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Vincent Ramdhanie
Senior Software Engineer
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In Defence of Noble Characters

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By Vincent Ramdhanie•
fiction culture character ethics
In Defence of Noble Characters

Somewhere along the way, nobility in fiction became embarrassing. Characters who do right because it is right are dismissed as childish, while "morally complex" became our highest term of praise. I think this reflects a mistaken verdict about human nature — and there is good evidence the tide is worth pushing against.

Why do we lean so hard into flawed characters? There was a time when a character could be written with nobility and a sense of righteousness, and audiences celebrated it. Today that kind of character is considered childish — a sign the author hasn't grown up. I want to argue that it is not.

What nobility on the page looks like

Consider The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn, Gandalf, and Galadriel are noble and, in the ways that matter, above reproach. They work for the good of their society and fight evil because it is the right thing to do — not for profit, and not for power. Galadriel is offered the Ring and refuses it. Aragorn spends decades serving in disguise before claiming a throne he never grasps at. Because the leaders are like this, the war itself changes character: it becomes a war to end evil rather than a war to gain control.

The early superheroes belonged to the same tradition. They fought for what was right, and that was allowed to be the whole story. I would argue the type survived in mainstream film right up through the Infinity Saga. Even now, Spider-Man fights crime without an eternal moral dilemma. And note what the exceptions actually prove: Tony Stark's arc works precisely because it bends toward nobility — a flawed, selfish man who grows into the hero who gives his life for everyone else. Nobility as a destination is still nobility. The classic form never demanded flawless characters; it demanded that goodness be real and worth reaching for.

The evidence that the culture turned

This is not just a feeling. The turn is documented, named, and celebrated.

Television critics call the era that began with The Sopranos the third golden age, and its canon is explicitly a canon of bad men: Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Don Draper, Walter White. Brett Martin's history of the period is titled, approvingly, Difficult Men — NPR's coverage describes these protagonists as the signature achievement of prestige television. The antihero was not a variation on the form; he became the form itself.

Fantasy followed the same road under its own name: grimdark. George R.R. Martin has been open about the philosophy — in his Rolling Stone interview he says of one of his characters, "You can't make him a hero or a villain. He was both. And we're all both," invoking Faulkner's line about the human heart in conflict with itself. In Westeros, nearly everyone acts from the desire for power, money, or survival. I have been reading Joe Abercrombie's books this past year, and he is a genuinely good storyteller — I enjoy them. But I cannot get invested in the quests of his characters, because none of them act selflessly, and this seems to be universally true across his worlds. That is not an accident of craft; it is the design.

The clearest evidence, though, is in our vocabulary. "Morally complex" is now a term of praise; "goodie-goodie" is a dismissal. Things got so lopsided that readers had to coin new words for the alternative: in 2017 the writer Alexandra Rowland declared that "the opposite of grimdark is hopepunk", and the label "noblebright" appeared alongside it. Sit with that for a moment — decency in protagonists became so rare that it needed a subgenre name, the way an endangered species needs a preserve. And when James Gunn relaunched Superman in 2025, he marketed the character's defining trait as rebellion: being kind and "unapologetically earnest," he said, is the real punk rock — adding that basic human kindness is "something we have lost." When kindness reads as counterculture, cynicism has become the establishment.

The claim hiding inside "realism"

The standard defence of all this is realism. People are mixed, the argument goes; a character above reproach is a lie, and grey fiction is simply honest fiction.

There is a half-truth here worth conceding. Inner conflict is real, and stories about it can be great — the Iron Man arc is a story of the heart in conflict with itself. My complaint is not that characters struggle.

My complaint is the settled verdict smuggled in underneath: that selfless motives are fantasy, that everyone ultimately acts from power or appetite, and that portraying anything else is naive. That is not an observation about storytelling technique. It is a claim about human nature — and it is one our films and shows now repeat so consistently that we have come to accept that human beings are simply incapable of higher motives.

The verdict is wrong

The Universal House of Justice addressed this exact conviction in its 1985 statement The Promise of World Peace: "Indeed, so much have aggression and conflict come to characterize our social, economic and religious systems, that many have succumbed to the view that such behavior is intrinsic to human nature and therefore ineradicable." The same statement traces the "falsehood that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive" to the glorification of material pursuits — and warns that a paralysis of will follows from believing in "the inevitable quarrelsomeness of mankind." (The Promise of World Peace, 1985)

Twenty-seven years later, in its Ridván 2012 message, the House of Justice returned to the theme in a passage that could double as a review of this era's fiction. Hopes for a better world, it wrote, "founder on erroneous assumptions about human nature that so permeate the structures and traditions of much of present-day living as to have attained the status of established fact" — assumptions that "rely for justification on humanity's failings, examples of which daily reinforce a common sense of despair. A layered veil of false premises thus obscures a fundamental truth: The state of the world reflects a distortion of the human spirit, not its essential nature." (Ridván 2012)

That last point is the one I want to press, because fiction is not a bystander here. Stories are where a culture rehearses what it believes is possible. A generation raised on tales where every institution is corrupt and every motive is appetite is being trained in exactly the conviction the House of Justice describes — and a people convinced that selfishness is inevitable will not exert themselves to build anything better. The distortion becomes self-fulfilling, one boxset at a time.

Bahá'u'lláh states the alternative premise in a single line: "O SON OF SPIRIT! Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created." (The Hidden Words) Nobility, on this view, is not a childish fantasy layered over a base reality. It is the created reality; the baseness is the distortion. A story in which Galadriel refuses the Ring is not less true to human nature than a story in which she takes it — it is true to a different, and I would argue deeper, part of it.

Hope vs despair

I am not calling for the abolition of flawed characters — I will keep reading Abercrombie, and the growth arc from flaw toward virtue may be the most useful story shape we have. What I am asking is that we stop treating nobility as an artistic failure. Write characters who act selflessly and mean it. Let a leader serve without a hidden ledger of ambition. Trust the audience — the reception of an earnest Superman suggests people are hungrier for this than the industry believed.

Because beneath the two storytelling instincts lie two postures toward the future. One holds that the condition of mankind today is all we can be, and that from here things may only get worse. That way lies despair — and despair, as we have seen, paralyses. The other posture simply remembers. We have always changed. Practices once defended as permanent features of human nature — slavery, the divine right of kings, children sent into the mines — were ended by people who refused to accept them as final. Centuries of evidence say that we grow, and there is no reason to believe the growing has stopped. Nor will the change arrive from somewhere outside us. It will come from us — from people who take up, deliberately, the work of creating a new race of men who value the higher ideals.

Stories are part of that work. The full potential of mankind is not visible in a mirror held up only to our worst behaviour. Some of us still believe the older stories were on to something: that a person can do right because it is right, and that showing this — credibly, seriously, for adults — is not childish at all. It is a vote for hope over despair, and it might be the most necessary kind of realism we have.

References

These thoughts are my own. I had help with grammar, structure, and research from Claude.