No discussion about flaws is complete without discussing hubris. It is the classic flaw, the overriding one of Greek drama, and it informs much of our concept of fiction.
Hubris is the belief that one is equal to or above the gods. It is putting yourself up so high that there is no ground beneath you to support yourself. And the tragedy is the falling from grace, and the resulting consequences to everyone around them.
It's hard to find modern stories that include true hubris. It's hard to use effectively, especially without active gods in the story. But there are still stories of incredible arrogance and self-pride that tell of how someone's feelings about himself caused his downfall.
Bonus writing prompt: write about someone dealing with hubris. What do you think of the flaw?
7 comments:
Is hubris that literal? I'd thought that in this day and age it had come to include that incredible arrogance and self-pride... Setting oneself up as a god, even if no literal gods are involved for comparison. (Or was that what you were trying to say and I'm just being dense? LOL)
Strange, I can't think of many protagonists of modern works that have trouble with hubris; it seems mostly a quality of villains these days. Perhaps this has to do with capital-T Tragedy being out of fashion.
I also think it's difficult to portray hubris without making the character look like an idiot. It takes a subtle touch.
Yeah, it's not a protagonist flaw anymore. And if it's the villain's flaw, they tend to look like something out of Power Rangers .. "oooh, I'm so POWERFUL, you will WORSHIP me!"
Only place I can think of hubris being done at all well, oddly enough, is in Disney's _The Emperor's New Groove_. The emperor, before he became a llama, had a good case of hubris through ignorance going.
I don't know, I think it's possible to do (in the "overconfidence and arrogance" sense, at least) without it being all Power Ranger-y. (Literal "worship me, I'm a god", yeah, I agree with you there.) It has to be done very carefully, and I think you have to kind of build up to it subtly as Sefiru said... But I think it's possible.
Unfortunately, having said that, I can't think of an example. :P My brain's a little dead right now... I feel like there's an obvious example that I'm just not quite coming up with.
What keeps poking itself into my head, actually, is Dread's motto from Tad Williams's *Otherland* series: "Confident, cocky, lazy, dead." The hubris arc in a nutshell. I know I've used this to refer to characters I've felt were guilty of, at the very least, an arrogant over-confidence... Actual factual hubris takes that to another level, but I'm thinking some of them might have actually passed into that in my estimation. I wish I could remember who. Blargh.
The thing is, when a modern protagonist expresses hubris, they usually get taken down a notch near the beginning of the story (about the end of Act 1) and the rest of the plot involves them developing Respect for All Living Things or some such.
I have a feeling that we could find some good examples in superhero comics, but I'm not familiar enough with them to say. Actually, my favorite example of classical hubris comes from the Sandman comic: that madman in the first volume, who gets hold of Morpheus's ruby pendant. He (briefly) thinks he can destroy Morpheus with it. Though Sandman is larded with literature references anyway ...
Question: Is it still hubris if they're insane? Or is that just insanity and delusions of grandeur?
I don't think it's hubris if you're just crazy.
Or it can be /both/, depending - but I think part of hubris is truly thinking that you just ARE that good. It's a kind of insanity, but ... if a character is truly insane, I would consider that different. Personally.
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