I was thinking about Captain America, but the modern Cap is done quite well - he knows that he represents an ideal that doesn't really exist, and he's uncomfortable with it and the silly costume. The one that really springs to mind though is Sir Galahad. Lancelot is a much more interesting character, IMO. I guess the point is, most people generally try to do good, but when push comes to shove, they don't mind breaking rules, or at least taking advantage. A real world example - I speak to a lot of business owners on another forum, and most of them are decent people. But during the pandemic, the government has offered a fully backed, low interest loan that you are only supposed to take if your company is in trouble. Most of the business owners have chosen to take it even if they didn't need it because it's free money, others have taken it because they needed the money to live off, knowing full well they couldn't pay it back and would have to liquidate their companies. Morally wrong? You could argue it is, but they would say they had no other choice. It's very rarely so black and white. God forbid any of us should ever be in that situation, but not everyone can truly, categorically say they wouldn't take revenge on someone who had murdered someone dear to us. The most interesting characters are those that are wrestling with their own instincts. That's why my favourite Marvel characters are villains - when they're not being villains.
There are lots of reasons why good people do bad things sometimes. Here's the famous Milgram Experiment, designed to try to understand why the ordinary people of Germany, once they became Nazi soldiers, were capable of such horrendous things. They mostly said they were just following orders: Another good example is shown in the movie The Crucible, based very closely on actual court documents taken at the Salem witch trials. Things were set up in such a way that, if you were accused of witchcraft, you could either be hanged, or you could turn in 2 (or was it 3?) other people. In that case you just have to sign a confession and do pennance at church or something, and the other people now have the same choice—either die with your name smeared horribly as a witch, or name a few people to die in your place. Strangely, almost all the inhabitants of Salem were eventually accused of witchcraft. The lesson is that it can become a matter of you or somebody else. As I've said several times before on the board, there are times when decent people have to decide if they're going to be the guards at the gulag or the ones inside the cells being tortured and starved. You either turn in a few people for wrongthink or go into the gulag yourself. In situations like this, it's pretty hard to be spotlessly good.
I think it's a combination of the following-- --Living in a more cynical and distrusting age, where we tear down the tall poppies ruthlessly. --A modern love of antiheroes or villain protagonists (Breaking Bad, The Shield, Dexter, Hannibal, Cruella, etc). Unfortunately, a side-effect of writing such characters well and going into detail on their justifications for doing nasty things is that the audience (and in really bad cases, the writers), ends up forgetting that they're still bad people doing bad things. If the character is charismatic and / or sexy, the sort of misdeeds that people will forgive becomes truly breathtaking (the "Sephiroth Principle"). --A rebellion against stupid or simplistically written villain factions (the Evil Overlord rules) leads to them becoming more plausible and competent. Unfortunately, that spills over into making them unrealistically super-competent and efficient (see: Draka). --An association of being "bad" with being a cool, sexy rebel who plays by their own rules. We've always had a bit of a fascination with villains as a vicarious way to be uncivilised and stop worrying about all those tiresome rules.
The whole 'people identifying with the Joker' phase was pretty cringeworthy. Telling the difference between Understanding that protagonist and virtuous hero don't always align is tough work for a good chunk of people.
A sign of the times we live in. I think it's hard to fit a tender hero like OP describes in a modern day story without breaking realism or immersion. The most likely outcome for this kind of hero in the world we live in is that he would be crushed, or turned into a morally grey antihero by traumatic circumstances.
It can be done in a children's story or a very gentle story. We create the story world we want, it doesn't have to reflect social realities of the times. Of course whether such a story would be broadly accepted in these times is a different matter. If it's well done a lot of people might appreciate it as a break from all the insanity going on all over. Imagine if tomorrow the original Star Wars came out. Or, as I try to do sometimes you can put a decent character with good morals into the harsh world. They can learn to get tough without becoming totally jaded if they have decent values. Of course any childish illusions they may have need to fall away.
No, it just means that your target audience aren't young people. There are tons of older readers who aren't looking for disillusioned garbage, stuffed with grimdark absurdity. You write for adults.
I believe there are also a lot of decent young people who appreciate decent stories with decent heroes.
I'm not saying that there aren't, just that there are an awful lot that focus on the dark, dank and disgusting side, post-modern dystopias and anti-heroes who are evil for the sake of being evil. You certainly can't generalize, the the second any of those stories come up, it's a good bet that the author is under 30.
Strongly disagree. The times we live in are comfortable and the levels of violence and bigotry are at their lowest in history (no, really!). The difference is that modern times in the Western world are far more anxious, and much more saturated in information, making us acutely aware of the problems we have, and the flaws of people we admire, and also making us feel more personally responsible even for big abstract problems that we have minimal influence on.
