Unclear Description: The Hero

A recent line of discussion in the Trope Description Improvement Drive has revealed that The Hero's article has serious problems:

1. Overly cluttered/confusing description, laconic and Playing With Wiki subpage, such that the trope's definition is not clear at all beyond occasional overlap with The Leader and/or The Protagonist (s/he can be one, both, or neither), and references to Ideal Hero (and other tropes) that fail to define the difference between the two tropes.
2. The above is compounded with Five-Man Band's own definition of The Hero as The Leader of said ensemble (clashing with the aforementioned occasionality of its overlap with The Leader).
3. According to shimaspawn in the aforementioned discussion, The Hero is supposed to be "the supertrope to the Ideal Hero. It's one of the highest level supertropes we have", and "A hero doesn't need a team. A hero can be out there on their own. At it's core 'A hero does what must be done to save what can be saved.'" Neither of those two concepts are apparent in the description.

Proposed solutions (not mutually exclusive):

• Clarify The Hero's definition, and clean up and trim down the description into being the true supertrope it's meant to be without all the Five-Man Band natter in it.
• Revise the laconic and the Playing With Wiki subpage to reflect The Hero's true definition.
• Either replace The Hero in Five-Man Band's article with The Leader (since that is what the FMB role is supposed to be) and clean up wicks appropiately, or redefine/clarify The Hero's role in a Five-Man Band.

EDIT: Correcting incorrect letter case of shimaspawn's handle.

edited 9th Mar '12 1:15:15 PM by MarqFJA

I like all three of the bullet points.

As do I, but then again, I helped write the OP.

Well, I didn't have anything to do with the OP_, but I like all three suggestions as well.

You have my complete support in all three ventures. ^_^

That's good, but here is the tricky part: What is The Hero supposed to be, as a supposedly highest-level Super-Trope to the various kinds of Heroes?

I completely support replacing The Hero in the Five-Man Band with The Leader.

Lemme give it a try for a laconic:

A hero is a type of protagonist that faces danger courageously for a noble cause.

Protagonist isn't required for a hero. Archetype might be a better fit there.

Villian Protagonist, all those tropes about having a character that's a secondary character as a protagonist instead of The Hero, it's not the right fit.

edited 9th Mar '12 1:53:19 PM by shimaspawn

Okay, how about:

A hero is a character archetype that faces danger courageously for a noble cause.

There's lots of ways of marking the hero, since there's several things the hero can be doing:

• The person who moves the story, the person who the story is about (The Protagonist; can be different from the POV Character)
• The person who is on the side of good, or whatever the work believes is good, in a Good vs. Evil setup (the distinction in Villain Protagonist / Hero Antagonist)
• The person who the audience is supposed to admire and aspire to be like (hero as Wish-Fulfillment or Moral Example)

edited 9th Mar '12 2:07:22 PM by lebrel

I think Lebrel nailed it. We have at least a couple of different ways the word "hero" is used here.

• A character/personality type: "character archetype that faces danger courageously for a noble cause." A character who acts in a heroic manner.

• The main character of the story, whether he's heroic by the first definition or not; as in <X is the hero of the story>.

Those are the two very top-level definitions, I'd say. Most other uses can be slotted in under one or the other.

In the case of Five-Man Band, I think we intended it to be used in the second sense, going on the assumption that the leader of the band is usually also the main character. I think that assumption is deeply flawed.

The first one is exactly how The Protagonist is defined, though. See its article and laconic.

edited 9th Mar '12 2:03:50 PM by MarqFJA

You are correct. I misused protagonist. And apparently we don't have an article for "POV character". Bah.

^^ Yes, it is, but we're using "hero" in that sense. More importantly, it's very commonly used in that sense outside the wiki. And it's a part of the cause of the confusion.

edited 9th Mar '12 2:42:01 PM by Madrugada

Perhaps we need to define it as the other definition but specifically point people looking for the Protagonist to The Protagonist.

I was pointing out how lebrel was apparently under the impression that The Protagonist was something else than his first definition.

That would be fine by me. The Hero's article already notes that it's not synonymous with The Protagonist, anyway.

edited 9th Mar '12 3:05:55 PM by MarqFJA

I think it's "A character who acts in a heroic manner, with a very large Internal Subtrope where such a character is also the main character. Another Internal Subtrope (to a somewhat milder extent) has them be The Leader of the good guys."

edited 9th Mar '12 3:32:54 PM by Ekuran

The first Internal Subtrope would be Hero Protagonist, I think.

Defining a hero as someone who acts heroic is rather a circular definition, since heroic is defined as "having the characteristics of a hero".

Fortunately the wiki regularly defines things by their names so we are immune to circular logic.

The Hero as a trope should mean exactly what the word means in English.

Media tropes almost never are what the dictionary definitions say. The dictionary is a terrible place to see how people actually use words in the wild.

I don't like that definition.

The way I see people using it on this wiki, The Hero doesn't have to be brave, or noble, or even heroic.

Isn't The Hero basically "the character who's purpose in the story is to try to solve the conflict"?

edited 9th Mar '12 6:30:14 PM by abk0100

I'm going to quibble. I think the common usage is pretty evenly divided between the two meanings. The difference in common usage between "the main character" and "a noble person who behaves in a heroic manner" can be encapsulated in which article is used with it. Generally if it's being used in the first sense, he's "the hero". In the second he's "a hero".

edited 9th Mar '12 9:40:57 PM by Madrugada