The David Crosby and Phil Collins song “Hero” has a line that perfectly defines my favorite type of hero character: “And the reason that she loved him was the reason I loved him too. He never wondered what was right or wrong. He just knew.” That’s the paragon, the hero who doesn’t need to “become” a hero, just an incident that starts him to his destiny, but he was already formed by loving parents or a fictional character that inspired him to want to be that kind of hero.
This archetype seems to be a lost art, and there’s a sadly loud chorus cheering the death of the paragon and the aspiration heroes in general because they refuse to believe anyone could just be inspired from the beginning to do good, if they ever are good at all. They embrace the anti-hero and want regular heroes to struggle not with a powerful foe but his or her own inner demons. Any hero to the contrary is “unrealistic”…in a world where everyone is wearing spandex flying around punching each other.
Professor Geek dropped a great examination of the paragon as part of his series on character archetypes, and I have a few thoughts of my own on the subject.
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