Not Every Story Has a Hero

A couple of months ago I got another one of those annoying reviews where someone whined that the start of a book was "mean."  Though I didn't really think it was that mean.

24 Hour Asian Girl is about a husband who's been spending a lot of time using a site that lets him peep on Japanese schoolgirls.  His wife goes to see the mysterious Mrs. Vantu who gives her a potion that basically makes the husband into one of the girls he was peeping on.  Which is sort of a variation on that old thing where if your kid smokes a cigarette you make him smoke a carton so in theory he won't want to smoke anymore.

But this is so mean!  And I'm thinking, wait so you don't think this guy ignoring his wife to peep on schoolgirls deserves to be punished?  I guess if you read a lot of erotica it does make sense you'd side with the voyeur, right?

But it's emblematic of the inability some people have to recognize that just because someone is the main character doesn't mean that person is the "hero" of the story.  Take one of the oldest novels in existence, Don Quixote.  Recently my frenemy Tony Laplume read it and he had the same reaction I did:  Cervantes never intended people to think Don Quixote was some tragic hero and lovable dreamer.  Just the opposite, actually.  He was a dangerous lunatic worshipping a time best forgotten.

Someone, somewhere, sometime read the book (or Cliff Notes) and somehow misread it and came up with all that Man of la Mancha "Impossible Dream" stuff and since most people don't want to actually read the book, they just assumed that's what the book was about.

For the most part, Alan Moore's Watchmen is the same.  People think because it's about super"heroes" that they're like traditional superheroes like Superman or Batman or Captain America or whatever.  When in actuality Moore was doing the same as Cervantes and using these characters for criticism.  Because the "heroes" of the story are a megalomaniac, a paranoid psychopath, a sadist, a couple of thrill seekers, and someone whose god-like powers have caused him to completely lose touch with humanity so that he'd rather hang out on a lifeless world.

So when DC Comics and now HBO do prequels and sequels and whatnot, I just think they don't really get what the original story was about.  It wasn't another superhero franchise to exploit.  When you treat it that way, you're just missing the whole point of it, much like Man of la Mancha missed the point of Don Quixote.

I guess though we're so programmed that stories are about good guys vs bad guys that it's hard for some people to realize when the "hero" isn't really a hero.