Heroism and True Heroes, Part 1
Recently, a friend of mine posted that about a revision of The Hobbit in which Bilbo was gender swapped. One of her main issues with this is that instead of creating a new female hero, the reviser simply did damage to one of the few true male heroes in existence*. She listed the three true male heroes she has encountered as Bilbo Baggins (of The Hobbit ), the Doctor (of Doctor Who ), and Agent Coulson (from the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Obviously these are all fictional characters, but the conversation seemed to be concerned mainly with fictional characters rather than real-life heroes. This post will be following in the same vein. In reading her post and the ensuing discussion, I started to think about heroes I had watched or read. I also began to wonder about my own characters and whether I had written any true heroes of either gender. That thought led me back to something I had written in a previous discussion on heroism with another friend: Heroism is a)...