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The tendency of heroes to be "merciful"
So let's talk Star Wars. Everyone loves Star Wars!
At the end of RoTJ, there's everything you'd expect from an epic finale. Luke goes all big hero and faces his father, Darth Vader, in combat and is victorious. Darth Vader is down for the count. Luke is in a perfect position to take revenge on Vader for severing his arm, killing his mentor, and being a general bad dude who condoned mass murder and genocide...
And he refuses.
I don't understand. Luke had everything handed to him on a silver platter. Why didn't he take the dive, do what anyone else would do?
But this is nothing to what happens next. Luke goes up to Vader's boss, Palpatine, and says generic "You're screwed" hero stuff to him. Palpatine says a few villain things and they fight. And you know what? Luke loses. Narrative takes a sidestep to logic here: how can a farmboy with relatively little training stand up against the most formidable Sith sorcerer in the galaxy? And Luke doesn't just lose, he loses badly. At the end of it, he is crying and writhing on the ground in agony!
And you know what happens next? Darth Vader stands up and dunks Palpatine down a shaft, resulting in both their deaths. (The EU reveals that Palpatine became an evil ghost but screw the EU)
The implications are so clear that they aren't implications and are instead so explicit they might as well have hung a neon sign on it. Were it not for Luke's mercy (traits associated with weakness), he would have been a piece of charcoal sitting next to his father's corpse. Luke doesn't save the day by punching Palpatine to death and single-handedly kersploding the Death Star: he wins because he forsakes revenge out of mercy.
And Luke's not the only one.
In Lord of the Rings, Frodo continually decides not to kill Gollum, even when (a.) he has sufficient reason to (Gollum tries to make him spider chow) and (b.) it is reinforced by Sam that he could end Gollum whenever he wanted to. If it were Gimli or Aragorn in his place, Gollum would have been thwacked in two long ago. And Gollum's "alive" state is what leads to Sauron's downfall in the end. It is notable that again, Frodo does not directly cause Sauron's downfall. It is even underlined at the end that Frodo loses. He succumbs to the Ring, just like Isildur and Gollum before him. If Gollum weren't alive, Frodo would have gone crazy and Sauron would be kicking back and watching the Orcs kill everyone. It is Frodo's mercy (let me highlight that this is normally a weak and not very heroic trait), not his strength or cunning, that scores him the victory in the end.
Where did this trend of "heroic mercy" come from?
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Comments
There you go, now mercy is heroic.
You mean when a few people left and everyone else stayed?
Also, the reason is because revenge more easily makes a character look like a jerk.
Though apparently there is indeed a demand for a place to post this sort of content, so it would be quite ironic if the people who left IJBM end up simply re-creating it in spirit elsewhere. Such as HH, which seems to be the most likely place since we do have a high degree of userbase overlap.
Hur hur hur.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
We just root for him because the gods are jerks.
Stopping him will prevent more people from becoming his victims.
And, once you've won, you'd basically be kicking him while he's down.
Must feel pretty good to, though.
That's not true. I know a lot of revenge-driven characters who don't look like jerks. Not every vengeful character is Kratos.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
/Freddy Krueger.
"I'm not gonna kill you, but I don't need to save you"
and then the Darknight it's like "I'm saving you Joker, just cause"
He had mercy.
But if Batman kills the Joker, DC will go out of business since the Joker's too dead to do anything. Unless the Joker can resurrect whenever he wants to, and in that case how is it any different than being locked up in Arkham?
And he ended up getting nailed to a stick by the people he tried to save. Not really the best example.
Having power and using it for your own ends and only your own ends makes you a villain. Having power and using it for the benefit of others and knowing when to NOT use it for the benefit of others is heroic.
What these fine and intelligent gentlemen said. There is a difference between a hero and a Nietzschean übermensch. The two can hypothetically overlap, but overall, the essential quality of a truly heroic character is a noble and selfless strength. Part of that strength is the quality of mercy.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
Gary/DOUCHE/whatever is constantly condescending towards your character, always claiming that outside forces or his own mercy are responsible for your victories. It is immensely satisfying to prove him wrong, to prove that you are better than him, and rob him of his victory at the end. And it only gets sweeter when his grandfather snubs him in favor of you.
I don't really see how being vengeful makes someone a monster, though...