Should heroes be allowed to fail?

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

I think making a heroic character, even a superhuman one, be human is something that's not easily achieved by most people. You have to make them have realistic flaws as well as strengths. I hate to resort to this example, but the best one I can think of right now is Batman. We all know about Batman as that kind of non-superhero superhero that can do extraordinary things, even beyond the scope what his limits should be.


Where Batman shows a side that's not really consistent with what we know him to be. As with most superheroes, they put all on the line to save people - but what happens when you cannot save someone? What happens when there is no happy ending at the end of it all? Heroes should always be allowed to fail, but the importance is in the context of how that failure is brought about. Failure for failure's sake is nothing more than poor writing and lack of an imagination.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Yes even when the superheroes doesn't like it (Batman: Golden Dawn come to my mind). As long they had tried but still fail in the end then I'm ok with that as oppose to given up so easily as in not caring.

 

[VoidWanderer]

I think Alfred says it best.

"Why do we fall, sir? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

 

[Battenberg]

You mean, for example, like Batman getting his back broken in a fight against Bane?

Personally a hero that never fails is bound to get boring eventually, that's one of the reasons I think Superman isn't very good as a superhero - he's basically unbeatable, with a near unimpeachable morality and can only be stopped by little green pebbles. A superhero who is all powerful/ undefeatable comes dangerously close to being 'God' and frankly there's plenty of books about that as it is.

A superhero is nothing without villains/ enemies that pose a threat to them, something capable of making them fail. So yes, in my opinion heroes should be allowed to fail and any hero incapable of failing isn't going to be very interesting.

 

[Porygon-2000]

Of course.
What is victory, without the threat of failure to contrast it to?

 

[Winnosh]

Should heroes be allowed to fail? Sure. My problem is that Superheroes just fail too frikkin often nowadays. It seems like heroes are only allowed to have partial victories or no victories at all in comics.

 

[Dimitriov]

Here?s an issue I addressed in a story of my own and I wonder what people would think. I?ll try to summarize the story:

Lord Maelstrom, a psycho criminal, clones the powers of young Jessica after kidnapping her. After she escapes, Jessica and her friend Kyle go on a mission to try to stop Lord Maelstrom from using these powers.
What is the resolution to this story? Kyle and Jessica, at ages 130 and 170, whom currently struggle to run a search a rescue for lost human kids, try to fight someone whom is well over five hundred years old that has been running and fighting full underground police forces that believe in full fledged vigilantism and lethal justice for all of his life. What do you think happens? They barely survive even the attempt. After the evil vampire breaks some fifteen or so bones in Jessica?s body with one hit (and Jessica?s species has no healing powers), both characters realize they?re out of their league. They back off themselves, let the authorities chasing Maelstrom know where he was last seen, and go back to what they were doing before, looking for a lost kid.

Yes, in reality there are no super powers etc, etc, but we all know these things are metaphors at best anyway. The point of the story is to learn that sometimes it?s okay to recognize that you can?t solve a problem and move on, even if you ARE in the right and you ARE rightfully involved. Yes, it?s a situation that requires thought, but it?s real enough. I rarely see a modern hero have to admit his own inadequacies like this. Is this bad not to show, doesn?t matter, or is it in fact bad to try to explore this so literally? Thoughts?

There's nothing inherently wrong with a protagonist failing, but I do see a potential problem there: you seem to be running the risk of not resolving plot lines. Certainly there are no rules as to what you can or cannot write, but introducing a villain with a some master plan and then simply having your story walk away from that without concluding the plot is... not great. If you do resolve it then you must either simply have someone else stop the villain or else have the villain win.

Also you have misused "whom" just so you know. It ought to be "who" in both instances because the relative pronoun is being used as the subject of a relative subordinate clause. If in doubt try replacing it with a normal pronoun to see how it sounds. If "he" or "she" sounds right use "who" but if "him" or "her" then use whom.

 

[piinyouri]

I think there was a time when having an un-corruptable, invincible basically non human hero was important and something people, and maybe even my country needed, but nowadays I feel a more human and flawed 'hero' is not only more interesting, but far more inspiring.

 

[Lyri]

Here?s an issue I addressed in a story of my own and I wonder what people would think. I?ll try to summarize the story:

Lord Maelstrom, a psycho criminal, clones the powers of young Jessica after kidnapping her. After she escapes, Jessica and her friend Kyle go on a mission to try to stop Lord Maelstrom from using these powers.
What is the resolution to this story? Kyle and Jessica, at ages 130 and 170, whom currently struggle to run a search a rescue for lost human kids, try to fight someone whom is well over five hundred years old that has been running and fighting full underground police forces that believe in full fledged vigilantism and lethal justice for all of his life. What do you think happens? They barely survive even the attempt. After the evil vampire breaks some fifteen or so bones in Jessica?s body with one hit (and Jessica?s species has no healing powers), both characters realize they?re out of their league. They back off themselves, let the authorities chasing Maelstrom know where he was last seen, and go back to what they were doing before, looking for a lost kid.

Yes, in reality there are no super powers etc, etc, but we all know these things are metaphors at best anyway. The point of the story is to learn that sometimes it?s okay to recognize that you can?t solve a problem and move on, even if you ARE in the right and you ARE rightfully involved. Yes, it?s a situation that requires thought, but it?s real enough. I rarely see a modern hero have to admit his own inadequacies like this. Is this bad not to show, doesn?t matter, or is it in fact bad to try to explore this so literally? Thoughts?

If you haven't already, go ahead and watch Kickass.
It is basically a story about failing, and that being a hero is not what you thought it would be.

 

[nepheleim]

A basic tenant of the hero's arc is the overcoming of some kind of adversity to propel the hero from one state to another (whether improved or not really depends on the hero and story). So, in order to demonstrate that a.) There is some adversity and b.) The hero actually needs to get from the one state of affairs to the other, you need failure at some point.

Other questions:
What would constitute a non-vigilante underground police force?
How did someone get from being a psycho criminal to a vampire in three sentences?
How did a species without the ability to heal something as minor as a broken bone make it far enough to have a society with police (both under and above ground, apparently)?

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

There are two answers. The first is entirely pedantic but boils down to the fact that if the hero fails, then they are not heroic. The basis for that can be found readily enough by pointing to the monomyth where, at worst, the hero will not achieve their desired end goal but, instead, the necessary one.

But, pedantry aside, there is no particular reason that the "good guy" ought to win. A narrative needs to earn it's ending regardless of what that ending may be. Slaughtering a character because it is unexpected (Game of Thrones for example) isn't particularly useful given that the whole "unexpected" thing necessarily requires that the narrative did not earn that outcome. Conversely, forcing a happy ending also makes little sense. The intervention of extra-narrative forces required to achieve such an outcome easily undermines a work when presented to a people who, by and large, don't place a lot of stock in fate as an unrelenting force in life. To see this go poorly on the "Hero wins" side, just look at Mass Effect.

 

[Bocaj2000]

The question to ask is why is it so important for them to fail. Is it part of a greater message? If so, is it the core message of your story or at least compliment it? If not, is it to produce an overly oppressive atmosphere?

If the answer to all of these questions is "no" then reconsider why you want these characters to fail. If you answered "yes" to one of these then think about ways in which the failing is justified and make a point out of it.

 

[Trivea]

Absolutely... if it serves the narrative. Not every single story is required to have an "and then they all went home happy, the end" ending. There's something to be said for good triumphing over evil, but it's more realistic to recognize, even in fiction, that this isn't always the case because the world is unfair.

I faced a similar situation to this with my role playing group. Typically, we have a single storyteller who plays the important PCs and all of the NPCs, guiding the other characters along from point to point. The stories are all vastly different. Once, I was asked to be the storyteller, come up with the entire plot, and lead it. However, we typically did all of this "good triumphing over impossible odds to beat the bad guy", and I wanted something different.

The "main characters", or the heroes, were six nineteen-year-old kids with magical powers that they couldn't control, and they were forced into the middle of a conflict between two five-thousand-year-old brothers, nearly all-powerful gods who had a severe history of hatred and resentment between them. Needless to say, it did not go well for the six heroes, because there sometimes are odds that are just insurmountable no matter what you do.

 

[Sir Shockwave]

Yes...and no. If you let the Hero win too often, you get a boring invincible hero and work tends to lose a lot of it's tension because you know how everything is going to turn out. Making them lose too often however makes them look like armless failures.

It's a delicate balancing act X3

 

[Silverfox99]

Heroes are allowed to fail in the short term. The fail is always a way to show a weakness and that character improving and finding a way around that weakness. Long term, and in the overall story arc, the hero can not fail. If they do they are not a hero. The character is protagonist but not a hero. The character can be a good person that you can learn from and make for an interesting story but that character is not a hero.

The example that you gave has no heroes in the story they way you have described it. Nothing was resolved except the characters learned that Lord Maelstrom is too tough for them. The characters might be heroes in other stories, but in this one they are not. If the characters knew that he was too tough for them and they went up against Lord Maelstrom anyways in an effort to save a child, and the child is saved then they are heroes.

This doesn't make the story bad or any less entertaining it just no longer becomes a hero story. This is the reason why if you read a Hero story the hero does not fail. The hero might not be able to overcome the situation with his powers and have to find another way around the problem, the hero might change what the problem is and deal with the new problem, there might even be a stalemate in the story, but a hero will never fail in the overall story arc. If a hero fails or falls the story you just wrote or read is now a tragedy.

 

[Kittyhawk]

Failure is an important aspect of any character (and life too. No one is ever perfect and we all have our flaws, be you super righteous or darn right evil. how you mold that into your tale in execution is also important.

If you need examples of failing/the fall from grace, there's plenty of examples out there across various media and tales. Look at classical tales like The Odyssey, to see how characters respond to, deal with and hopefully recover from big tragedy/failure, bouncing back with twice the will to survive. Then go away and carve your own fall (and hopefully rise for you character.

There's another option you should consider. Make another character who can kill your evil Lord, if those that try first fail.

 

[CaptainMarvelous]

Yeah, it's allowed and they totally do best example I can think of is Constantine in Hellblazer. He's not really a hero as much as a protagonist but he never has an actual full-on victory due to his series long running nature. He can beat the devil once or twice but eventually he f*cks up. It became a running a joke how often he lets his friends down and they end up paying some horrible price, some evil vampire dude kills a guy standing next to him and asks "Friend of yours?" to which Constantine replies "Must be, he's dead".