areas
we could start throwing in some characters that are dangerously certain that they're doing the right thing. I dunno, could be fun.
Soooo, yeah.