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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29960
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29960
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Evil is cool. Virtue is dorky.

The pure hero really only exists in hagiographies and tracts -- works that hold up somebody's idea of political or moral virtue for admiration. Works of these kind exist to draw lines between good and evil, not to examine the human condition.

And consider the basic shape of story. The climax of a conventional story is essentially moral, a choice of values. Is the hero willing to pay the price to achieve their goal? For the pure hero, the answer is obviously yes, and we all know it is going to be yes, so unless our sole interest in the story is to have our political or moral opinions validated, it is a boring story: nothing is actually at stake.

The hero who chooses the sacrifice must be at least venal enough for their choosing it to be in doubt. But, and this is key, the more sinful the hero is, the more profound and moving the moment becomes in which they make the sacrificial choice.

Equally moving, by the way, is the saintly hero who stumbles at the moment of crisis, as Frodo does at the top of Mount Doom. Frodo had been so good, so self sacrificing, so tolerant (even of Gollum), that if he were to stride up to the edge of the volcano, whip the ring off his finger and toss it into the flames, it would be a bit of a let down. But the saint stumbles. In the great moment of crisis, he chooses selfishly.

It is both an ancient trope and human truth that the outwardly virtuous man may have feet of clay, while the outward rogue may have a heart of gold and a spine of steel. The rogue, in a sense, sees through all the mannered pieties of the self-consciously virtuous and rejects them (not without selfishness or culpability, to be sure) but when the stakes are raised, their deeper moral nature is engaged and they prove to have more real courage than the paper saint.

Original score: 8