I'm tired of anti-heroes. A thread.

I noticed that everything I was watching was built around anti-heroes. Game of Thrones, Westworld, Birds of Prey, Mr. Robot - to name a few - it's a trend that's been hot for a long time. Breaking Bad, The Boys, Dexter - it seems like we can't get enough of rooting for villains.

Anti-heroes, for the uncertain, are protagonists in a story who use morally ambiguous-to-wrong methods to accomplish their goals. Basically bad guys that, in their story, are the good guys. Thanos was the protagonist of Infinity War - he's who we empathized with.

It's a valuable way of telling a story. It's fascinating. There's something evocative about walking in the shoes of what we fear most.

But it's also concerning to me on a number of fronts.

In order to root for an anti-hero, they have to be immersed in a world/fighting a villain that is substantially worse. It's all about contrast - and for a long time I think that's been satisfying to watch because we recognize that the clear-good v obvi-evil trope is broken.

People are complex - the world is obfuscated from clear view - so our morality tales of right vs wrong are often just the story we choose to tell ourselves to elevate "us" over whomever it is we want to vilify.

It's fair to reject that and seek to dig deeper, and I think that's where anti-hero stories have gained such massive traction in mainstream media (they were around for a long time before that, but we aren't all on the cutting edge of comics etc so the discussion is delayed).

My concern is that even when our anti-heroes have good ends in mind, their means to reach those ends are (necessarily) not justifiable. This, within a broader context of heroes we can root for who follow a moral code we would wish to uphold, isn't bad. It adds good complexity.

However my fear is that we arrive at a place where the saturation of anti-hero stories in the mainstream begins pushing out the values system that hold our society to a higher standard. We muddle what behavior should be modeled, and slowly we get accustomed to rooting for wrong.

Whether stories are so powerful as to directly affect individual behavior or we're fooling ourselves as storytellers in thinking they are is up for debate. But humans are social creatures, and we're always looking to those beside us for cues as to right and wrong behavior.

If we get to a place where the majority of cues we're picking up from what we consume tell us that the ends justify the means, or that life holds no intrinsic value, etc. I have to imagine that will percolate into our collective subconscious.

It may not result in a wave of outright murder sweeping the land, but it might dull our empathy to the plight of the "other" - whether that other is in a distant, war-torn land, or our neighbor in the midst of a crisis. In many ways, I fear that we're already there.

Storytellers, much like journalists (cough cough), may not consider their individual work to be all that powerful. And it may not be. But it contributes to a much larger conversation that we as a society are always having - a debate that will never cease and must ever be engaged.

This is where my mind has been over the last few months as @rich_bilkey and I discuss where to take my fiction and how to release it. I want to think in terms of this ongoing discussion - in how we view each other and how we either love and care for one another, or shrink away.

It's not where my mind was when I started publishing a decade ago, but I wasn't really aware of the bigger discussion in the first place.

I'll still have my anti-heroes, but I want to balance them out appropriately. And I want them to pay for their decisions.

I'm also not saying that this doesn't happen in most anti-hero-centric stories. Most do end badly (not to spoil any specific stories). But when they're all we see, I think the Overton Window for consequences shifts in our brains, especially when we identify with those anti-heroes

All that to say that I took a break from anti-hero stories for a moment and watched Band of Brothers again for the first time in a decade, which was a welcome change. Warm and encouraging if sad and sobering. Plenty of gray, while offering some real clarity of moral vision.

It made me wish for something better - to be a "better man." It certainly suffers its own problems, but it left me wanting to put others before myself. Those are admirable desires (in my mind at least) upon which I wish more stories pushed me to dwell.

There's enough uncertainty in the world right now. While I'm a huge proponent of skepticism and digging deep into the values and systems we put in place to guide us, both individually and as a society, all that digging has to lead somewhere relatively concrete or it's for naught.

I'll end on this, because I think it's a cliche that captures exactly what I've been straying towards for years and what I think we're risking more broadly:

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

What do we stand for?