An angry anon makes a good point on the nature of heroes, and what one should do when faced with their imperfections (or downright moral failures):
Fucking this. You can’t trust others to be your heroes.
It’s important to remember that you never truly know your heroes. Heroes are just people.
People change. People are bought. People lose sight. People die.
Never forget, no matter how it happened, that whenever you’ve lost a hero, the things you believed in didn’t stop being true. The people you believed in weren’t the physical embodiment of whatever it was they stood for. If they betrayed you, or turned their back on their ideals, it doesn’t make those ideals any less valid.
This is because it’s not the person that you believed in. They didn’t make you believe in those things. You already believed the things that you believed. But you saw a strong person working towards them, or who had a clearer, fully conceptualized idea of what they were, and knew for a moment that they could be realized.
The only thing they really made you believe in is yourself.
The reality is that since you never really knew your hero, they were always just an idealized projection of you.
With them gone, you can choose to let those ideals die, or you can choose to pass them on.
A hero is just ideals with action. Choose to be your own ideals, and you choose to be your own hero.
A hero is just a focal point for the self.
Original screen cap:
Temple of Zagan 