Untrained Heroes

Batman spent a lifetime training to be the best hero he could be. Superman was blessed with amazing powers and abilities. Most heroes have gone through extensive baptisms of fire to become the heroes they are. But there seems to be a small percentage of heroes who were only half prepared to be what a hero was yet they still manage to save the day. Which has me wondering how many more people they could have saved were they properly trained.

To give you an example of this type of hero I shall cite the holy trilogy for us geeks, Star Wars. Luke Skywalker, our hero, spends much of the three films learning about his destiny as a Jedi. He gets a few pointers on what it means to be a Jedi from Obiwan in the first film and then he gets a crash course on Jedi abilities in the second film from Yoda. But as we see in the Prequel films, Jedi train from the time when they are practically toddlers. At best Luke spent maybe a week with Yoda. Maybe Yoda gave him some books to read while he’s flying from Dagoba to Cloud City but still, that’s a lot of knowledge about being a Jedi that Luke never receives. Anakin spent years as a Padawan, and he was supposed to be some sort of Jedi prodigy. Putting it simply Luke Skywalker saves the day getting the equivalent of a correspondence course in Jedi fighting.

And that seems to be a recurring theme in heroic stories. The hero starts out with little to no skills and throughout his adventure he or she masters just enough knowledge to defeat the threat to the country/world/universe. To examine this I will use the series long story in Avatar: The Last Airbender. At the beginning of the story the main character, Aang, has not mastered any of the other elements he must wield as the Avatar. He’s a skilled airbender, but not much else. As the series progresses he spends each season mastering a different additional element, until by the end of the series he has mastered all four elements (Air, Water, Earth, Fire) and is able to return balance to the world. But as we see in the sequel series, and in flashbacks of Aang’s past incarnations, it takes years to become a fully trained Avatar. While the series certainly spans several months, it is not the years of training that the other Avatar’s have received. So Aang is defeating the armies of the Fire Nation essentially with only the most basic of elemental bending knowledge.

In many ways it is this rag tag patchwork training that makes the hero so interesting. Being a fully trained and knowledgeable hero removes the concept of doubt that the hero might fail, and part of that is what makes the story so interesting. This makes me think of one of Sci-Fi favorite half baked hero, The Doctor. It you’re not familiar with the long history of the show Doctor Who then you probably don’t know that The Doctor is not a fully realized TimeLord (the species that the Doctor belongs to). While TimeLords are referred to as these ancient wise masters of all time and space, it is quite obvious that the Doctor has long ago shunned and neglected many of the teachings of his people. People who have in several classic episodes proven that they can easily subdue the Doctor and exile him to Earth (as was the fate of the Third Doctor who spent the entirety of that regeneration working for UNIT on Earth). Even his time machine is rag tag, having stolen a broken museum piece in order to travel through out the Universe, while at the same time seeing functional Tardis’s throughout the series that do not have the many issues (broken chameleon circuit, faulty navigation, nasty temperament) that the Doctor’s Tardis has. Even when the Doctor regenerates he acts as though it is a miracle every time, which leads me to believe it is more complex procedure than we think and requires training to do properly. Yet despite these many handicaps he continues to save the day.

In the world we live in there are real heroes. Doctors, Firemen, Soldiers, Police Officers, all people who save lives and have some form of training to do so. Now it is true that sometimes a random citizen can do something heroic for his fellow man, but the heroes who tend to repeatedly save the day in real life are people with extensive training. So it seems odd that our fictions are filled with amateurs constantly saving the day. Perhaps this is a bit of wish fulfillment on behalf of the authors and audience who wish they could save the day but don’t want to go through the extensive training it would require to do so.