Heroes

[katleept]

Heroes are many things to many different people. Who you look at as being a hero may not necessarily be a hero in my eyes. Who I look at as a hero may not be a hero in yours, and who we both consider a hero may not be a hero in some one else's. Some of my favorite characters don't quite make my listing of favorite heroes for this very reason. They may be considered heroes by some. They may actually have some noble intentions when they enact villainous deeds, like Lex Luthor's reasons for conquering the world, Rumpelstiltskin's acts in trying to find and save his son, or Magneto's efforts to conquer humanity to save his own species.

Others may be a hero to some people in their lives, and may have even saved lives, but their main intention isn't to be a hero. Instead, they're simply trying to do the best they can with their little piece of the world. The boys of The Magnificent Seven come readily to mind in this category, as do several of the Disney Princes and Princesses.

Still, there are those who wouldn't be considered a hero by some who, for my tastes, are too straight laced because they kill. I'll tell you right here and now: My favorite characters and my favorite heroes will kill. Many of them will only do so when absolutely necessary, but they will do it. Further more, to my way of thinking, it makes a great deal more sense to kill a villain than to simply keep recapturing the same villain every time they escape from jail or asylum especially, when each time they do, they return immediately to their old ways.

Returning to thieving is one thing, but it's the killing that makes it sensible to kill them in my book. Batman is a prime example of this. He constantly defeats the bad guys, and girls, and throws them in Arkham Asylum, but every time he does, they escape and more people get hurt and get killed. His own arch enemy, the Joker, killed his parents, but instead of enacting true vengeance and killing him, he continues to put him in Arkham and, in so doing, let him escape. So much would be different if the Bat would simply learn to do what needs to be done with cretins like Joker. Barbara would have never lost her legs, Jason Todd wouldn't have been killed, and many others would still be alive. But, instead, he continues to be the clean hero, stop the villains, and then have to stop them again when they escape and inevitably return to slaughtering innocents. It's one thing to kill an innocent; it's another, entirely, to kill a killer.

One reason I like comic books so much is because they are, for the most part, rather truthful. It's been said many times before but can never be said enough when there are still "heroes" like Batman: We don't live in a world of black and white. We live in a world of grays, and sometimes, it takes doing a villainous act to be a real hero. Would a real hero let a killer escape to kill more innocents? Not a real and true hero -- at least, not in my book.

Now those of you who know me well might think I'm contradicting myself here because I very much like the scene in the early X-Men comics when Magneto talks Rachel Summers out of killing the gang of prejudiced idiots who have kidnapped, cruelly beaten, and planned to kill her best friend (and, some of us think, more), Kitty Pryde. This is a little different and here's the reasons why: First and foremost, at this time in his life, Magneto was trying to adhere to another's code of ethics. He was trying to be the man Charles wanted him to be, so he could stay with him. Charles is another of those who doesn't approve of killing, even though it would save so many lives in the long run.

But Magneto didn't talk Rachel down just for Charles or even so that Kitty wouldn't blame herself later for Rachel taking more lives. He did it for Ray. Rachel had already suffered far too much as a Hound, being forced to track down and kill, in the future from whence she came, thousands of her own kind and many of her friends and family. Taking another life to save other lives wasn't as simple for her as it is for many characters. Doing so would have put another death on her conscience, and because of all the innocents she'd already killed, she might well have never forgiven herself. It's true he let the bad guys survive in the end, but in doing so, he also saved a friend.

My favorite heroine is a character like those I've spoken about being true heroes before. She'll kill in a heartbeat if she needs to, but she'll do it to protect herself or protect others for whom she cares, and most especially the cats of the world. This dashing, bold woman also has the distinction of being my favorite villainess, and I'm sure, with that being said, most of you already know about whom I'm talking: Catwoman!!

So many people view Selina as just a villainess, or even just a thief, but the '90s series, at least when it started, showed that she was much, much more than that. Like Poison Ivy, my second favorite DC villain(ess), she has a good reason for wrecking the havoc she wrecks. The goods she gets from her heists goes to build a better life not just for her but for her cats as well and to help her causes, and like Robin Hood of immortal fame, she rarely steals from those who cannot afford it.

Selina's much more than a villain and much more than a thief. She's a woman trying hard to do the best she can to provide a life for herself and save as many cats as she can. There is no truer innocent than an animal, and for all she does to protect them, she always will be my favorite villainess and heroine. If you still doubt her heroicness, let me direct you to these fics: Catwoman's Promise, Intruders, Their Heroine, and most especially, A True Hero. These are all written by yours truly, and the true Catwoman shines through in them all.

Catwoman is much more than a villainess, a thief, or a heroine. At the core of her character is a woman who loves and respects cats and will not tolerate any harm coming to any feline baby. That's the same that it is at the core of this woman, so of course, I have to love her. :-) I challenge you gentle readers, though, to read this stories and not come away with respect and love for Catwoman as she was depicted when I first became familiar with her character and shall always be.

These are some of the same main reasons why I love Poison Ivy, although she doesn't quite make my favorites list except when it comes to only DC. Instead of cats, however, she goes after saving the plant life of the world, and cats will always come first with this cat woman. :-)

The humans of the world have so many who help and save them, but most humans, in my experience, don't necessarily deserved to be saved. They're prejudice and full of hate, disgusting, and ruthlessly and/or carelessly destroy all the truly innocent lives in their path. The Bible says both "Thou shalt not kill" and "An eye for an eye". I definitely believe in both when it comes to animals. If you kill an innocent, you deserve to be killed. If you harm an innocent, you deserve to be harmed equally.

Humans are such violent creatures and definitely don't deserve their reputation as the most intelligent species. They go out of their way to harm innocents. They kill to eat living beings. They stab out the eyes of innocent furbabies, burn out brains, break limbs, cut off feet, and more, all to true, furry innocents who have never done a thing to harm them. Unlike most animals (note that I say most; I know chickens and pigs will do so also), they even eat their own species.

Like I said, humans are disgusting, filthy creatures. The true innocents of the world need a real hero, and Catwoman is certainly that heroine. But this post is supposed to be about heroes, not about the real and worst villains of the world, so I won't rant here much about all the evils of the human species.

My second favorite heroine is Storm, who actually beats out my favorite X-Woman of all time, Emma Frost. Now Ororo doesn't like to kill. Early Ororo was as adamant against it as Charles, but 'Ro has grown a lot as a character since then. She's learned that sometimes, you have to kill. You have to kill to survive or to rescue innocents. You have to kill so that others may live. She has taken several times, but it never sits easily with her.

There have been many times when she has been shown talking and/or praying to her Goddess over the lives she's taken. She is always full of remorse about them, never taking a life without considering all the repercussions unless it is in the very heat of the moment of saving her life or those of her dearest friends. This, to my mind, is how true heroes handle killing: They do it if it has to be done to protect others, but they never take it lightly and always wish there was another way.

This is also why Emma doesn't top Storm in my list of favorite heroes but comes in next. Emma has many regrets and is full of remorse over a lot of the things she's done, but she will never take killing as heavily as Ororo does. It wasn't even the fact that she had to kill her own sister to protect her students that wounded her heart and soul so over that arc. It was, instead, the fact that the very ones she was killing to protect then turned their backs on her.

Emma's still a hero. She's saved far more lives than she's taken and remains determined, no matter what else is done to her, to help lead the next generation of mutants into a better world, a world made better partially by her so that none of these new young ones coming along the path of mutation have to suffer like she did. Her own family put her into an asylum very soon after her powers first kicked in, but as she's grown as a character, her life and goals have gone from protecting and saving herself to doing all she can to make the world better so that no young mutant again has to suffer like she did.

She still lacks the morals that make the best heroes, however, which is why, although I love her, she'll never top Storm when it comes to heroes. Next in line is Faith, and her morals are also why she's not higher up in my list of heroines. Don't get me wrong: I love the girl. I love her style and the fact that she takes crap off of no one. I was actually a little disappointed when she allowed herself to be arrested for accidentally killing a human, but that was what she felt was the right thing for her to do.

She suffered in order to do the right thing. She went to jail. She took abuse. There's no telling what all she went through in there, both at the hands of police and other convicts, until she broke out, and I love, love, LOVE!!! the scene in Angel where she breaks out of jail to go help him. That one scene, perhaps more than anything else with her character, shows just how easily she could have broken free from the authorities but remained in prison because she felt the need to do right. I will always disagree with her decision to do so as she could have done a great deal more good and saved many more lives outside of the prison walls, but she felt it was the right to do and I back her for that.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the scene and quite possibly with the whole Angel series, Angel's inner Demon/Vampire, Angelus, broke free of his control and took charge of him. Wesley, another friend of both Angel and Faith, went to visit Faith in prison to tell her that Angel needed her help. She goes from being on the phone with him, through the glass and the whole nine yards that all prisons have, to calmly laying the phone down, standing up, picking up her chair, throwing it through the window, and proceeding to walk out of the prison, easily dispatching every guard that came after her. Her friend needed her help, and there was not anything or any one that was going to keep her from giving it to him. Later on, she goes back to jail calmly, easily, and without any fight because her friend's problem is over and she remains determined to serve her time in the justice system for what she did wrong.

Shadowcat is my fifth favorite heroine. Now here we have a girl with an uncanny ability that could make her one of the world's best thieves and nearly unstoppable (not only can she phase through anything but she can also dismantle alarms or anything else electronic with a single touch) but who chooses to be good. Not only does she have one of the best powers I've ever encountered but she's also a certifiable genius and becomes, with loads of training from Wolverine, one of his teachers, and others, as confident and capable a fighter as Logan himself. She led the X-Men on a mission when she was only fourteen years old and has always been years ahead of her age in mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional levels. She, like I, is a girl far more mature than her actual years, and the right writers never let us forget that.

There are times when she is tempted by the dark side. Ogun messes with her mind to the point that he temporarily pulls her over into the darkness when she's only fourteen or fifteen, but she comes right back when he tries to get her to kill Wolverine. Later on, she's tempted by her best friends in various arcs and realities, including Magik, Rachel Summers, and even Ororo Munroe. She even has an encounter with Dracula, but almost always, Kitty stays away from the darkness. Even when she does occasionally go into the dark, she always comes through as the heroine we know and grow to love.

She really is a kickass woman, too. In her own way, I'd say she's every bit as skilled a fighter as the fabled Xena, Warrior Princess, and one of the things I love about the Wisdom and Pryde romance is how Pete used to love to just sit back and watch his girlfriend kick the bad guys' butts. Similarly, the problem I have with the Kitty/Piotr romance is that too many writers have tried to make her tack a back seat to Petey boy. Kitty is her own woman. She takes a back seat to no one, but in the same vein, she'll do whatever it takes to save lives, and she does save lives and the world -- as Joss said about Buffy -- a lot.

Buffy doesn't make my list of favorite heroines. There's loads to love about her, but it wasn't until long after the show finished that I actually came to appreciate her again. She can be admittedly quite selfish, and my next heroine is also selfish and conceited and has a quite high opinion of herself. Yet, in the long run, Cordelia does whatever it takes to make the world a better place.

She stands by Angel through everything, even being the first to tell him off when he goes batty over Darla. She at first wants to get rid of the visions Doyle gives her, but later, even despite the huge suffering she undergoes with them and knowing they will eventually kill her, Cordelia won't give up the visions for anything. As she herself says, she's Vision Girl, and Angel needs her. He needs her to help save the world and the lives he's meant to save, and she's beside him through it all --

Until a chance comes for her to be able to help him and the world even more. Here is a girl who has lost everything she ever had at one time but is finally on the verge of getting everything she wants. She's heading to meet the love of her life to tell him how she feels about him and believing she'll get to finally hear him tell her he loves her back when time around her stops and she is offered a deal, quite literally, of a lifetime. A strange, cosmic power comes to her. She can have enormous power. She can help Angel and the rest of their friends and the whole world more than she's ever been able to help them before. But she has to go with this power she's never met before.

She could have kept driving. She could have had everything she'd wanted for years. She could have continued saving the world with her visions. But doing so would mean turning away from a chance to do even more good. So she took it. She gave up everything, made the ultimate sacrifice, to become what she thought would be a Higher Power and be able to help Angel and the others so much more. It turned out to be a trap, but Cordy essentially gave her very life not simply to save the world but to help the man she loved and their friends more than she ever could have on the mortal plane. All without anybody knowing or even a chance to tell anybody where she was going, what was happening, or say goodbye. She does come back one time after her death, and that, too, is to help Angel. That's real sacrifice, and real love.

Then we have Piper and Prue from Charmed, sisters who were born Witches but grew up not knowing what they real were. It was their younger sister, Phoebe, who brought their powers back into play, and the sisters suffered much while saving the world. Prue lost her beloved Andy and later her life. Piper lost her man a couple of times over their journeys and her sister. She almost didn't come back from losing Prue, and it was only in fighting to save her little sisters that she did return to the fold and to saving the world. She didn't fight for the world or for the innocents in it. She fought for something much more important: her family.

You don't have to save the world to be a hero. You don't have to even try. What you do have to do is to do your best to save your part of the world, and that includes those in it -- your family, be they human or animal, your loved ones, your "people". Sometimes, in the determination to save them, you end up saving much more, sometimes the very world, as Piper did many times over. She's one of the strongest heroines I've ever had the pleasure of watching in that sense, and she did never go back to trying to save the world in particular. For Piper, it was always about her family, about her sisters at first and then later her sisters, her husband, and her children. Although I'll always miss Prue, Piper's journey to become the new Halliwell matriarch was a powerful one and one she well deserved, even if she never wanted it.

I've got three other women I'd like to talk about -- three other heroines at the very top of my list, Jubilee, Xena, and Pocahontas, in that order --, but that last remark makes me want to take a bit of a sidestep and go on to my favorite heroes. All of us fans are well accustomed with our characters' journeys for and/or with power. Many of our favorite characters either already have immense power or search for that power. Many who try to gain power are automatically considered villains for that reason, but I say that their reasons for searching for power needs to be of considerably more consideration than their mere searches.

Smallville's Lex Luthor first started looking into ruling the world not simply for the power but because he wanted to save it for those he loved. He wanted to have been able to protect his mother, and he wanted to protect his best friend, Clark Kent, and his family, the best people young Lex had ever known. He wanted to protect the world from the beings it couldn't fight against: the meteor freaks and others like them. The only way he saw to truly protect the world, however, was to conquer it first, and he's certainly not the only one who wanted to own the world to save it.

The X-Men's Magneto is another kindred soul. He suffered greatly at the hands of human beings, first through the Holocaust where he lost his parents and later because he was a mutant. He lost his wife and daughter to a fire caused by mutant haters. They killed innocents simply because they hated him for being what he was born. Weary of the suffering humans caused, Erik went about trying to stop them and take the world from them so that others wouldn't have to suffer like he did.

He has since come to the X-Men yet again after realizing that humans will never be defeated entirely by the mutant race. Now he understands that, in order to save his people, some humans must also be saved, but rarely has there been a man more capable of distinguishing between evil humanity and true innocents.

My favorite hero is one who's been overlooked by most people. He was another who set out to conquer the world, and although the series showed him to simply be power hungry, my beloved Drew and I cooked up a far better story for him than that simple theory. In our Love on the High Seas series, Salem wasn't just power hungry. He set out to conquer the world for a reason.

Like Magneto, he set about doing it for his people, but his people weren't mutants. They were the truly downtrodden beings. They were the Witches, the Elves, the Werewolves, the Vampires, and all the other monsters and "things that go bump in the night" who have been forced into hiding and other realms because of the human menace. Take a look at most of your true historical texts, and you'll find accounts of all of these beings. Even the Bible mentions dragons, unicorns, and dinosaurs, and yet in today's world, we can find none of them out in the open because humans have pushed them back.

Salem intended to change all that, but the Council stopped him, as power-hungry Councils often do to beings who try to conquer more of the world to save it. They stopped him and turned him into the talking, black cat all Sabrina fans love. But in our series, our minds, and hearts, Salem's adventures didn't stop there. Even as a cat, he was able to touch others and eventually led a rebellion against the Council, all, again, to save his people which also ended up including a few humans and loads of animals. After all, if there is one type of living being more down trodden by humanity and its evils than the monsters, it is surely the animals of the world.

Again, this brings us back to the evils of our own human race. As seen with the mutants and monsters, we humans have a tendency to lash out against any one who is different from us. We have fought wars because of this. It was our people who caused the holocaust, all simply to wipe out humans who were different from other humans. Wars are still been raged today over differences, and I'm rather certain we all know they always will be.

Thousands of people kill thousands of others every day. We kill for money. We kill because they have what we want. We kill because they're different than us. Perhaps they're of a different religion, a different color, or a different sexual orientation. The fact remains that they are different and far, far too many of us hate them because of that.

But when it comes to the devastation we cause the animal species of the world, it isn't even about prejudice or about differences. We take their homes. We burn them, tear them down, destroy them, and build our own homes or cities or factories in their stead -- all in the name of progress. We slaughter the trees for wood and for paper and for so many other things -- again, all in the name of progress. We steal land and destroy the people and animals on it.

We kill animals for entertainment or to stuff their heads on our walls and boast about killing them when they never did anything against us and had no chance of survival against our guns and other weapons. We see a beautiful creature made by God and can only think, instead of protecting them as He originally made us the supposed higher species to do so, of killing them and then being able to brag about it. We eat them. We grind their parts to make medicines that, more often than not, don't even work. We kill them, leave their bodies to rot and take just a part to mount in our homes so that we can show our neighbors and friends what cruelty we succeeded in doing.

And that's not all. Millions of animals are hurt every single day by people who are hurting them only to show that they, somehow in their sick and twisted minds, are superior. These people hurt animals simply because they derive some kind of sense of power from being able to do so. These are the same sick bastards who rape, harm, and kill innocent men, women, and children, the same bastards who destroy precious lives for nothing more than pleasure, the same bastards who are causing so many animal species to become extinct and who forced the "monsters" of old into hiding.

Thou shall not kill. The Bible doesn't say thou shall not kill man or thou shall not kill this beast or that. It simply says Thou shall not kill. The Wiccan Rede also has Do what ye will but harm none, and even some Satanists (I know one personally) have rules, code of ethics, or what have you that strictly forbid harming innocent animals. And yet, still, we kill. We harm. We destroy. For the supposed "fun" of it. We are the true monsters, and we need far more heroes like Salem and his people in the real world to stop our own species from destroying everything around us.

None of my heroes or heroines would take kindly to an innocent animal being killed around them, and that includes Magneto and Lex. None of them would turn a blind eye. All of them would try to stop in it. Indeed, this brings to mind one of the most powerful passages I've ever seen with Ororo. It was during the time that she had been stripped of her powers by Forge's machine and was out on the African savannah. She was alone when she came across a white lion and was just beginning to make contact with the regal animal when a woman on safari shot him dead. When 'Ro turned on her, she shot her, too, with all the same intentions of killing her as she had the great cat. Any one who would so easily harm an animal, the truest of innocent lives, will do the same to any other two legger, to any other living being, no matter the species.

I wish that more people would consider the lessons that the best writers try to teach us in books, comics, TV shows, and movies. Lessons about the importance of life runs throughout all of my favorite fandoms, and surely if those who read and/or watch them would adhere to these important lessons, the world would be a much, much better place. Heck, if people would only adhere to the rules in their own religions, again, the world would be so much better.

Religions have a great deal in common, more so than most anybody wants to hear. C.S. Lewis has been touted as both a Pagan and a Christian for his Narnia series, but in fact, when he first started writing the series, he was neither. He didn't even believe in God, but yet he created one of the best characters, and heroes, ever in the great and mighty Aslan.

Some say Aslan was based on Jesus, dying to free Edmund of his bonds. Some say he was like the God of the Harvest, retiring in the Winter and being reborn again in the Spring. The fact remains that, whatever Lewis' true basis, there are many similarities in both these and other religions. Both respect life, and both do not want innocents to be harmed and frown upon invoking pain, let alone killing, others. Aslan Himself surely would not allow any innocent to be harmed around him and is one of those wonderful heroes who will take endless punishments and give everything they have to protect the true innocents of the world.

There is so much more that can be said about heroes, but there are a few simple facts amongst them all. Heroes can be found in any shape, form, or size, in any species or sexual orientation, in either gender, in any race. It isn't the outside that makes the hero, or the heroine. It's the inside that counts with them as in all things.

A true hero might not set out to save the world, but they will do all they can to protect their part of the world, to protect what is theirs, to save the innocents around them, to save their family most of all. They will suffer. They will sacrifice. They might even die. They might do other things, things that they will come to regret or may even regret as they're doing them, but whatever they do, they will do so with the very best of intentions: to save their world, their loved ones, and the innocents, be they human, monster, mutant, animal, or whatever, that God has placed in their pathway.





And here, after much, much consideration, are my favorites, with some extras thrown in:

Heroes:	Heroines:

And One Who can never be forgotten about, the One Who truly gave everything before any one else, the One, without Whom, we would have nothing:



Honorable Mentions:







This has been for a Universe challenge. If you join, tell them Kat Lee of Team Fire sent you.

I didn't manage to cover everybody I wanted to, but if you see some one above and would like to hear me rant and ramble about why they make my top heroes, just drop me a line. I'll be happy to explain. :-)