How is kindness a bad thing? I thought that was universally agreed to be a good message to have in a piece of media. I guess the excuse is they don’t want media to have messages at all but like, how would you even have a movie where the hero has no values that they stand for?
Ok, I don’t think kindness is a bad thing but I do think the type of hero who’s all vanilla and too good to be true feels fake. I can’t relate to someone who always makes the right choice without fail and who has near unlimited power. I also think it makes for a more boring story. I like stories where the heroes aren’t perfect and need to learn to be better.
I kind of agree. I enjoy Superman but also prefer heroes who are more morally grey. But my post isn’t about people who dislike Superman because he’s a Mary Sue, it’s about people who are angry that Superman values kindness
It doesn’t have to be boring to make a story about people who always makes the right choice it’s just more challenging to write. You need to write scenarios where it’s not clear what the ethically correct choice is and have the the hero have to figure that out.
A large part of Star Trek (at least back when they had good writers) revolves around that. In fact movies like Captain America Civil War also revolve around a bunch of people wanting to do the right thing, just not agreeing on what that is.
When the writing is bad, stories about a character being bad then learning to be good can be just as boring as a story about someone being good from the beginning. It’s just generally easier to write a story with character learning something because you don’t need to do all that much world building to create an interesting ethical dilemma.