Heroes and VillainsHercules, Jesus, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, Frodo, Harry Potter, Buffy Summers, Spiderman, Batman, Captain Kirk, Dr. Who, Darth Vader, Sauron, Voldemort, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, the Daleks, the Borg. Almost anybody living in the developed West would be able to group these individuals into two camps: the heroes and the villains. However, what criteria they may use to do this is less clear. Mike Alsford introduces us to a range of heroic and villainous archetypes on a journey through film, television, comic books, and literature. On the way, he addresses questions such as: What is a true hero? What is a true villain? Have we misunderstood these terms? What kind of societal values do our mythical heroes and villains represent? In trying to understand the extremes of hero and villain we are made more aware of our own ethical standards and given a space in which to explore contemporary concerns over notions of right and wrong, good and bad. |
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... desire for Buffy – ultimately resulting in his attempted rape of her forces him to realise the distinction between desire , and the attendant need to control through possession and violence , and love . It is this newly awakened ...
... desires for power and glory.1 To say that a hero has to wield power would seem , on the face of it anyway , to be a ... desires , if one achieves all the desires that the other achieves , and also others , he has no more power than the ...
... desire to impose order and control , to create an empire , is often the primary goal of the villainous mastermind . We see this in a variety of villains from Saruman to Vito Corleone from Darth Vader to Lex Luthor . The uniformity that ...
Contents
Myth and Imagination | 1 |
Heroes and Otherness | 23 |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | 63 |
Copyright | |
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