Failure Heroes

One thing that Watchmen did was point out to the reader that the heroes were not flawless demigods but people in costumes fighting criminals. I just keep think about often we pour our ideals into heroes and when they fail to meet it, we get frustrated, disappointed and angry. I know it is ultimately futile to poor ideals into all to human heroes but we usually expect to them to be larger than life but when we get heroes like Shinji Ikari we get frustrated that they don't meet our standards. These heroes fail because they did some thing either truly foolish, get screwed over by the universe, hampered by their own hubris, try and failed to redeem themselves or they just plain suck at being heroes. I often myself in such heroes but what do you think? Should we really project our ideals onto heroes, both fictional or otherwise?

a hero is always a reflection of the reader, either what he is or what he wants to be.

if you are perfectly honest with who your hero is, there shoulnd't be a problem with what to expect with them.

Shiji's problem was that he was meant to be the former while the audience expected the later (mainly due to all the extreme cynicism the story was having). the story needed hope and Shiji was hopeless himself. He was a good character but not what the audience is used to have. the story was never meant to be that way.

Shunji was meant to express the despair and sadness of the author, not to be The Cape or a paragon of justice

ideal heroes tend to represent what we aspire to be an they are great to inspire people even in real life. But failure heroes represent who we are.

believe it or not ideal heroes have changed people in real life for the better.Heroes like Superman and batman teach us that those ideals they aspire are worth it despite the cost. You would be suprised to know how many people have being inspired to never give up thanks to goku's idealism

Take a look at spiderman, perhaps the best blend between the two he seems to never being able to suceed in anything,he let gwen stacy and uncle bun die... and yet and he has realistic problems and yet... he has ideals that he never gives up like using all his power for the greater good even beyond his own benefit ("with great power..."). people see themselves on HIM... AND yet they aspire to be like him.

I recomend you to wathc Superman Vs The Elite and Kingdom Come, they make a point that ideal heroes are also great.They have the counter argument of works like Watchemen

It all depends on what you want to acomplish and tell with your character

edited 17th Aug '12 10:07:39 AM by FallenLegend

We get frustrated with Shinji because he's not entertaining, not because he doesn't meet our ideals. Plenty of people don't meet our ideals but make good heroes. (I can start with James Bond and work my way down through the list to much more recent people like nearly the entire cast of Black Lagoon. If you want to know what Shinji Ikari probably should have been, I recommend Nadesico's Akito.)

"shunji not being entertaining" is subjetive he does have his fans, that apreciate him as a character.

I am explaining why the lack of attachment from some people towards the character from a psychological point of view.

character likeability is always subjetive, and the choice of the audience.Some people will think shinju is the most interesting character on the anime, some like me will not.

edited 17th Aug '12 11:12:39 AM by FallenLegend

There are degrees of subjectivity. And frankly your take on why Shinji didn't make it is far more subjective than mine. You'd have to be pretty hard-core schadenfreude to watch the travails of the younger Ikari and be amused.

I am just claryfing a point of view. I actually did a research on this and I am talking about indentification. While the process is subjetive as you said, but the concept on itself is a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_%28literature%29

Yes there are people that enjoy shinji as a character. Believe it or not people taste's are varied. I am not myself a fan of the character, however.

My purpose is not to argue likeability (that is in the eyes of the beholder) but purpose and identification of a failure hero.

edited 17th Aug '12 12:00:20 PM by FallenLegend

Amen. I know very little about the series in question, but from what I do know - and what I know about similar characters I'm more familiar with - the general dislike for Failure Heroes is because they're just not a lot of fun to watch, not because of some nonsense about "ideals". The fact that Shinji and other characters do have fans just proves that further.

It's one thing to have a character or hero fail, it's quite another to have failing be their entire schtick.

Let's put it this way. Heroman saves Troper City on a regular basis from crime, terrorism and lupus. One day Heroman has the unthinkable happen, he fails to save someone. Now the failure itself is unimportant as per what it could be. It could be Mrs Pickleberry was simply in the wrong spot at the wrong time when that plane came down. It could be the law of gravity had it in for him when trying to catch someone out of a freefall. It doesn't matter what. Now here's the part that makes characters liked. How does Heroman handle this? Does he develop and evolve to become a better Heroman? Or does he dwell on this and the sole failure becomes his entire schtick?

In well written works, Heroman would get over the failure and learn from it. He's not flawless but he's still a hero when things turn tough. A similar case in point is Heero Yuy of Gundam Wing, he has failures but he learns from them and gets better both at what he does and as a character. In less capable works, Heroman basically becomes Shinji Ikari, a worthless angst-addled shell of a creature worth neither pity nor sympathy.

I'd like to point out that Shinji fails as a hero for the same reason Frodo (books, not films) fails. He's a protagonist who fails in his goal at the end. Frodo doesn't destroy the Ring of Power, Gollum does. While his world is save, he failed in his task as the hero.

I strongly disagree with both the idea that Shinji is not entertaining and that he is not worthy of pity or sympathy. Whether we admit it or not, Shinji reacts to his situation in the same way many people his age realistically would. It's amazing enough that his sanity lasts as long as it does.

A whiny bitch? I knew 10 year olds who had more psychological maturity than Shinji.

How many of them had to pilot giant cyborgs and fight hideous supernatural monsters?

If imagination counts, at least three of them.

I have a feeling the reaction would be less 'Holy shit a monster is fighting me and I'm in a cyborg and I'm about to die why is this happening to me?' and more 'Holy shit I'm fighting a monster and I'm in a cyborg this has got to be the best of things!'

edited 18th Aug '12 7:19:12 AM by Collen

^ Yeah, battling monsters in a giant robot is a typical 8-10 year old's fantasy. They'd jump for joy at the chance to do it in reality.

Wasn't half the point of Evangelion to show that fighting giant robots wouldn't be nearly as cool as it looks? I haven't seen the series, but from the sound of it, they manage to make it out as rather traumatizing.

I believe so, yes.

In fact, I think it's frankly bizarre to characterize Shinji as "unrealistic". What I know about the series suggests strongly that it's a good example of how realism isn't always fun to watch, which, as I said, is the real problem with the Failure Hero.

I have absolutely no idea who Shinji is so I can't weigh in on that.

The big reason why we idolize heroes isn't so much what they do, as it is what they show us. You could say Frodo 'fails' because he isn't the one to throw the ring into Mount Doom, but that's not the point. It's the point of the most basic plotline in the book, yes, but it's not the point of Frodo, as he and the rest of the Hobbits have character arcs that are meant to show the strength of humble people. The point is that he got so far with a burden that no one else could manage, not that he failed at the end.

We like to see people that embody strengths that we don't have or can't exhibit, because they remind us of what we're capable of at our best. In the end, that's more important than what they're able to accomplish. We can love someone who fails, because they did it with strength of character that we admire. In fact, failure makes a hero more sympathetic, because if they always did everything well, their strength would seem like it wasn't special at all. The problem with a hero based around failure, I suppose, would be a tendency toward melodrama. But that doesn't have to be the case—there could be an upbeat but failure-ridden character who would be sympathetic, and also qualify as a 'hero' for standing up in the face of odds that always seem stacked against her.

But it's true. Nobody is that whiny and unlikable in reality. You have to be the most maladjusted individual on the planet to even come close to his whining.

Most folks would have gotten raped, murdered, burglarized five times over, and beaten to death literally before they were allowed to reach Shinji's level.

People the world over don't have tolerance for his kind. Even the most maladjusted of people are still much more sturdy and mature than he is.

So it's better to simply say Shinji Ikari was an unrealistic and poorly-written character than to try to play him off as the "average teenager reaction to Adversity-X".

...Well, I can't say for certain, as I have not seen the series and all-but-certainly will never do so. But if I did, I strongly suspect that I'd be more in agreement with Lennik's point of view.

Shinji is actually three dimensional character but he was conceived as the anti thesis to the shonen hero.

edited 18th Aug '12 11:49:34 AM by GAP

And yet the shonen hero was more realistic if a tad done to death.

You would think that 8-10-year-olds would find it awesome to pilot a giant cyborg against a supernatural monster. Then they feel everything the cyborg feels, from their arms being broken to having energy lances thrust into their eyes, to having high-temperature energy tentacles impaled through their torsos. As an added bonus, they get a super high-temperature beam capable of melting mountains shot right at them, they get to sit back and watch the cyborg be taken out of their control and used to maim their friends without being able to do anything about it. On top of that, add in parental neglect and abandonment, Mind Rape, and the constant burden of having the fate of humanity on their shoulders with no therapists in sight.

Yeah, realistically, I'm sure a child would take all of that in stride.

edited 18th Aug '12 2:10:32 PM by Lennik

Some can. Some can't. Either way they won't act like Shinji or turn out to be him. (They'll either adjust or suicide rather than fall that far.)

Major Tom, I think it's less that Shinji is unrealistic, and more that you don't understand human psychology.

I found him to be painfully realistic.

That said, I think a lot of people went into Evangelion expecting standard giant robot escapist power fantasy, so I can see why they wouldn't like what they actually got.

I understand it plenty. Shinji is unrealistic.