Not Just Plucky Underdogs

Most of us are suckers for “plucky underdog” stories. I say “most,” because I assume bullies aren’t into them. I notice that the grifter’s administration referred to itself as “Goliath” in one of its communications to Canada, which gives me some indication that whoever wrote that line was not paying attention in Sunday School.

But the rest of us love them. The first three Star Wars movies were colossal hits because the resistance fighters were plucky underdogs who eventually won.

For me, part of what makes the original Star Wars movies so satisfying is that the plucky underdogs are the good guys and they win.

The winning is important. It’s not just that they’re plucky and right; they succeed.

When The Force Awakens, the first of the last Star Wars trilogy, came out (We will draw a veil over the second trilogy), my first reaction was “Wait a minute. The good guys won in Return of the Jedi. Why are they the plucky rebels again?”

Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie, even enjoyed the complexity of the good guys that got worked into that whole series. But my question stands.

Why weren’t the good guys fighting from a position of power? The implication is that even if the right people end up in charge, they can’t hold onto it.

Now there are certainly plenty of historical examples of the good guys winning only to be overthrown soon after. It happens. It happened here in the United States in November 2024 when the January 6, 2021, insurrection, which we all thought had failed, succeeded.

You can argue that we needed better good guys and that the United States needs some changes and I won’t disagree with you, but we are dealing with the destruction of our country right now, including a lot of the best parts of it. I come down on the side of clean air, equal opportunity, safety, antitrust enforcement, and retirement protection every time.

You can also tell me there was an election, but I will counter that the 14th Amendment bars insurrectionists from office. The failure of our institutions to protect us from this debacle will keep me angry forever.

Anyway, the plucky underdog story is a classic, whether the underdog wins or loses, and we the people of the United States do seem to be in the underdog spot right now. (I assume some of the people who voted for the grifter are still under the illusion that the leopards aren’t going to eat their faces, but they need their social security checks and their highway repairs, too.)

But unless the underdog wins and holds onto the win, it is so not the story I need right now! I need stories where the good people not only succeed, but figure out how to keep things going well. I want stories in which people develop a good society – if not a utopia, at least something on the path to one – and keep it going.

Those stories seem damn hard to come by. Most utopia stories end in ruin.

I come back to one of my favorite stories of all time, Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed.” I love that story and I want to change the ending. I want the people who developed that wonderful society to be able to protect it. But they can’t.

Then there are all the stories that glorify the resistance. I mentioned It Can’t Happen Here last week. It ends with the sentence:

And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die.

Wonderful. Inspiring. But goddamn it, couldn’t the good guys just win? Is honoring resistance heroes the best we can really do?

I don’t want to be a resistance hero. I’d be terrible at it. I’m the sort of person who would get shot early in the story because I spoke back to the wrong person.

I mean, my personal idea of a hero is the Zen Monk Takuan Soho, who was – at least fictionally – a teacher of the great sword master Miyamoto Musashi.

In Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel Musashi, Takuan has to deal with a bullying captain, who is threatening to cut off his head because Takuan has stood up to him and told him off. Takuan says:

Now just try cutting off my head and sending it to Lord Ikeda Terumasa! That, I can tell you, would surprise him. He’d probably say, “Why, Takuan! Has only your head come to visit me today? Where in the world is the rest of you?”

Of course, unlike Takuan, I do not count powerful lords among my acquaintances, so I’d probably still lose my head. (Spoiler: he doesn’t.) It’s still my core idea of bravery. I believe in standing up to bullies.

Musashi’s story is a complicated one and you’d have to be a much better scholar of Japanese history and stories than I am to decide exactly who were the good guys. Certainly his life was that of an outsider, even as he became one of the great swordsmen of history.

I root for Musashi when I watch the movies or read the book, but it’s Takuan who is my real hero – the Zen master who treats everyone the same, regardless of rank. He’s smart and strategic, and, at least as Yoshikawa and filmmaker Hiroshi Inagaki tell the story, he is the spark that makes Musashi into a great man instead of the young tough he is at the beginning.

I’m struggling right now with a story I really want to tell – a short story that is in part worldbuilding for a novel I’d like to get around to – in which people build a solid community that they can protect from the likes of grifters, broligarchs, white supremacists, religious extremists, and so forth.

They have ideals, but they also take practical precautions. It’s hard to write at this time because the grifter and his minions keep coming up with means of attack that hadn’t even occurred to me, not to mention that I’m trying to figure out ways we could get from here to there. Plus there are so many other crises going on. (I could write a trilogy just on the “AI” grifters.)

It might also be hard to write because it’s the world I wish I lived in.