Quotes / Designated Hero

Anime & Manga

He is just the man to become the hero who'll bring light to the shadows of this world. Sherlock Holmes.

— William James Moriarty, of Moriarty the Patriot

Comic Books

"But somehow we seemed to outgrow the world. We began finding Reds where others saw nothing, like in Harlem and Watts. In fact we found that most people who weren't pure-blooded Americans were commies!"

— William Burnside, Captain America #155

Fan Works

This is callous, self-centered evil in its purest form, and the fact that Lionheart presents it as the culmination of a brilliant, heroic plan is beyond sickening.

—rebonack7 on Chapter 76 of Partially Kissed Hero, Das Sporking

OUR FUCKING HEROES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!

No. Seriously. I've tolerated the USSPRA's bullshit for so long. So long. Gushing about Cole? Annoying as hell, but I managed to push through. Lovey-dovey shit? Also annoying, but I try to tune it out unless if it's really something worth mentioning. But this? THIS?!? This is the last straw. This is not what Super Sentai and Power Rangers even represent here.

In fact? I don't really want to consider these guys heroes anymore. No! From now on, from this fucking day forward, they're Designated Heroes. And all these moments are why. You can't really root for them, especially with shit like this, and trust me on this one, it does get a hell of a lot worse!

You know what I do see when I read this? I see a gigantic group of jackasses, with the exception of a rare few, who only care about themselves (or Cole), never any fellow humankind. Who flip out when things don't go their way. Who do shit that goes completely against their canon characterizations! USSPRA...you will never be true Power Rangers or Sentai Warriors!

—arcadiarika on Super Sentai vs. Power Rangers right after Natsuki and Eri are sent to the Detention Center, Super Sentai vs. Power Rangers: The Liveblog

Films — Live-Action

"I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? But sometimes, there's a man."

— The Stranger on The Dude, The Big Lebowski

Literature

You couldn't say 'we're the good guys' and do bad-guy things.

—Thud!

Yeva: Ivan is said to be clever and resourceful but in this story he seems only greedy and careless. The wolf warns him over and over and Ivan never listens. And yet, Ivan never gets punished. The wolf helps him every time, and neither he nor the wolf have to pay for what they've done. In the end Ivan gets everything he wants and lives happily ever after.
Beast: You may call me Ivan.
Yeva: Because of the story?
Beast: Because your Ivan is not a hero.

— Hunted, with the characters discussing "Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf"

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might.
Or does might make right?

— Afterword to A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Live-Action TV

"And our brave hero roasts the disabled man!"

— Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Space Mutiny

"Our hero: a big stinky CHEATER!"

— Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Final Justice

Video Games

"We need someone who can look into this... someone brave and fearless who can get the job done! But all we have is Crash, so he'll have to do."

— Aku Aku, Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage

"I'm starting to wonder which side is supposed to be the bad guys..."

— Haken, Endless Frontier

Webcomics

"According to a loose enough definition of 'hero', we qualify. Well, more or less. The point is that good deeds were done and we were nearby."

— Red Mage, 8-Bit Theater ("We Could Be Heroes")

Legolas: We defeated a balrog, you know.
DM: You didn't defeat it.
Legolas: Well, we faced a balrog.
DM: You ran away from it!
Legolas: Okay, fine. We were near a balrog. For several seconds.
DM: Wow, you guys must be so proud. Maybe you guys can find a bard and have your story of heroic balrog proximity put into verse.

— The DM of the Rings, "Deeds of Legend"

Web Animation

"Aiden Pearce was a hacker who did any work for hire and stole money from bank accounts, but then accidentally targeted someone powerful who killed his six-year-old niece, which gave him a little Spider-Man moment and he declared that from this day forth he would use his powers to… continue working for hire and stealing money from bank accounts, but also fight crime! In-between. If he can be arsed. Not stealing-money crime, or property-damage crime, or murdering-policemen crime; just, you know, all the bad crimes, the ones committed by people other than himself."

— Zero Punctuation on Watch_Dogs

"Fast forward to God of War 3 and Kratos is channeling Judge Death. He murders people who are flat-out offering him the things he murders them for. He murders the gods of the sun and the sea causing untold damage to the world, and all to get his revenge on Zeus. Revenge for what? Stabbing him in the heart in God Of War 2? Kratos had walked off that little paper cut inside 10 minutes!... And Zeus only did it because Kratos couldn't stop murdering things!

— Zero Punctuation

"And so, on this day forth, our hero has slain 30 men. And he would later admit to having a good time while doing it, too."

— Madness Combat, Episode 1

Web Original

There were like fifty writers on this screenplay and nobody realized the main characters are total wangholes?

— The Editing Room, Clash of the Titans: The Abridged Script

Don’t worry, kids, if you’re jealous, just try to kill everyone and Kamen Rider will be your friend!

— The Glorio Blog on Kamen Rider Wizard in Magic Land

...Dagny pulls rank and orders them to drive through the red light. This, in Rand's world, is the mark of a heroic and decisive capitalist, rather than the kind of person who in the real world would soon be the subject of headlines like '22 Dead in Train Collision Caused by Executive Who Didn't Want to Be Late For Meeting.'''

— Adam Lee, 10 Things I Learned About the World from Ayn Rand's Insane Atlas Shrugged, AlterNet

Not to mention, and we’ll see this with Cersei in a few scenes, the implications here is that what makes a particular instance of sexual manipulation bad is whether it was committed by an Evil Woman - rather than instances of sexual manipulation reflecting on the character of the perpetrator.

— Turtle-Paced on Game of Thrones Season 5 Episode 1.

He is, in short, an obvious villain protagonist (who doesn’t even have enough of a moral sense to rise to the level of antihero in most chapters), except that Lionheart doesn’t seem to actually realize that and presents every awful thing Harrymort does as perfectly justified and reasonable. The end result is disturbing to say the least; the character is both morally repugnant and thoroughly unlikable, and the fact that his moral degeneration is unintentional means that we’re even cost the possibility of interesting character development coming from his side into darkness. What a hero, isn’t he?

— Master Ghandalf on the Partially Kissed Hero version of Harry Potter, Das Sporking

This can be excused as the kind of shock-for-shock’s-sake that is naturally appealing to adolescents. But it is worth noting that The Last Resurrection’s Satanic themes avoid the unabashed we’re-the-bad-guys approach favoured by (for example) black metal music, and instead take a weirdly sanctimonious tack: these incestuous, misandry-driven rapists are portrayed as forces of good, nobly saving us from those evil Christians.

—Doris V. Sutherland, The Last Resurrection and Millennial Adolescence, womenwriteaboutcomics.com, on the topic of The Last Resurrection

"Leaving aside the undeniable blandness of this segment for a bit, isn't using an animal as a weapon to kill people a bit unsettling, especially considering the militaristic, jingoistic overtones that tend to accompany these games?"
"I'm pretty sure that we're the bad guys.
We are the ones who built the orbital doomsday device, use killer robots, and weaponize household pets after all."

—Something Awful discussion of Call of Duty: Ghosts

Web Video

"Now, I'm not too sure if I'm the bad guy or the good guy. Because I kind of look like the bad guy right now. (But then again, bad guys don't go left to right!)"

— JonTron on Samurai Zombie Nation

"Your hero is stealing from a hospital? Do you think that would sound good on a movie poster? Patch Adams: He steals from hospitals. I WOULDN'T SEE THAT!"

— The Nostalgia Critic on Patch Adams

"The reason the fans liked Rose was because the script liked Rose."

— Mr Tardis Reviews, "Is Doctor Who too sexy? Discuss!"

"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, our heroes, SUPERHEROES, emphasis on the heroes, are trying to destroy their friends' fulfilled lives, SPECIFICALLY to shirk responsibility"

— The Mysterious Mr. Enter, "Staring at the Future" review

"With Grover, he has to ace his project if he wants to steal someone else's girlfriend. Wait, that makes him sound like a terrible person. He's supposed to be the good guy protagonist we're supposed to root for, right?"

— The Mysterious Mr. Enter, reviewing Legends of Chamberlain Heights

"Bubba was playing a psychotic male predator obsessed with the thoughts of crippling women so naturally he was the babyface in this scenario."

— Adam, What A Culture.com

"You need to play it up like tragic antihero and less like just jackass."

— Rich Evans, Best of the Worst on the protagonist of The Sweeper

And frankly, it's not hard to see it as both Mark Millar and Marvel saying "yeah, the pro-registration side was the correct one." You know, the side that convinced people into revealing their identities to the public, violated the memory and DNA of their friend to create a murderous clone who killed another friend of theirs, recruited psychopaths to hunt down their friends, and then wrongfully imprisoned their friends in another dimensional realm where they were subjected to misery and depression. "No, no, they were the good guys and the ones we should be rooting for. This especially in light of the book ending, with Tony flirting with Miriam Sharpe and talking about how those 100 ideas will lead to a bright new dawn for the Marvel universe. You know, once they figure out how to weaponize the sun as a gigantic death ray. For peaceful purposes against the anti-registration rebels, of course! Nothing else.

— Atop the Fourth Wall, 15 Things Wrong with Marvel's Civil War

"You are a terrible role model for little girls!"

— Chip Cheezum on Jessica, Retsupurae

"Am I a hero? Eh, I don't know, I don't think it's very heroic if the only person you've managed to save is yourself."

— Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind

"RENT is a musical about selfish, horrible people framed as romantic freedom fighters. They show profound entitlement over other people's rights and property, but it is framed like romantic rebelliousness... Maureen is an emotionally abusive cheater who gaslights all of her partners. Angel gets into wealth at the beginning by killing a dog, Mimi is a self-destructive, co-dependent enabler, Collins honors the memory of his dead lover by hotwiring a local ATM to dispense cash for him and his friends when you plug his name in. And Mark, sweet Mark, you might just be the worst thing to have ever happened."

— Lindsay Ellis, "Look Pretty And Do As Little As Possible"

"So did you just get lucky that you didn't murder a random person?"

— Bryan Schilligo, Good Bad or Bad Bad reviewing Lords of the Street

"Throughout this entire adventure we've done... just questionable-to-bad things. Have we ever done good?"

— Fatguy703 on Book of Mario: Thousands of Doors' prequel, foreshadowing the twist that Mario is being possessed by the Greater-Scope Villain

"I've written here, this is the title: it says "Cade Yeager is terrible." He's all the more terrible due to his lack of self-awareness, he's all the more terrible because Mark Wahlberg. But, look! He doesn't pay his employees, he borrows money from his employee but tells him he's lucky to have a job. Bad form, bad form. He steals electricity from his farm from the neighbors, he's six months behind his property payments, he threatens the realtor and some potential buyers of the property with a baseball bat—again, a property he's not paying for, so technically not his anymore. He throws the bat at a car. He's never invented anything that isn't a slight variation on something that already exists. The slight variation being that his doesn't work. That's the difference!"

—Nick on Transformers: Age of Extinction, Caravan of Garbage

"The first time we see Tommy, he's spying on a half-naked woman with a camera. Isn't that a great way to introduce the "hero" of the movie, to make him into a pervert?"

— James Rolfe on Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

Producer: Okay, I'm just gonna say it. I think this guy's kind of a monster.
Screenwriter: (looking at the script) Uh, it says right here he's a hero.

— Screen Rant Pitch Meetings, on Batman (1989)

"Clay's performance is fine but it's really disheartening how he was basically coerced in a performance he didn't want to do, because always the great con artist and liar Buster Moon used his song without permission, then lied about promising to get him as a musician in his show, so he trespassed on his property just to save his own ass. Wow, good thing he conveniently needed closure for his late wife and the antagonist turned out to be an actual murderer, or else Buster's actions would've made him look like the asshole!"

— Cellspex on Buster Moon in Sing 2

"It's fine to write a protagonist who is a horrible person, if you at least recognize that they're actually bad guys... But lately, it seems like we end up with horrible protagonists being presented as 'heroes'."

— Out of Frame, Morality is Dead. Hollywood Killed It.

"How bad are your female characters when the audience sympathizes more with the cartoonishly evil misogynists? Honestly, is Sailor Victory really attempting to be a progressive female empowered story? Well, no because it's supposed to be a send-up of the giant robot genre but why take this needlessly hateful turn, especially when the characters are giving the assholes license to be assholes."

— Bennet the Sage on Sailor Victory

Jeff: And what about the lifestyles of the popular groups and artists?! Some are admitted homosexuals!

Brad: Kid... go fuck yourself. YOUR decision is to not listen to rock music, fine. MY decision is that I don't have to listen to any more of what you have to say, because as soon as you bring your homophobic beliefs into this one-sided conversation, I am done with you. You wanna say "music is evil"? Fine, that's your right but you at least have to back it up. This is a really, REALLY depressing movie. I'm not kidding! This is actually one of the more depressing things I've sat through! And I've sat through Salo and A Serbian Film! This is a movie about a kid whose love for music is transmorphed into something quote-unquote "evil" by his paranoid parents until he is turned into a raving, bigoted fanatic who loses his friends, his personality, and any sense of independence!

—DVD-R Hell on Rock: It's Your Decision

"In Mystery Incorporated, Velma was sassy, but in a way that was still endearing and didn't go too overboard. And it's certainly possible for a character to be sarcastic or negative, but still likable. Except here, they've confused "being sassy" with "just insulting people", so she comes across as incredibly mean. She's not sassy, she's just a dick, and that's putting it mildly."

— Cynical Reviews on the eponymous character's portrayal in Velma

Producer: Oh, Grandpa Joe's a monster! Is he a bad guy or something?
Screenwriter: No, he's one of the good guys.
Producer: If you say so.

—Screen Rant Pitch Meetings on Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

I started thinking a bit more about it, and I started thinking, is Claire Ripley? Well, God, no. Ripley sacrifices to save Newt, she tries to save the troops. Is she Gorman? No, 'cause Gorman sacrifices himself because he knows he's done something immoral and he was weak. And then I realized- Claire is fucking Burke!

—Mike Hill, Jurassic World, Jurassic Values

Western Animation

"I'll prove I'm a good guy, even if I have to destroy this entire city and beat you to a pulp!"

— Coop, Megas XLR

Brother Blood: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I intend to prove that the Teen Titans are not the protectors of Jump City as they claim. In their pursuit of "justice", they destroy everything in their path, with callous disregard for the safety of the city! They, not we, are the true villains!
Starfire: (sobbing) He is the right! We are the monsters!

— Teen Titans Go!, "A Farce"

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