In Response to Krystal “Antiheroic Inspiration”

In Response to Krystal “Antiheroic Inspiration”

Krystal posted a response to a blogpost written by Avery regarding the recent surge of flawed heroes within literature (or media in general). Avery briefly argued against the idea that this was a problem, which, according to Avery, is a stance that many theorists seem to have taken. Krystal, agreed with Avery, but also added that this subject reminded her of the contentions surrounding the topic of violence in video games.

I would have to agree with both Avery and Krystal in that it is problematic to claim antihero’s should not be popular because people might want to emulate there lackluster characteristics. However, I am not as sure about the comparison to violence in videogames. From the literature that I have on the subject, it seems that the relationship between violence and videogames is, well, quite simply overstated. However, this is not to say that there is no such thing. There has been researching successfully illustrating the fact that children will often intimidate actions that they witness other perform, including violence. However, no real causal link has been shown between video games and children’s behavior. Accordingly, I do not view antiheroes within fiction as being problematic because of the imitation factor, just as I do not view certain types of videogames as being problematic for the same reason. For the record, I do think there are other issues involved with allowing young children to play adult videogames, however I do not find the intimidation factor to be the problem.