I totally agree, we need more aspirational heroes. We live in such a postmodern world where stories often tend towards moral relativism and a lot of people have lost sight of right and wrong. We need more characters who embody virtue and do the right thing. Doesn't mean they can't be deep. By now the edgy antihero has been done to death anyway.
Yeah, the idea that being so flawed that you're practically a criminal or dysfunctional "adds depth" is quite possibly the most annoying storytelling trope of our time!
The honesty of writers and what they want to achieve with a book's story is often two different paths I feel. At least in modern books. Kuang's Babel is an outstanding example of this. Marketed as one thing and the truth being she numerous times keeps bludgeoning the reader with the white man bad, colonization bad, have another thirty footnotes saying the same thing because I don't trust my readers to comprehend the story by themselves. It's a lot of tell and not show. I think a book should be thought-provoking and if that thought may be positive or negative or any in-between is up to the reader. That is also the fun of discussing books in my personal opinion. Therefore the writer pre-chewing my food to regurgitate what I need to think is utterly abhorrent. Why can't we keep that ambiguity? It's an odd thing. I went a bit on a rant, my apologies. There's this fantasy writer that comes from a geological background. His world building is marvelous, although I must give a fair heads up that his main characters often stumble from one rough situation into the other. (This resonated for me and gave me inspiration to never give up how dire things might go.) But I wonder what you'd think of his books. It's Ian Irvine's 'Well of Echoes' and 'The View from the Mirror' series. Thank you for taking your time making videos, I deeply enjoy them. Very soothing to listen and to sit back and ponder.
