IS SAVING THE WORLD THE ONLY STORYLINE? Part 1

Hello all! Welp, I think I’d better start talking about stories, being an author and all that. I was on a Spider-man craze lately, and as it do, my brain had an epiphany: “There sure are a lot of save the world plots.”

That got me thinking, is it so popular that is it the only plotline that’s used anymore? Superheroes do it the worst. (Still looking at you, Spider-franchise.) Oh, no! The bad guys have set up a doomsday weapon! It’s so common that there’s even a word for it, ‘sky beam’. You know, the bad guys have set up an energy beam that pierces the sky, to—do something bad. Blow up the planet, open another dimension, transfer all power in the universe into the main bad guy. Is that all the usual ones? But it’s not all just sky beams. Sky beams have been around for, what, 20 years now? In the movies. It makes sense in a visual medium like the moving pictures.

…Death lasers! That was what was before sky beams. One points down, the other points up, if you need to know the difference. The most famous death laser, that never got off the ground, was the satellite from the James Bond movie Goldeneye (1995). They showed up in video games, too, like in the Command & Conquer series (1995-2008). Around the same time as death lasers were, of course, nuclear weapons. James Bond dealt with a good chunk of those, too. By gum, any supervillain worth his evil diploma had a death laser. Big one, small one, personal ones. I wonder if they were a fad in the supervillain community? Did the industry fade out? Or, did they become so popular, like the ‘save-the-world’ plot, that they became blasé?

It is an all-too-common plot that we take it for granted. Why? It’s the end of the world! …Yeah, but who cares? The alternate dimensions next door? Even less concern. Yet, save-the-world is the most common plot, it seems, of 2000s media, along with its bedfellow, the ‘the main character becomes the best-version-of-themself.’ Don’t worry, we’ll get to the ‘become-best-version-of-yourself’ plot later—Joseph Campbell had a hand in midwifing that schlock into our entertainment. I’ll give it its due later.

Where did the ‘save-the-world’ plot come from? I’ve read old literature, and the goofy pulp fictions of the 1920s. Some of the oldest granddaddies of pulp scifi stories had heroic space men fight aliens shaped like glass pyramids, aliens who plundered world after world in their insatiable hunger for more resources. Earth was their next target! No, that’s not the plot of Independence Day (1996), or the plot of War of the Worlds (1898, HG Wells). It was the plot of an old pulp story from 1934, but the name escapes me. It…well I could guess everything that would happen in that story, but it was good space-man fun. Shooting lasers at aliens shaped like black pyramids. What more could a boy ask?

I want to say that our modern notions of ‘save-the-world’ were codified by Tolkien, but I think the notion, in the West, goes as far back as Christianity and the belief in salvation. Why even think in terms of ‘the whole world, the whole planet’? That idea was never a global phenomenon until recently, within the last 150 years. What is the world, then? For pre-20th century people, ‘the world’ was just there. It was not of any concern to them. The only concerns were their personal life, their village, and whoever had authority over them. A part of the world could go to rot, and a pre-modern person would not care, or notice.

The save-the-world plot is so common, I can even sketch out the most common versions. Something bad is happening, and things are so desperate that one person—not the protagonists—says ‘to hell with morals, I’m saving the world!’ The audience boos that person, because they leave behind individuals to save overall humanity. A second version is that, usually, the protagonist is tasked with saving the world, but declares that ‘I’m not doing it to save the whole world, I’m doing it to save my friends!’ The audience cheers this protagonist for sticking up for the everyman/his loved ones in spite of the oncoming doom; though, a common alternative is that the protagonist is already a misanthrope who hates the world in the first place, but still saves his friends. A third version is that the protagonist works to save the world—but hark! Something in the process goes wrong. Oh, no! The protagonist must give a heartfelt goodbye, and sacrifice his one life for the good of the many. We shall ever love you, [insert protagonist here]!

Not to be flippant, but that person can get in line behind Jesus Christ, Optimus Prime, Steve ‘Captain America’ Rodgers, Steve ‘Wonderwoman’s Boyfriend’ Trevor, Frodo Baggins, and Bruce Willis! (Armageddon, 1998.) Not to mock Our Lord and Savoir, it’s that the fictional characters who imitate his sacrifice get a bit silly. This even includes characters in foreign media. Japan and its anime stories has a dark and disturbing inversion. It is a character type that I have encountered only three or so times in my 2 decades of anime binging, and it is so disturbing that it slaps me in the face whenever I see it. Rather than be a Savoir-character, this character type is an inversion. Not an Anti-Christ! An Anti-Christ wants to ruin the world. Here, it is more of an ‘Inverted Savoir’*, where the character does want to save the world—by being the monster that everyone hates. This inverted savoir commits an act of murder, or terrorism, so heinous that the world (its governments and its peoples) brand the inverted savoir a monster, and hate him so badly they put aside all their other problems.

Now that I think about it, C. Nolan’s Batman did this, to a degree, in The Dark Knight (2008). You know, lying that he (Batman) murdered people to make a murderer (Two-Face) look like a hero because… people needed a hero, that wasn't Batman? ...I have a lot of beef with Nolan’s Batman, but that’s for later. Anyway, the inverted savoir of Japanese anime is always hunted down and killed, and the world, out of fear of another monster coming back, is put in a state of vigilance that keeps them on good behavior. Note: I am not trying to vilify the Japanese people or anime in general. Japan has some very unique storytelling techniques that I can get to in another post. This is a very rare character type, and the Japanese people are very tactful with other peoples’ cultures as a rule of thumb. (They are very aware that if you apply the ‘inverted savoir’ type in a Western-style story, it would be like Jesus deliberately becoming Satan to force the people of the world into becoming angels. That’s just weird.) The Japanese anime writers know the inverted savior is a weird, repulsive trope, that’s why they use it so rarely.

Okay, went off tangent.

More to follow, in part 2!

*[For those interested, my examples of an inverted savoir are:

Prince Lelouch of Code Geas, a prince who becomes a terrorist to murder his corrupt royal family, becomes the emperor, and then acts like a tyrant to force people to behave (anime); Erin Jaeger, of Attack on Titan, who literally becomes a mythological monster to prove a point (anime); and Leto II, God-Emperor of Dune, the son of Paul Atreides. Yes, from the Dune series, but later on in the books, because the later books of Dune are so screwball, they can’t be adapted into movies. Leto II deliberately acts like a godawful tyrant, to get his subjects to hate him so much that, when he dies, his subjects flee the space empire. …I have beef with Frank Herbert, the author, and a number of other educated space hippies like Herbert. You will only ever have one Dune movie, and that’s because only the first book makes sense to normal people!]