Heroes

Shakes' post on female gamers has gotten much deserved attention, from men and women alike. Earlier today, she e-mailed to ask me why, saying that she knew the secretly violent femmes would respond, but not the stereotypically violent mens. I couldn't quite answer then, but I can now. And it was her other post, on Cindy Sheehan, that clarified it.

What struck me about her piece was her articulation of what's always attracted me to games; the desire to be a hero. If you read her blog, it's the same thing, there's a subtext that says one girl and her keyboard can change the country, one girl and her keyboard can light enough fires on enough mountains that, Lord of the Rings style, the other bloggers will see the flames and wave the torches in front of their audiences, the audiences will light flares before their politicians, the politicians will set fireworks in front of the media, and all of us will finally snap out of our stupor, strap on our swords, and march on her political Mordor. And, with the Downing Street Memos, it almost came true. Half a thousand blogs sparked tinder and demanded attention and, for a few days, Bush and Rove and all the rest were singed by a fire she helped light.

That is, to an extent, what the blogs are. They're attempts to be more than people with opinions. We call the right the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, but we're doing the same thing. They want to pretend they're fighting a war, we want to believe we're stopping one. In a Campbellian sense, the two are archetypically equivalent: we all want to be heroes. It informs our writing. Not every piece, certainly, but those few where righteousness flares up and our opinion becomes a call to action, one that rattles at the cage of our websites and spills out across the internet, sometimes into the media, sometimes into the political structure. It happens rarely, sure, but the promise of it is one reason so many do this, or at least why they start.

But read Shakes' post on Cindy Sheehan. This is no Leia, no Samus, no Buffy. This is a woman whose heroism is grief-fueled, whose strength comes from the visual of being humiliated, being hurt, being ignored. Her most powerful moment was when the President played the plutocrat and sped by her in his limousine. It could hardly have been more perfect had the heavens opened to wet the ground, letting the President's limo spray the grieving woman with mud.

We don't have heroes anymore, not strong ones. Not the ones that Shakes and I and so many of us pretended to be on Nintendo systems and Sega consoles. When Gary Hart asks where the leaders are, that's what he's scanning for. Larger-than-life figures whose voices rumble with the power to take down an Administration, whose fists strike tables and whose fury leaves Tim Russert, truth be told, a little scared, a little awed. None of this is to diminish Cindy Sheehan who is, without doubt, a compelling and courageous figure. But Cindy, archetypically, is the sort of truth-to-power everyman who the hero steps in to save. She's the brave reporter who the mob boss kidnaps, the fearless DA who gets a hit put out on her. She's the one whose plight makes Buffy or Batman dash in at the last moment. She's hero bait.

But we're overfished. As a culture, we seem to have left heroism, at least the traditional sort, behind. Not in every case, but consider it: Our Star Wars trilogy features the antihero, not the hero. Our comic books have descended into shades of gray, waves of complexity. We don't have heroes, we have tortured souls, traumatized crimefighters. We don't have Superman, we have Batman. Spiderman is quaint, it's Wolverine's day now. Zelda is for kids (most recently, Link was a kid), we play Grand Theft Auto.

What struck me about Shakespeare's Sister's post wasn't that she was a girl playing video games, but that she'd articulated what I miss in video games, what I miss in culture, what I miss in politics. I miss heroes, and the sort of society that wants to see them. I want an RFK* to stand up and fight injustice, I want Sin City and GTA to leave people upset, I want Link to grow up and do what Hyrule needs done. And I want those desires to sound, not childish, but natural. Because they are and they should be. The games that sell now let us be the villains, the Germans, the carjackers. And Cindy Sheehan lets us feel like the underdog, the oppressed, the downtrodden. But Shakes, and I, and I think many others here, want to be heroes, or at least stand with them. That's why we played video games as kids. That's why we play politics as adults. And that's why I loved her post.

* A tortured soul if there ever was one, but not publicly.