Seriously! Why is it that no matter how literally *EVIL* the villain is the hero is held back by a mainstream author? Unless we’re talking stories like Game of Thrones or Blade or The Boys we almost ALWAYS end the climax or progress through a story with the hero holding back a well deserved punch.
We can bare witness to our heroes getting beaten, broken, verbal abused, publicly shamed/slandered, tortured, kidnapped, killed, raped, maimed or even worse! We can cry, weep, scream ourselves asleep after every chapter no matter how much it hurts.
We can bare witness to scenes so brutal & sad, moments so harrowing & mind-numbing, or entire chapters dedicated to butchery the very souls of the heroes we love at the very end of the climax, allowing ourselves to accept that the authors we idolize hate us as much as they hate their characters.
Our favorite books don’t always have the best endings or the happiest moments so we accept that our heroes are going to suffer pain that is unjust & sometimes horrifying, soul-devouring & unwarranted violence against their spiritual & physical person.
But if a villain is responsible any one of those things we never get the satisfaction of the “punishment fitting the crime”.
Why?
by Illustrious-Video353
3 Comments
… what books are you reading that this happens? I see just the opposite all the time in crime thrillers, fantasy, sf, and historical fiction.
Because if the hero is every bit as vicious as the villain, how do we know who is who? Sure maybe the hero is a bit better justified but if all you need to do horrible things is the right justification then it is super easy to toboggan right down that slippery slope.
A well-written, thoughtful work will generally recognize the tension between the occasional necessity of doing bad things in self-defense and the potential for escalating if you have to break a moral code. Per the classic Nietzsche quote: “*He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.*”
But also it’s just that stories don’t always need to make practical sense to be satisfying. We all want to be rewarded for doing the right thing and its nice to see good triumph over evil, even with the handicap of being good. There’s probably also some religious connotations around the fact that in a lot of older works the hero doesn’t deal the final blow, some divine lightning bolt or somesuch does it for them.
It’s not fair to hold people up to the standards of Blade