"The Hero Always Wins" Affect

[Xombie3000]

Came across an interesting article today concerning heroes who always come out on top and win against their fight with evil.

http://www.comicvine.com/news/off-my-mind-does-knowing-the-hero-always-wins-affect-reading-enjoyment/144447/

We tend to root for the good guys and there are times when the stories can get pretty dreary for the heroes. The odds can get stacked against them and it appears as if all is lost. Could it be that the bad guys will finally win? Probably not. Great writers are tasked to come up with compelling stories that make you actually question the outcome. But no matter how much they throw at them, the chances are going to fall in the hero's favor. Does this fact that the heroes will always win lessen the impact of great stories?

This can also apply to TV and movies. Does knowing the title character will always win almost ruin the story for you?

 

[PlasmaTwa2]

The ending to Mass Effect 3 sucked. Can't really call it a hero's victory since you kind of commit galactic genocide.

 

[Smallville22]

Sometimes, because the evil also deserve some victories.

 

[STDiva]

It doesn't ruin the story for me, but I wouldn't mind if the evil winning percentage went up a bit.

It's refreshing to see evil win.

 

[Xombie3000]

I believe the Affect is why Spider-Man is so popular. He has always been billed as the "every man hero." With all of the setbacks in his life, each one of us can kinda sit back and think about when something like that happened to us. A lot of people forget Spider-Man originally wanted to use his powers for greed. He wanted money, and lots of it, and when he got screwed over and watched he person who screwed him over get robbed, well, I believe I would have probably done the very exact same thing he did and let the robber run right past me.

Another series I enjoyed that I thought I wouldn't, was Wanted (the book, not the awful movie that had nothing to do with the book itself). The story featured one day every villain deciding to team-up and finally rid the world of heroes. They went back in time and completely eradicated the heroes exsistance and took over the world and ran it from underground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanted_(comics)

Using magic and advanced technology, the newly formed Fraternity was able to erase the world's memories of superheroes and supervillains. All that remained were faint, inaccurate memories, which were the cause of superhero comic books and other media. Many of the surviving heroes now believed themselves to be actors who had played superheroes.

 

[Mr Glam]

It can get annoying when it's a team of good guys but the lead character always has to be the one to fully defeat the villain.

What is the absolute worst IMO is when a show/comic has one of the early villains turn into a good guy...and then make him about as useless as possible. "Oh no I was once the most powerful villain in the universe but I've just been defeated by one of the current villains lower level goons, oh no!"

 

[VampDude]

For me, when I play games where you can choose your righteous path of either GOOD or EVIL... First choice, the evil path.

Why? Because it's fucking awesome to be evil sometimes!

 

[D-rock]

Quite frankly downer ending suck. It's a lot of the reason humanity created fiction in the first place. I will somewhat restate what I read about an author whose work I generally liked said after other people came in and did a bunch of dumb crap with the setting. It went something like if he wanted to watch or read about moral ambiguity, the bad guys winning, or crappy things continually happening and winning out he would just watch the real life news.

I have to agree with him. I read fiction so I don't have to go through that. I want to experience a place where the good guys win and good triumphs in the end despite great struggles that might need to be gone through to get there. We get enough of the crap of the bad guys winning in real life.

 

[squallumz]

This can also apply to TV and movies. Does knowing the title character will always win almost ruin the story for you?

YES! a thousand times YES.

i fucking hate that the good guy always fucking wins. i was just complaining about this last night. everyfuckingtime a main character gets shot, falls down a pit, gets stabbed, they always live.

they try to make it suspenseful, but its not suspenseful when you KNOW that they are going to be fine.

its fucking stupid. if i wrote movies and shows, people would die. main characters, poof, dead. oh, didnt see that coming? what?! the bad guy actually won?! no way! yeah, in my world they do. makes a good ending for me.

yeah. this is a hot topic for me. whats the point in pretending he might die when you know he wont?

 

[Xombie3000]

I don't know if anybody has ever seen it, but the movie "Fallen" staring Denzel Washington had an amazing ending in my personal opinion. I was completely shocked and blown away right before the credits started rolling.



Another movie that really set in stone the whole Hero affect was The Empire Strikes Back. I mean, the heroes were constantly chased and beaten down throughout the entire movie. It started off with the good guys losing, and ended with the good guys losing. Such a dark film for it being a space fairytale, and yet, it ranks as the best piece of the entire saga.

 

[D-rock]

Another movie that really set in stone the whole Hero affect was The Empire Strikes Back. I mean, the heroes were constantly chased and beaten down throughout the entire movie. It started off with the good guys losing, and ended with the good guys losing. Such a dark film for it being a space fairytale, and yet, it ranks as the best piece of the entire saga.

I don't think things that are going to have a sequel or some kind of continuation of the story count. If that was the last movie of the series it wouldn't have ended that way.

 

[Automate]

There are no happy endings, since whenever you follow a storyline far enough, it will end in death. As a matter of fact, there are no endings. There is just a point in time where the storyteller or narrator has decided to stop talking (or writing or whatever else fits the medium in question).

I do not want clear-cut morally delectable and well-chewed bullshit endings without any edges or jarring. Any story worth its salt has a difficult, thematically realistic ending. The greatest example of this that I can think of: Planescape: Torment. The ending of the game is immensely satisfying, despite... well, I will certainly not spoil it for those that haven't played it.

 

[Hondarobot]

The hero losing is tough to pull off. I can think of two primary examples in movies where it actually works:

The Directors cut of Blade Runner. Great ending, worked perfectly. The original, studio mandated ending is stupid as hell.

The Mist. I loved this ending too, it actually shocked me. Unfortunately I took a date to see the movie, and she really hated it. "What kind of a fucked up movie was that!?" I was asked at the closing credits.

I didn't get laid that evening.

 

[Bearded_Menace]

I don't know if I would say that anyone "won" at the end of Cowboy Beebop. The main character's girlfriend gets killed and he ends up dying in the end as well.

 

[Mr Glam]

Actually thinking about it...it's pretty smart writing wise. Why not keep the same character(s) around? It beats having to come up with more new characters.

 

[squallumz]

I don't know if I would say that anyone "won" at the end of Cowboy Beebop. The main character's girlfriend gets killed and he ends up dying in the end as well.

yes, an excellent anime and an excellent fucking ending.

 

[Rey C.]

I like movies and TV shows where the "good guy" isn't necessarily the good guy and the "bad guy" isn't necessarily the bad guy. That's one thing I enjoyed about Lost. The game that Jacob and the Man in Black were (finally) shown to be playing with each other convinced me that Jacob wasn't necessarily the good guy and MIB wasn't necessarily the bad guy. I liked that. Unforgiven is a movie that had Eastwood playing a character in a grey hat, not so much a white hat.

That's more realistic. That's how life is. No one (or very few people) is all good or all bad. I hate most Hollywood movies and TV shows because they seem to follow a predictable formula. And you can almost always predict what is going to happen by the end = boring.

 

[Patrick_S]

These rules don´t apply in horror. In fact, i think i have seen more movies where the "hero" dies in the end (or in some Giallo´s, turns out to be the killer him/herself) than "happy" endings in horror movies.