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What you say about storytelling is true: to optimize for drama and thrills and edge-of-your-seat uncertainty, you're going to want to write an underdog story. Ooh, how's our hero going to get out of this one? You've only got the faintest clue, and you're watching with breath absolutely bated to see if you've guessed correctly or not.
The problem is that the Underdog Story may not be the best lens through which to view the world. Or at the very least, it shouldn't be the only lens through which to view the world.
The Underdog Story has its upsides in terms of life lessons, like self-reliance in the face of tough challenges, proactivity about doing the right thing, and so forth.
But it also has its downsides, and one of the most important is the plot-driven necessity that anybody powerful be somewhere between evil and useless, so never good. A heroic overdog would be boring, after all: no uncertainty about how he'll get out of this one.
But what happens when we marinate our minds in this narrative structure, over and over and over again, in a relentlessly-optimized fiction market? Maybe find ourselves inexorably associating "power" with "evil" and "weakness" with "good?" "The status quo" with "the evil empire" and "anything right and decent" with "us chosen-one rebels?"
Perhaps we'd end up thinking that way: living out a perpetual rebellion, as the only stories that matter are about the conquest, about supplanting the powerful. What happens after - the actual ruling, the use of that hard-won power? Well, feh, that's always just skipped over in the epilogue. "And they lived happily ever after." Once we win, there'll be utopia! Who cares about the details? They never need to in the stories.
So somebody with power who is not presiding over a utopia needs to be torn down. Every generation sends up its heroes to tear down the last generation's and be torn down by the next generation's in turn. Nice and dramatic: how's it going to go this time? And maybe there really is improvement ratcheting upward each cycle - either way, every generation can always imagine it's the chosen one that will really fix everything this time, and can always explain away their failures once they're apparently on top by appealing to some unseen ever-more-powerful foe that must be holding them back.
Not good for stability, though. No telling what hard-won good will end up as collateral damage in any given revolution. Our Heroes' victories don't tend to last long if there are sequels.
The tagline to 1978's "Superman" was "you'll believe a man can fly." With special effects these days, that's trivial; much more impressive would be to show us how someone can be both that strong and that good. Such a character's Hero's Journey may be over, but that just means that the really important part has begun.
Tougher to sell tickets to that, though, so maybe we're stuck this way.
(Hello, all! I've lurked since before there was a Culture War Roundup thread but never posted at all. Thought I would try to help get the new site running, but I don't expect my courage to last.)
I'm in the same boat, but I hope to continue posting. I realized that I want to become a better writer, and even if your comments aren't the best you can improve them over time. Heck, I struggle to write well for productive reasons so I might as well hone my skills in a place that rewards good writing, and discusses topics I find interesting.
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One can certainly write a story of this sort. But it's a quite different story.
There's an isekai called Worth The Candle that tells a story of this sort. Not sure how to spoiler tag things, but basically there's an evil villain who immediately surrenders because he can see he's underpowered relative to the ubermensch lead character. At this point he reveals that he rules a surprisingly populous society that he built around his particular variety of evil, one which will rapidly descend into starvation if you just switch it off, and with a population that is aligned with his values. Um, now what? And is handling this situation even a good use of ubermensch time and effort relative to the primary goal of creating a good magical singularity?
Unlike Tolkien, it was not rooted in medieval England. You could race swap the main characters with no issue and toss and hint that the isekai lead faced racism back in Oklahoma.
Also it's niche internet fiction written by a stay at home dad who is a big success by the standards of Patreon and earns maybe $1-2k/month from 444 subscribers. There's a reason Amazon didn't buy that and ruin it - it's utterly inaccessible to most viewers.
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You've made a very good comment and I encourage you to not let courage be the barrier to your further posting. Those of us making smaller, more mundane, comments can often be the magic catalyst that sparks off truly great comments and discussions. You will at the very worst be forgotten.
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