Myths And Heroes

MYTHS & HEROES

I am going to talk about the notion of myth and heroes. First of all I would like to give a quick definition of that notion. Let’s begin with the myth. A myth is an ancient story about gods, heroes, and magic, it can be a popular belief, something traditional or a false notion. Now let’s see what is a hero. In order to illustrate what is it, I have chosen different documents.

The first one representing three characters in three difference frames. A person may be considered as a hero if he became object of admiration, of devotion amongst a lot of people either by his achievements, his noble qualities or his powers and his great courage of course, someone who also accomplish extraordinary exploits, who share human values, values of peace, and appears as a legend, like someone who changed the history. On the document there are three different characters, the first two men are doubtless heroes, but the old man on the last frame is a hero as well. He is of course not as famous as Superman or the baseball player, he doesn’t have muscles like them, he is not tall or good looking, but he has exactly the values of a hero, he is courageous war veteran who probably saved a lot of people and accomplish extraordinary exploits and who also shared values of peace.

For most of people, heroes are fictional like Superman, Batman… or they are important persons, like Martin Luther King or even Rosa Park are real heroes thanks to what they achieved in their country. But there is a third kind of hero, they are probably most numerous than real or fictional heroes but they are not famous and they don't want to be. We call them ordinary heroes, daily life heroes… They are like the old men in the first document normal person, they absolutely don’t look like heroes, but like the veteran they have heroes’ values. To talk about these ordinary heroes who are not at all or not much know by society I am going to use a document of compilation of videos studied in class. In this document we can see a lot of different people who accomplished with abnegation and without thinking an heroic act and saved a life. For exemple in some of the videos, someone fainted or attempted to suicide on the rails in a metro station, and luckily an unknown hero cames from nowhere and came to their rescue by jumping on the rails, grabbing them back onto the platform in the nick of time. An other group of people worked together to heave a car and put the victim out of harm’s way. Those persons made it by reflex, they were probably on the work’s way and didn’t think that that would have to do it. There is a second type of daily life heroes. As the precedent they don’t do it for the glory or the money or anything else, but just because it’s there job to save lives and defend people from vilains, all these persons are the firemen, the policemen, the soldiers…

I think that a hero don’t need to have a lot of qualities, three are really important on my opinion. The first one is that a hero have to be humble, modest and all the ordinary heroes are like that, but also most of the famous heroes even in the comics have this quality, like batman who use an other identity or Mandela who didn’t considered as a hero. Then a hero have to be full of courage, not strong or tall, but courageous, because all the heroes like the ordinary heroes

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