Name: The Psychology Of The Anti-Hero
Uploaded: 2023-10-06T04:49:56.000Z
Duration: 14 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I have a pretty serious confession to make.

Before you destroy me in the comments, I know this is an unpopular opinion, but the Man

of Steel has just never resonated with me.

The problem for me has always been that he is too strong.

I mean, one of his primary powers is invulnerability.

The conflict is never if Superman will save the day, only how.

This apparent infallibility extends to his personality as well.

The biggest strike against him is that he’s too compassionate, and this can sometimes

That’s the answer you give when you’re asked in a job interview what your biggest

This relentlessly upright persona and general do-goodery make Superman feel distant.

His character is, pardon the pun, completely alien to my own experience.

And, if I’m being honest, it’s not all that interesting.

Characters like Batman, Wolverine and Deadpool feel so much more human.

They’re flawed, they make mistakes and sometimes they do bad things for the wrong reasons.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels this way.

Over the last two decades, antiheroes have become increasingly popular.

In fact, the top three highest-grossing R-rated films of all time are 2019’s Joker followed

Why have so many of us turned our backs on characters like Superman and Captain America?

To understand that, we first need to figure out what exactly an antihero is.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, this is easier said than done.

They’re dark, gritty, usually a bit reckless and make questionable life decisions.

However, the term itself is difficult to define.

Antiheroes as we know them today are a relatively new concept, and the parameters are fuzzy

At its most basic level, the antihero is a subversion of the hero trope.

In a technical sense, this means giving them characteristics normally reserved for an antagonist.

They might drink and curse, have an abrasive personality or rail against authority.

The problem with this description, though, is that its negatively defined meaning is

rooted solely in its opposition to something else.

This doesn’t tell us what an antihero is, merely what it is not.

This is further complicated by the fact that what characteristics constitute a “hero”

Heroes in the truest sense are meant to represent the ideals of a society.

They stand as living personifications of the values that citizens should strive to emulate.

However, these ideals and values naturally evolve alongside the beliefs and needs of

Traits seen as un-, or anti-, heroic change based on the cultural context.

In 1962, Canadian missionary Don Richardson traveled to Western New Guinea in Indonesia

to try and convert members of the indigenous Sawi tribe to Christianity.

He encountered some trouble though when his potential congregation identified Judas Iscariot,

not Jesus Christ, as the hero of the story.

It turned out that the Sawi people placed a higher value on trickery and deception than

They saw Jesus as little more than an unwitting sucker who had been duped by the true hero

A better way then of defining heroes and antiheroes might be by judging them based on their moral

Heroes by their nature are morally consistent.

They have a strict set of dedicated principles they follow that guide their actions.

Antiheroes on the other hand are morally ambiguous.

They operate in gray areas and are more fluid in their decision-making.

This ambiguity can manifest either in the antihero’s own personal ethics or in the

Not every antihero needs to be an edgy, homicidal maniac cracking one-liners as they shish kabobs

In fact, the classic antihero archetype looks a lot less like Deadpool and more like your

I know what you’re thinking: “Spider-man’s not an antihero.”

But even by the traditional definition, he kind of is.

When Peter Parker is first bitten by a radioactive spider and gifted with superhuman abilities,

he doesn’t want to become the savior of New York.

He’s insecure, anxious and wavers in his convictions, even allowing a criminal to escape

as an act of revenge against a boxing organizer who cheated him out of his winnings.

Over the course of his career, Peter quits multiple times, always questioning whether

or not he’s capable of overcoming the challenges given to him and living up to his responsibilities.

None of these are qualities that we normally associate with heroes.

Peter is inconsistent, and our perception of him doesn’t align with the image that

On the other end of the spectrum, there are anti-heroes like Wade Winston Wilson’s alter-ego

Deadpool, who we normally associate more with the term.

These are heroes who do the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the

Particularly in the comics, he is a mercenary first concerned solely with how any given

Even in the films, his story begins as a revenge trip.

Yes, his objective is to take down a cartel of human-traffickers manufacturing and selling

mutants into slavery, but he’s doing this only as retribution for his own disfigurement.

His motivation isn’t to break up the smuggling ring or free the captives, he just wants to

To say that Deadpool’s morals are loose is generous.

He is entirely self-interested, recklessly individualistic, and more than a little murder-happy.

If he ends up saving the day, it’s typically just an unintended byproduct of his actual

The key takeaway from this is that antiheroes are hard to pin down when it comes to assigning

moral judgments, either because their own ethical code is so nebulous, or because we

as a society have difficulty reconciling their personal traits with our own expectations

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The Psychology Of The Anti-Hero

perceive

crisis

associate

conflict