Anzac Day, Avengers: Endgame, and Fallen Heroes
I've been thinking a lot about fallen heroes in the past two days. Possibly because I went to see Avengers: Endgame yesterday, possibly because today is Anzac Day.
(FYI Endgame was freaking fantastic but considering this is also a post on Anzac Day I figured the respectful thing to do was to keep the fangirling to a minimum. (But go see it. Holy smokes.) (Also, this post does not contain spoilers.))
The longer I go through life and the more I learn, the more I've realised that heroes fall. Whether that means they fall literally like the men at Gallipoli or like some of the characters in Avengers, these are people (or fictional characters) who lived and died, breathed and fought for what they believed in.
Then there's the other kind of falling. There's the falling where someone once had respect and lost it, where they used to be a hero but it turns out they are something less than what you'd hoped. Something a little more fragile, a little more selfish.
Honestly, I think the latter fallen hero is the worst. It's a betrayal of something you had built up in your mind, and kind of a betrayal of who you are and what you look up to. There's something horrible and twisted about a hero falling from a stage they both built and destroyed with their own hands.
The former is easier to heal from, because in a way they always exist in that space in your mind. They can live there, their memory untarnished. In Marvel, you can always go back and watch fallen heroes in previous movies and those characters exist in those two hours on your TV screen forever. In real life, people live on in the memories of the people who loved them. They exist in that space between waking and sleeping, in the dawn services and the photographs.
They live on in the stories we tell each other, and there's something heartbreaking and beautiful in that.
(FYI Endgame was freaking fantastic but considering this is also a post on Anzac Day I figured the respectful thing to do was to keep the fangirling to a minimum. (But go see it. Holy smokes.) (Also, this post does not contain spoilers.))
The longer I go through life and the more I learn, the more I've realised that heroes fall. Whether that means they fall literally like the men at Gallipoli or like some of the characters in Avengers, these are people (or fictional characters) who lived and died, breathed and fought for what they believed in.
Then there's the other kind of falling. There's the falling where someone once had respect and lost it, where they used to be a hero but it turns out they are something less than what you'd hoped. Something a little more fragile, a little more selfish.
Honestly, I think the latter fallen hero is the worst. It's a betrayal of something you had built up in your mind, and kind of a betrayal of who you are and what you look up to. There's something horrible and twisted about a hero falling from a stage they both built and destroyed with their own hands.
The former is easier to heal from, because in a way they always exist in that space in your mind. They can live there, their memory untarnished. In Marvel, you can always go back and watch fallen heroes in previous movies and those characters exist in those two hours on your TV screen forever. In real life, people live on in the memories of the people who loved them. They exist in that space between waking and sleeping, in the dawn services and the photographs.
They live on in the stories we tell each other, and there's something heartbreaking and beautiful in that.
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