I’ve had Enough of The One for a Lifetime
Hi there. I’m He-Man. Won’t Someone Love Me?
Let us discuss He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, because it is a subject that has been sorely ignored by the media old and new for too long. When I was a kid He-Man was on TV all the time, protecting Castle Grayskull for some reason and fighting his eternal battle against Skeletor, who wanted in to Castle Grayskull for some reason. It’s all a bit fuzzy, because I was ten years old, and because I barely remember anything from all that time ago. I remember almost nothing from yesterday, in fact, so thirty years ago? We’ll need Leo DiCaprio and his totem to drill in that deeply.
Still, the problem of motivation: Why was He-Man He-Man? In other words, aside from Mattel’s desperate need to sell kids like me plastic action figures and advertising on the cartoon, why was He-Man chosen to be super strong and manly by The Sorceress (Note: There was also a Sorceress)? Aside from the fact that he’s one of about two men in reasonable physical shape on Eternia, his buddy Man At Arms would have been a better choice. Man At Arms is not only in pretty buff shape to begin with, he’s also a technical genius inventor of weapons. If you’re handing out He-Man-ness to random people, why not him?
An argument could be made that giving Man At Arms super powers in addition to his super-genius at creating awesome death-dealing weapons would have made him too powerful. I reject this argument because it requires a depth of thought impossible in the He-Man universe. He-Man is chosen to be He-Man simply because – and that is awful storytelling.
All too common, though; fantasy and science fiction stories are riddled with examples of lazy heroes who are heroes solely because they were born with some genetic or societal advantage. Neo from The Matrix, Rand Al’Thor from the Wheel of Time, Even the Khaleesi from A Song of Ice and Fire all just sort of stumble into existence with the magic baked in, as it were. They wake up one day and realize, wowsers, I got the power in me, like they’re in the worst and longest After School Special ever.
Power ought to cost something. Power ought to require sacrifice, or it means nothing. If you can find a magic sword or a watery tart who just tosses you supreme executive power like Mean Joe Green tossing that kid that soda that time in that commercial, then it’s entirely possible your slightly meaner high school buddy might suddenly step forward at just the right moment, shove you out of the way, and snatch supreme executive power for himself.
Power should cost you something. The One Ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is found at random by Bilbo Baggins and then passed on to Frodo – but the Ring is depicted as having its own lizard will and to be using everyone around it in its efforts to get back to Sauron, and everyone who holds the Ring for any length of time pays a horrible price. Even Frodo, who barely scratches the surface of the power within the ring, is nearly consumed by the cost of wielding it.
Give me more of that. More stories where power has a price, and if you’re not willing to pay it you’re doomed. And maybe doomed anyway. I like doom, is what I’m saying.
I think Skeletor wanted Greyskull because he was a Bad Guy and “destroying” He-Man was his ultimate goal. It made sense to my…five year old self. Or however old I was when watching He-Man and other Cartoon Express offerings (Snorks? Shirt Tales? I still remember parts of the Denver the Last Dinosaur theme song).
Somehow this whole discussion (meaning your blog and the comment from Jen Donohue), makes me very glad I was a child during the 50s and 60s and only had to worry about whether or not this 3 Stooges had Curly in it.
Well, doesn’t power always cost something? Isn’t the loss of free will that comes from this sense of destiny burdening enough? There’s the responsibility of knowing you have power and the temptation/ moral obligation to wield it. How about the status difference, the expectations that everyone has of you, or even just the way they look at you… Maybe He-Man dreams of being an Account-Man in an advertising firm. Maybe the King of the Britons had rather been a Briton like any other…
I agree the “the one” idea as a starting point has been overused, but when writers dig enough into the character, the whole unfairness of one’s oneness can be interesting in itself, can’t it?
Hah! Well said.
But: “then it’s entirely possible your slightly meaner high school buddy might suddenly step forward at just the right moment, shove you out of the way, and snatch supreme executive power for himself.”
And maybe that’s how the world works, a lot? Some guy inherits a billion dollars or the kingdom or good genes etc. and that’s that. It might not make for a good fiction plot, but then life (like pure nihilism in fiction) often doesn’t…
In real life it’s mostly random who gets the power. But what are we made of? One could imagine that there is a price, but more subtle. If there is ultimately some kind of judgement (and who knows), those who inherit great power may have more to answer for… Soul-sucking rings play better to the crowd, but not all prices have to be so obvious…
But on a tactical level, giving man-at-arms super physical powers would be putting all your eggs into one basket, which is usually not a good move. At least this way there is someone else to draw fire when Skeletor is fighting He-Man.
Help help I’m being repressed! Come and see the violence in the system!