Journal Task #2 The success of antiheros in media

Antiheros is a character format that writers use when they want to convey a narrative surrounding/ including a flawed individual. This type of character however has seen a major boom and arguable oversaturation in recent years. This is because in general, peoples taste in media over the years have progressed from emotionally bland characters like superman to more 3-dimensional characters that can provide a much more emotionally complex narrative through their own flaws.

This change in collective opinion came from two major things. Firstly, is the fact that our knowledge of the human psyche and what causes flaws has greatly developed over the years, allowing audience members and writers to have a much better understanding of why a character is a certain way. This as a result allows both the audience to have a more empathetical outlook on antiheros, as well as allow for the stories themselves to be made with empathy in mind. The Second reason is that the rise of antiheros in media came of the backbones of a heavily oversaturated plethora of hero narratives, where writers were very unwilling to give their characters flaws or have them perform immoral acts out of fear of censorship.

This however does pose the question of if the boom of antiheros is ending due to over saturation like what happened with typical hero narratives. In my opinion, it is more likely that there will be stronger balance between hero and antihero narratives that fluctuate over time in terms of popularity. This is mainly due to the existence of companies like Disney who own a majority of main stream franchises but have a strong reluctance to explore antihero narratives due to their family friendly brand image. What this will effectively mean is that there will always be a strong presence in media of oversaturated hero narratives, leading to people edging towards antiheros for a different type of experience. On the other hand, when antiheros get oversaturated audiences will move back to hero stories. To oversimplify it, it would effectively be a flux in popularity between family friendly corporations and the rest of the smaller creators who can afford to take risks. In the mist of this however, I do think that their will be the creation of a grey middle for when companies like Disney try to combat the periods of hero oversaturation. This would effectively be just a normal person with flaws that forces them to do the wrong thing despite the fact that they are naturally a more moralistic character. An example of this would be a protagonist who has a panic attack during a battle and leaves their friends. Whilst abandoning their friends is an immoral action, the story would have placed an emphasis on the fact that it is out of their control. This would effectively shift the blame onto the condition rather than the character, allowing them to still be moralistic but have to deal with the guilt and ramifications of their immoral actions. Another example would be a trolley situation where both solutions to a problem have immoral ramification. What would commonly happen in a hero narrative is that a deus ex machina would allow the hero to save the day without them having to make an immoral decision. For the grey hero however, you force them to make the decision and live with the consequences, making them perform an immoral action (i.e., sacrificing someone to save another) but still having them be a heroic character as the blame would be on the situation/villain of the story. The main point of this is that they wouldn’t be antiheros in terms of character, they would be heroes forced into no win situations that are out of their control, either by circumstance or through their own flaw, and forces them to deal with the guilt of whatever transpires from the perspective of a moralistic character.