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Morality and Alignment: What makes a hero?



JAMIE BARRETT

As anyone that has heard of genetic engineering or artificial intelligence can attest, ethics are often messy, with a grey area for every thin line. But the difference between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” is often very clear among books, films, and games. Knowing what exactly it is that sets apart the heroes from the villains may help us to navigate these grey areas.

There are many definitions of a “hero” or a “villain”, but starting from the basics and using examples to derive a definition will help us discover why the defining traits matter, as well as what those traits are. Protagonists - the leading character or characters - are ubiquitous in literature. Someone needs to be there to drive the story forward, for the story to be told about. Antagonists, meanwhile, create conflict and challenge our hero. Automatically describing protagonists as “heroes” in this way may be a misconception, however - let us explore further and find out.

In tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), a group of players describe how each of their individual characters behaves and responds to a situation created by another player - the Dungeon Master or Game Master - who then narrates the consequences of their actions. No single player can be called the “author” of the resulting story that gradually unfolds, but every character is a protagonist in this story, and morality plays a part through a feature of each character - alignment.

There are nine possible alignments in D&D, described by two axes, with the first ranging from lawful to chaotic, and the second from good to evil. Neutral sits in the middle of each axis, and a character that is neutral on both axes has a “true neutral” alignment and typically prefers to avoid moral questions. By using each axis to assess known heroes and villains, we may reach a definition of a hero.

According to the Player’s Handbook - which includes everything you need to make and play a D&D character - a lawful character values following a code, whether a personal code or societal law, whereas a chaotic character prefers to follow their instinct. Both protagonists and antagonists can lie anywhere on this axis - Captain America and the Riddler are both lawful in the way they stick to some sort of code (although the former forsook the rules of America for a time, he always remained true to his personal code), while Thor and the Joker are chaotic and follow their gut.

The other axis may be superficially obvious - all heroes are good, and all villains are evil - but the Player’s Handbook defines “good” in terms of selflessness and “evil” as selfishness. This mostly agrees with our initial expectations, but there are some exceptions: Mr Freeze, for example, does everything to help his wife, which clearly gives him a good alignment, but he is still a villain. However, there are very few examples of characters that fit neatly into the evil alignment but are clearly heroes.

Of course, there are many examples of characters that are neither clearly heroes nor clearly villains. Batman, Megamind, Deadpool, and many others play with or subvert the typical archetypes. Indeed, it seems like there are a lot of grey areas here too. But there is one clear feature that sets apart a hero from a villain: heroes never seem to be selfish. They rarely act without other’s interests in mind, and they never stop others from getting what they need. Being selfless does not mean you are suddenly a hero, but being selfish is likely to turn you into a villain.

The journey to discover what defines a hero is now complete. No matter where you stand on a given issue, you can do your best to be a hero just by making sure you avoid putting yourself first, and doing what you can to aid others. I think we can all do our best to be heroes in these times.


Bibliography
Wizards of the Coast (2014). Personality and Background. In: Wizards of the Coast, Player’s Handbook. USA: TSR, pp. 121-142.
Youtube (2017). Part 3 - How to make a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Character (Proficiency, Skills, Backgrounds)). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKg-A8AjwU4& (Accessed: 08 April 2020)
Youtube (2020). Trope Talk: Antiheroes. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpABx1NOIX0 (Accessed: 08 April 2020)

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