I always wind up playing the hero. This may not be a bad thing.

Evergreen

That's a pretty ambiguous title for a thread. I'm probably going to get a lot of "I thought this was about..." So to clear up misunderstandings about the use of "play" , let me just say this isn't about gaming. I'm not a gamer.

In fact, this is mostly about imagining. So, let me explain: By now it's kind of been established through tropes that often Evil Is Cool and Evil Is Sexy. The villain often gets to do the more interesting and fun stuff, especially in a less serious setting and plot. They're generally the one who was outside the mainstream, misunderstood and scorned by society, and that often lines up with the thinking and life experiences of the people I associate with.

A great deal of people come to regard being the hero or "good guys" lame and boring and limited and stale and cliched, and they decide it would be better to be bad. And that becomes the "cool" line of thought. But at some point, it has to swing back around.

That's where I stand, I think. I have two examples of this in my own life, mostly concerning not-serious things existing mostly within the realm of imagination, both my own and that of (often thousands/millions of) others. 

The first example is the classic imagination-based pondering of "How would I take over the world, and what would I do once I ruled it?" Whenever people start talking about this, even though it's never serious, I get this feeling of dread in my gut. That quickly passes, though, and is followed not by the typical "Can I be your [x type of advisor or ally or whatnot]" but rather "Well, then I'd be the rebel leader rallying an underground resistance against you." Or even more commonly, "I'd be the leader of the proper authorities seeking to thwart your initial evil plan in the first place." 

This was the angle I took with one of my closest friends ever, one night at Boy Scout camp. We were middle-school aged, but already headed down different tracks, and as an artist and tinkerer (and son of an engineer), he was already imagining himself as some kind of mad scientist bent on world domination in the future. (Hypothetically, I mean. He's a normal stable person now majoring in industrial design at an art school and thinking of working for toy companies) I had a major fictional alter-ego at the time who was a government super-agent of sorts, and so I said that I'd be there trying to stop him, and no matter how uncool I might seem, I had a pretty badass team of agents that included mages and stuff, so he would have a real tough time of it! Typical kid talk, yeah, but I realized I felt kind of out of the ordinary for taking that stance. This would later come back into my life again.

Some time a few years ago, in high school, I discovered Dr. Steel. After thoroughly exploring and digesting what I found, my initial thoughts were "Are we ever going to find out who this guy really is?" and "Wow, that's about the most devoted fanbase I've seen, aside from maybe Juggalos." But then, I started thinking a bit harder about the way he presents himself. Somewhat steampunk-esque mad scientist bent on world domination, intending to impose a "utopian playland". Sounds good on paper, sure, and the appeal is pretty obvious to a whole bunch of subcultures and offbeat worldviews, but to embrace it just seemed too damn easy. He's still making an army of dangerous robots. He would still have to wage some form of war and kill some form of enemies, who wouldn't necessarily be bad people, just...y'know, the establishment. And you can't force people to be happy and have fun, and you can't have a society where everyone is either always having fun or doing exactly what they want to do, except maybe with lots of robot help, but that's besides the point. It's a nice message, but for once the cynic in me said "It's stupid" and the natural contrarian in me said "It would be so much more fun to be this guy's nemesis while everyone else is running off to join his 'Army of Toy Soldiers'." And so in my imagination, I began to style myself (by now having developed a different but similar fictional alter-ego) as the bastion of existing authority, standing ready to fight Dr. Steel in the name of the world blundering along as the flawed but free entity it is now. And I still think it's more fun to take that angle.

Am I the only one who thinks like this? I don't think I personally have much more to say on the subject, but I want to hear your thoughts. Maybe we can get a good discussion going... 

LouieW

Am I the only one who thinks like this?

I seriously doubt that. I mean, the world domination plots that you mention are necessarily going to involve harming people or preventing them from being free to be happy. I imagine that anyone who has a problem with using people like that is going to agree with your position there. If anything, I would imagine that your beliefs are more indicative of some kind of sense of being considerate of others, which is clearly a pretty good inclination to have. 

As for the good side being stale and boring, I think that can be true in some instances. However, I do not believe that being boring is necessarily bad since plenty of useful things may be somewhat uninteresting but needed for society (like having rules, delivering the mail, or keeping track of records). Also, in certain situations where wickedness is the norm, I feel like the good side can be quite interesting since the side of good has to constantly cling onto hope in a world that lacks it.

Kinkajou

Villainy is boring.

Malkavian

If you can't make the hero as interesting as the villain that's your failure as a writer and not a weakness in the role.