Why do some people think that Good is Boring?

Exactly what it is says on the tin, why do some people think that being heroic, just and good is boring? I know all stories need conflict for the protagonists and that most antagonists embody flaws but it seems that there is a notion that being good is somehow just boring and/or foolish. Why do some people think that Geeneric Good Guys are boring?

If you add the qualifier generic to Good Guys, then you've got an answer there. Generic characters tend to be more boring than unique ones.

Part of being Good is also about following certain standards, and if you standardise something like that, you end up with generic characters (or more generic, at any rate). Flaws, on the other hand, aren't standardised to the same extent, even if there are Good Flaws, Bad Flaws. There's still more variety in them than in being Good.

edited 11th Jan '16 3:11:33 AM by AnotherDuck

Because, in most media, Villains Act, Heroes React: the conflict is driven by the antagonist while the protagonist represents either the status quo or the status quo ante. (The latter covers revolutions in which the hero tries to overthrow an established villain in order to restore an older, "happier" time.) The hero's goal is often somewhat nebulous: "restore peace", "find love", "protect my family".

By contrast, villains tend to have discrete goals and motivations. They must be engaging in order to present the audience with the sense that they are both a genuine threat and someone that must be stopped. The audience must care about the villain in order to become invested in the villain's defeat.

Good writers give the hero motivations that go beyond merely "beat the badguy, restore peace", but that's a relatively recent development in fiction.

In older tales, The Hero's Journey is used to flesh out the protagonist. They may start out fairly dull and ordinary but find motivation and character along the path. Again, though, the threat that they are adventuring in order to face is usually established early in the narrative in order to be credible and to invest the audience in its defeat. This can make the hero seem bland by comparison.

edited 11th Jan '16 11:16:27 AM by Fighteer

I'd say it's because, for some reason that's unfathomable to me, morally good equals stuck-up and humorless, and/or overly pacifistic according to popular fiction writers. Maybe the latter has something to do with censorship standards, but I find no excuse for the former.

Other than that, stories where heroes act and villains hinder are much more difficult to serialize, since you either have to change the status quo rather often, or just have the hero always fail at the overall goal.

Still, there's plenty of stories where the heroes are Walking the Earth (or even the galaxy), consistently make a difference wherever they go, and can actually present their idealism convincingly. It's just far too easy to create villains and have the hero be a reactive straight-man, so as to better serve as an audience surrogate. Ditto how chronic hero syndrome is the cheapest way to involve them in the adventure of the week.

edited 11th Jan '16 9:11:10 AM by indiana404

It's not that Good is boring. It's that Good is boring as a motivation. If the only reason your character is doing something is, "Because it's the right thing to do," that's pretty generic. It speaks to a lack of investment. An absence of personal connection that can be used to create drama. An absence of depth or complexity that could make the character less one-dimensional.

Interesting characters do Good all the time, but Good is typically an effect of their actions rather than the cause thereof. Bob's tenement is under the rule of a tyrannical landlord who refuses to fix his sink so he overthrows the landlord and gets the tenement bought out by a better owner who cares about his tenants. Now everyone can have their sinks fixed because of Bob's actions. Good has been done, but Bob didn't do it just to selflessly make everyone's lives better, he did it because he wanted his sink fixed.

If all a person cares about is improving lives, there are a million ways to do that, most of which don't involve slaying dragons or journeying to far-off lands. Africa isn't the only place where starving children exist. There's probably tons of people in your life right now who could stand to have their lives improved. If someone's journeying to distant lands to slay dragons just because dragons exist there that need to be slain, that just sounds like someone who doesn't have anything interesting going on in their life and has to go try to find an identity somewhere else. And that's boring.

The same is true of Evil, you just don't hear "Evil is boring" very often because writers have long-since gotten the hang of coming up with a plethora of motivations that can guide characters to drive the plot through actions that result in Evil happening. It is a rare villain these days who is doing something just to be Evil. Even the Joker has a personal motivation related to his character as of the Dark Knight Trilogy, and he's basically a one-note psychopath.

They're just still having trouble coming up with reasons for the protagonist to care.

edited 11th Jan '16 1:50:02 PM by TobiasDrake

And yet For the Evulz and (worse) Generic Doomsday Villain still exist today. (digress)

Anyway, just gotta note that doing good for its own sake is not bad. Just boring. Unless care is taken, it's easy to turn such a guy doing it into a Flat Character.

Villains can more easily be completely flat with no real motivation and still work much more easily than the protagonist. If the work has a focus that isn't directly related to the villain, and the villain is just there to provide some tension and something to fight against, then a flat villain won't distract from that other focus.

Most of the time, the protagonist can't be that unimportant for the work, and therefore has to be more interesting in and of herself.

Villains tend to have cool accents, while heroes are stuck with bland generic American accents because the heroes tend to only be Americans.

I agree with this, but a lot of the time, you'll see characters claiming that if the person doing the "good" has a personal stake in it, it's not really truly good because they're doing it so they'll get something out of it. It's only considered to count as them doing "good" if it's a completely non-selfish action that doesn't directly benefit them and often it has to disadvantage them to do it. Usually the type of thing you're describing is what anti-heroes with more emphasis on the "hero" bit do. They're going "good things" not because it's the right thing to do, but because it benefits them (and oftentimes other people) and it's not the wrong thing to do usually.

Personally I think it's a double standard because everyone (in the real world, not just fiction) does things because they benefit from it in some way. It's just that some benefits are a lot more intangible (ie: "because it's the right thing to do") and other's are very tangible (ie: my sink can now be fixed). Usually, the intangible benefits are presented as being more noble and the tangible benefits as being more self-serving.

Also, villains are almost always after the tangible benefits, so any hero who's after something tangible that benefits them always comes across as being more like a villain then a hero who does things for intangible reasons.

Because society associates being "good" with a lot more than just heroism and justice. It also involves not swearing, not drinking alcohol, not watching porn, not having sex (outside of marriage, anyway). Heck, several religions go so far as to say all earthly pleasures are, if not outright wrong, at least a distraction from what's really important. Why do you think desserts are often called "sinfully delicious"?

I find "it's the right thing" a pretty hollow motivation because there are reasons an act is good or bad and you should do the former for those reasons; but I'm probably arguing semantics.

I'm going to decent a bit to the thread and say I'm generally more drawn to character trying to avoid a loss than acquire a gain. Maybe that's because that resembles my own desires more, or I can more easily invest in something that's around in the present than in the future, or it implies greater vulnerability on the part of the MC. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't wreck all sorts of status quos along the way though.

And are frequently criticized for it. People love Loki and hate Malekith because Loki has personality and goals and dreams that are clearly established, while Malekith is just an evil guy who does evil things, more of a plot device than a character. Loki gets to have a gigantic fandom that cheers any time he's on a screen or stage, and Malekith is so forgettable that many of you reading this don't even know who I'm talking about.

edited 12th Jan '16 9:23:36 AM by TobiasDrake

A a lot of good points here.

I kinda agree with about the double standard towards being good though even if I understand the reasons why people think it's boring.

If you're good and do things because it's the right thing to do, that makes you a boring and unrealistic, but if you do things because it's benefits you in some way, that means you are less of a hero.

People have always liked Villains more too, due to being more hammy, being more dynamic, and being the ones responsible for getting things rolling. The heroes are often shown as underdogs struggling to triumph, but since their victory is a Foregone Conclusion, this just further makes the villains look better to many.

I think this can be fought against though. Give the heroes motivations that are both a little selfish, and also somewhat more humanitarian at the same time.

They have a motivation that's less then honourable, but still do good things for others, both as a way to gain allies, and just because sometimes they like helping people, combining altruism with pragmatism. Have them bounce between doing something because it benefits them (even if that benefit is simply I like doing this cause it feels good, which is still a motivation), and doing something that will help their goal.

edited 12th Jan '16 9:34:04 AM by HandsomeRob

Doing good because it's "the right thing" may seem like a boring motivation, but if we didn't have those kinds of people, the world of fiction (and of real life) would be pretty horrible.

Yes. Absolutely yes.

Indeed. Even a semi cynic like myself acknowledges this.

Still I wonder if you could have a character with that motivation while still making them exciting?

make the character with the motivation, and:

• explore the motivation. Discuss, deconstruct, reconstruct etc.
• give them other traits that people can focus on. Interesting behavior, cool design, etc.

The hard part is giving the character a personal investment in something, even if it's not the central plot. The events of the story need to affect him in some way. An important question that needs to be asked is: how is he different at the end of the story than he was in the beginning? Many writers with this type of character will opt for the Moral Crisis but that's just cheap drama and everybody knows it; it's boring because it's a Foregone Conclusion. We've all heard it before.

• Hero Man is a hero, man!
• Something happens that makes Hero Man question himself.
• Will Hero Man sacrifice his core values?!
• Nahhh

That's a popular type of story but the problem is that it's not Character Development. It's actually a deliberate denial of Character Development. It's a conflict where the goal is to not develop. Where success is achieved through stagnancy. Where change is the threat that must be overcome.

That's not compelling writing. The audience is here to see the changes, to see the effects of the journey, to see how its characters and setting is influenced by its events. By the end of the story, things need to be different than they were at the beginning or the story might as well never have happened at all.

So even if your hero is just here to do some good, he needs to come out the other end a different person than he was going in, or he's just a stagnant, boring character. Change is the lifeblood of art.

Some stories do this by having the character begin as an ordinary person or antihero and make the story about his transition to a hero. The everyman learns to care about something other than himself and do what must be done for the good of everybody, because nobody else can.

Others might have him begin as a hero, and have him settle down and create personal stakes as he becomes attached to the setting. The ronin stops wandering and starts a family in the village he protected.

edited 12th Jan '16 2:51:43 PM by TobiasDrake

There's also the scenario where the hero never wavers in their desire to do good, but they're forced to reconsider which course of action is actually the good one.

"The ronin stops wandering and starts a family in the village he protected."

I have a question! How do you have Character Development without alienating the audience?

I started watching the show about the wandering ronin because he (you said the ronin's a he) embodies the values I like to watch about: badass despite his lack of roots, rejecting 'family values' such as the idea that family must be protected and loved even if they're wrong and evil, or that people must at some point settle down and start a family to be of worth, etc.

But through the course of the plot, the ronin changes to the very things I've avoided, the things I do not want to watch. The rug was pulled underneath me, and I feel cheated. The show promised it was about a wandering ronin, only to break the promise, turn right around and become something else.

Why should I continue watching this show?

edited 12th Jan '16 11:06:57 PM by hellomoto

Often, at that point, the show is over. There's nothing more to watch. The show fulfilled the implicit promise and therefore ended. In cases where the ronin settles down during act 1, then the story is about an ex-ronin and Character Development continues from there.

Alternately, the ronin would train a young student or his own son so they can pick up his legacy.

The original idea of the ronin in Japanese feudalism is a samurai who has lost his master, through death or dishonor, and is condemned to walk the earth. This is a highly undesirable state and any outcome in which he does not die, abandon the warrior's life, or find a new liege is a bad one.

The concept has become slightly diluted in modern culture.

edited 13th Jan '16 7:52:52 AM by Fighteer

Are there any historical concepts that haven't been diluted in modern culture?

edited 13th Jan '16 8:35:55 AM by AnotherDuck

Because we, Humans Are Bastards who can`t understand why someone will be good for the sake of goodness.

..............I actually used to believe this.