Robin L. Small <76640.2012@compuserve.com> asks:
> What (if any) have you seen or used to form your model for the
> Epic Hero, as seen in Sheridan, and the rest of the good guys???
> I read an artical in "SciFi Universe" that Bruce Boxleitner
> talked about the Arthurian Legends, so do you think it would be
> closer to the mark to look at the Arthurian Tales as opposed to
> Greek?

Well, if you're going to look at heroic epic, sure, the
Arthurian story is a classic...but the earliest and best of these
remain the Illiad and the Odyssey. Homer was definitely hitting all
cylinders with that.

If there's an aspect that informed B5's development, it's the
arc of that heroic epic, which if you look at it dispassionately, is as
much about the people *around* the hero as the hero himself. And all
too often, the hero achieves the goal, but falls or falters or is
changed by the end of it. Much of what passes for contemporary "heroic
epic" assumes that it means the Good Guys Win. Heroic here as a term
goes back to its much earlier origins, a "heroic effort" is something
that takes everything you have, against terrible or impossible odds.

Yes, you achieve the goal...but you fall in battle in the
fields of Troy. Yes, you create Camelot, but in the end you are
destroyed and Camelot falls. There's tragedy and mistakes side by side
with the glory and the gains. The accounts of Arthur's meeting with
Mordred at Camlan field, and how the final battle began is classic
ironic drama, a tragedy of great proportions...and an aspect of that
fed directly into the development of the B5 backstory, as you'll learn
later this season.

Histories are written about the soldiers who won their battles;
but songs are sung about the soldiers who fell in battle struggling for
a greater cause. What inspires us is the unfinished work, the dream of
picking up the fallen standard and taking it ten more feet up the hill,
knowing that even if you fall, the next man in line will take it
another ten feet, until finally the hill is taken. Humans are
constantly throwing their lives away on causes logic tells us are
hopeless...but which in time become real for that reason.

It's a dangerous romance with myth, heroism, and death. On the
one hand, it inspires an Arthur...on another, it inspires a car bomber
to blow himself and 27 bystanders to bits en route to an appointment
with Allah.

What makes the heroic epic work is that it taps into all the
myths and archetypes that have been with us for all of recorded
history, and much of its oral history. Where B5 gets into this area is
in trying to look at the kinds of myths and epics that have gone
before, and finding not the specifics, but the themes which are
universal, the *sense* and the feel of it, which are intangible, and
which is what makes doing an epic so hard. Either you feel the
structure, or you don't; if you try to hammer it down into a formula,
a step-by-step process, it turns to quicksilver in your hands and slips
away. You have to take it all in, then listen to the inner voice and
write accordingly.

I remember a stanza from a poem I read a long time ago; "Love
will die if held too tightly; love will fly if held too lightly;
lightly, tightly, how do I know, whether I'm holding or letting love
go?" This kind of fiction operates on the same basis. Substitute the
word epic or story for love, and the logic holds.

So the epic hero or story can't be a *model*, to use your
phrase; it can only be an inspiration for what has gone before...an
echo in the back of your mind that whispers and guides you through all
the dark places.

jms