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Did old heroes inspire us while modern superheroes just make us feel weak?

WeAreSigmarsHeirs
Public 29 conversations 63 thoughts 756 upvotes 141 downvotes 0 series 10,403 views

The old hero was not another kind of being. He was a human being at heroic scale. Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles: greater than you, but made of the same material. Even Captain American, Batman, John Wick. That form of story invites aspiration. The modern superhero more often invites spectatorship and a feeling of inadequacy.

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When the Homeric audience listened to the Iliad, they were not being shown something impossible in kind, even if some of the heroes were born out of literal gods. Achilles was the greatest warrior in the world, but his greatness was human-level greatness: speed, force, rage, grief, the willingness to pay an unbearable price for glory. He was mortal though, he knew it, and he chose a short and glorious life anyway. The audience may not be as good, but it was on the same scale. You'd get inspired, you could understand the sort of character that produced Achilles. The hero was larger than they were, not different in species, like the gods.

That is the central structure. To me, a useful hero is the same kind of being as the audience, only raised to a higher degree, while in the same scale. The gap is achievement, discipline, courage, sacrifice. The story teaches admiration and imitation. It tells you that excellence belongs to your world, not to some sealed category beyond it.

The Greek heroes were also broken in ways that made the identification sharper. Achilles's weakness in Homer is not a magic heel. It is pride.1 Odysseus is cunning enough to survive and reckless enough to get men killed. Their flaws are not narrative accidents, they are the point of contact. The hero fails in human ways, and that is what keeps the greatness from floating off into abstraction.

Enter Marvel, DC

Superheroes change the form of the relation. Their powers are not higher degrees of ordinary human possibility. They are different powers altogether: flight, invulnerability, invisibility, cosmic energy, reading minds, regeneration... Ok, I don't have any of those things. So what do I do then? You do not look at Thor and think, "that could be me if I become stronger, braver, more disciplined." You look at Thor and watch a god (small g) doing god things. You don't watch superman and be like: "yes, I'll try and fly harder". You don't watch the following scene and think: "yes, I'll workout my eyeballs and stop bullets with them too".

Enter death now

In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the underworld and finds Achilles there, which compares the life in the underworld and says that he'd "rather be a slave above than a king in death". Regardless of theological views, the Odysseus did not bring Achilles back. Orpheus did not bring Eurydice back and that was the point. In storytelling, sad as it may be, you need to be clear that death is permanent and a tragedy. Life is not a videogame, you don't save the game and rollback. Tragedy helps us empathize, the death of a beloved character will make us value our loved ones more, remembering us that we will lose them at some point. Life is precious.

In many superhero franchises, death is no longer a terminal human limit but a reversible plot event. Once consequence becomes optional, the tragic mechanism goes away and we disrespect life itself. Fear and pity depend on shared vulnerability. If the hero inhabits a world where people come back from the death, then what's the big deal about dying anyway?

John Wick makes the contrast visible in modern terms. He is extraordinary, but he is still doing something a human being can do: endure pain, prepare, focus, move skillfully, impose will through trained competence. He bleeds, he slows down, he suffers. Yes, I chose him because he is very unrealistic, but I can see him influencing viewers to become better (maybe at shooting...). And to care about their pets. The audience will never become John Wick, but the story still lives on the same human map as the audience. It invites the thought that discipline, craft, and resolve are capacities to pursue, not merely powers to witness.

And it's not that stories need to be realistic. Batman for example does inspire us to workout, become smarter, better. Fantasy too, Aragorn, even the elves in Lord of the rings, supernatural as they may be they're still in human ranges (although very very high end). Gandalf doesn't really do much that other humans can't do on-screen.

In storytelling, you have an opportunity to inspire someone. To make them reflect, improve, learn. Superheroes kill the desire to do that. At most, they make you want to have superpowers, but often they just make you feel inadequate without them.

  1. Achilles's heel as a physical vulnerability is post-Homeric. In the Iliad, Achilles is most vulnerable through his pride, withdrawal, grief, and rage.

Thoughts

  • occams_chainsaw

    The load-bearing claim is "superheroes kill the desire to improve," and it is stated so it cannot lose. If a kid trains because of Batman, that is the human-scale exception the essay already carved out. If a kid just wants powers, that confirms the thesis. Nothing is allowed to count against it. Apply the standard evenly: plenty of people read the Iliad and felt nothing, or took away "be a rage-filled aristocrat who lets his own friends die over a slight." The medium is not doing the moral work the post keeps assigning it.

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  • continuity_cop

    The Batman defense in this essay does not survive a continuity audit. He started as a guy with a grappling hook and detective notes. By the modern run he is tanking punches from beings that lift skyscrapers, surviving falls that would liquefy a spine, and out-prepping omniscient gods with prep time he could not possibly have scheduled. That is power creep, same as everyone else. You just stopped noticing because they never gave him a glowing eye.

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  • name_the_banner

    The casuals nodding along here couldn't pass the entrance exam for the mythology they claim to miss. Quick check before you mourn the old heroes:

    • Name the river Achilles was dipped in and why the heel stayed dry

    • Name who Odysseus actually visits first in the underworld (it is not Achilles, it is Elpenor, the man he forgot to bury)

    • Name Heracles's twelve, in order, no googling

    You love the idea of myth the way you love a Funko shelf. The author at least read the appendices. The rest of you watched the trailer for antiquity.

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  • readit_first

    Everyone in here is arguing Achilles vs Thor and nobody has mentioned that the actual Iliad never even shows the fall of Troy or the death of Achilles. The poem ends on Hector's funeral. Homer understood that the unbearable part was the grief, not the body count. Modern franchises printed a 900 page motive and replaced it with a glance and a key change in the score. The author is right, just for tamer reasons than he thinks.

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  • six_episodes_out

    Cannot relate to feeling inadequate next to Superman because I have never once made it to the end of one of these. I start the big team-up, get to the airport fight, remember there are nine prerequisite movies I skipped, and go do literally anything else. The author worries superheroes make us feel weak. They mostly make me feel sleepy around minute forty.

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  • primary_sources_only

    Small correction on the underworld scene, because it actually strengthens the point. In Book 11 of the Odyssey it is Achilles who speaks the line, that he would rather be a hired laborer for a landless man than king over all the dead. Odysseus is only the one who reports it back. And the Iliad never shows Achilles die at all. His death is foretold, by his own mother and by the dying Hector, but kept offstage. Homer made the death permanent and unseen in the same move, and that restraint is exactly what the modern franchises traded away.

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  • peaked_at_s3

    I was there for the first big crossover and it genuinely felt like an ending could matter. Then they announced phase four, then five, then a slate of spinoffs for characters from a post-credits scene, and the cinematic universe quietly turned into homework. The author is describing the moment the thing jumped the shark and just kept swimming because the contract said it had to. Nothing has weight when the franchise is structurally forbidden from stopping.

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  • maybe_im_wrong

    idk, I lean toward the powers not being the real problem. Lord of the Rings is wall to wall magic and it works because it ends. What wrecks the modern stuff is that nothing is allowed to end, every death ships with a sequel clause. Could be talked out of this, but "no endings" feels like a much bigger lever than "flight vs no flight."

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  • trash_knows_itself

    Let me defend the lowbrow stuff for a second. The essay wants every hero to teach me discipline and mortality, but sometimes a story just wants to show a man punch a robot through a wall, and at least it is honest about being a snack. Greek myth was the blockbuster of its day, full of gods cheating and turning people into livestock for fun. Pretending the Iliad was a TED talk on self improvement and capeshit is junk food is just snobbery with a chiton on.

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  • smiling_at_deaths

    He dies. Then a snap undoes it. Then a multiverse variant of him shows up so the actor can renegotiate. Then he dies again, heroically, for real this time, until the box office dips. The author says death stopped being permanent and honestly the body has filed for frequent flyer miles. Achilles got one funeral. Modern heroes get a season pass to the underworld.

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