students who were curious enough to turn fiction into reality

I love writing about fiction, It reminds me of how much associated we are with good stories, and characters.

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I am Aman and this safe space is my own metaverse, do check out all the adventures, hope you enjoy your ride :))

The Polarized Protagonist

Oftentimes in fictional stories, the views of the protagonist are very very extremist to the point where it almost seems naive and absurd to embody such views in the real world.

I used to think a lot about this gap in realism when I was fairly younger but now I think I can come up with somewhat of a reasoning as to why stories involving fictional characters and the realm of magic have a fairly simple model of the real world.

World Building surely has certain dynamics which needs to favor how the protagonist thinks, but having little or no knowledge of the aspects of world building, I will not try to venture into that domain.

Let's talk about the problems of having extremist views in any direction first, It would be easier for me to project my points.

Optimistic Extremism

Now I am no expert in deconstructing stories, everything that I am writing here is an opinion I currently choose to form, will be more than happy to be wrong, In my metaverse you don't have to buy anything to exert freedom of speech ;)

1. NARUTO

I am sure most of you reading this, have either watched Naruto or have heard about it at least once, for people who don't know what I am talking about here's a summary for you folks,

NARUTO IN 18 MINUTES

The main character Naruto in this anime possesses an indefinite amount of optimism for the good in people no matter what, which is a difficult attribute to have in the real world.

I doubt that such indefinite optimism works in reality exactly like it works in fictional worlds but nevertheless the influence that they exert on people reading the story is magical and I will come to that later, for now let me state my views as to why it's a problem.

• Real world and it's people possess far more complications compared to the people of leaf village and that's understandable also right?

• Optimism is a good trait to have but indefinite optimism or naivety will often result in us being more disappointed

It is absolutely difficult to portray a world as close to our real world and still justify the unrealism, the most important point to note is that the story will fail to serve it's purpose of an optimistic ending then.

2. BLACK CLOVER

While Black Clover is not a case of Indefinite Optimism but it still has it's own ways of diverging from realism, the protagonist Asta is indefinitely stubborn about achieving his goals, while this may be a very useful trait to have in the real world but I'd still argue against it

Tying oneself to one specific measure, can often times distract us from selecting what's right for us and what's wrong, I would not classify dedicating one's life to achieving a single goal, a sane choice.

A similar type of trait is seen in Monkey D. Luffy(protagonist of the anime One Piece) ,where his beliefs of achieving his goals are so rigid that he is willing to die for it, this kind of idealism is the biggest hindrance to reassessment and reflection in one's personal life.

While there may be people holding such standards of idealism in real life but we are not talking about long tails here, with respect to the mediocristan societies we live in, It's very hard to find environments that nurture such values.

Now that we have talked about cases of Optimistic Extremism let's march against the notion for a bit

Pessimistic Extremism

What could be a better anime if not Attack on Titan to talk about such case, the protagonist Eren Yeager is surely polarized towards a dystopian vision,

2. ATTACK ON TITAN

The idealism that the protagonist chooses to serve in this anime is rather uncommon,

The protagonist Eren Yeager believes that the only way to end the suffering is annihilating half of the world specifically those who oppose his kind, that's a rather polarized view surely but as we all know in the realm of fiction it's the story teller who decides what message to send.

I haven't had the chance to watch that many animes with a pessimistic world view but the point I want to make from this example is that, such polarizations are very much deviated from reality, of course no one expects such kinds of realism, but there is something about the impact that these stories create in the real world.

While these are some stories with characters that lie on the extreme end of the spectrum there are some good one's also which lie in between and can somehow be converted into realism, like My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer, where the protagonists are somewhat realistic in their ability to self doubt themselves at times, even reassessment of what they are thinking.

How stories with polarized characters create optimism for innovation?

I grew up watching stories which were rather optimistic, this influenced my outlook about the world, and I know all this is generic stuff that I have been talking about this entire time.

but,

I do think that optimistic fictional stories have a lot to do with our technological progress rather then pessimistic one's even though such character polarizations are very unrealistic, they sure help us intake some idealistic views to strive with.

One of the goals of technology is to bring us closer to our imaginations and bring reality closer to fiction, our reality currently has a lot of fictional aspects to it, thanks to the years of technological progress, we need more such stories and more such protagonist with indefinite optimistic views, so that as kids we can absorb that idealism and at least try to solve hard problems.

We have our own weird ways in which we make ourselves familiar with the protagonist, we try to replicate such idealisms in the world around us, It's very difficult to be as optimistic as Naruto is in reality but it'd be cool if we can have a virtual world interlinked with aspects of reality where we can hold such values.

Fiction is very underrated in the way it moves technology, a lot of people don't realize the role of science fiction in our day to day lives but we surely have a lot to attribute to it and I think Rohit does a better job compared to me in explaining this.

So You Want To Have Impact!

Pessimistic views gives rise to a lot of dystopian outcomes surely but having such values means accepting that we have reached our capacity to innovate and I choose to refute that train of thought.

Pessimism Appears to Be the Intellectually Serious Position

What if we grew up watching pessimistic stories instead of the optimistic ones?

If this were the case I think that we wouldn't have progressed to such an extent, Optimistic stories shapes our approach for betterment in a lot of ways, which the pessimistic ones will never be able to.

Though I believe that we should still have room for such stories also, It's never bad to consider possibilities where the outcomes are not positive

I am personally very much moved by fiction and the effects it has in our reality, this is what I am curious about the most, hence the possibility that we can embody such polarized views even though unrealistic sounds intriguing to me.

I look forward to the time when technology brings us closer to such a reality where such views and such idealisms are very common. There may be a few people around me who might possess such views but from what I choose to think it's not reciprocated well enough.

Conclusion

It's good for us to have characters which are tilted in the way they think, whether optimistic or pessimistic because we need to have such idealisms in our reality if we are to progress further.

This is what I have been thinking for quite sometime, I may be entirely wrong with this one or may be too naive to think in such a way, if that's the case I would be more than happy to have a discussion :))