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[Sevrun]

I went out Christmas shopping today for my son, and found a toy that in all honesty, was iconic of my childhood and I suspect a great many others.  At first I was overjoyed, and who wouldn't be at finding something of such immense sentimental value?  It wasn't until several hours later, sitting alone as my wife coaxed my son into going to sleep, that I came to realize why I came to value this toy so very, very much.

  the world I grew up in was one of transformers and go-bots, a world where the heroes won at the end of the day so that children like myself could sleep feeling safe that night.  It was a world where even the villains who seemed so terrible at the time had limits beyond which they would not tread.  In short, it was a world of imagination, warmth, and endless possibility.  Everything a child could ask for.

  However, as I looked around with my instinctive need to compare and contrast everything...  I find it to be a vastly different world from the one which I now inhabit.  Mine is now a bitter place, cold, unappreciative of creative thought, and where the monsters have no limit to how far they will go to obtain what they desire.  I find it heartbreaking to consider what I and so many others have given up without thought in our pursuit of... what?  I look around and for my life I cannot see what it is we have been racing toward, what I see others running for still.  Maybe we didn't understand the value of what we were discarding... looking back now I can say I certainly did not.  But how could we when we had not yet been introduced to this world where violence is pervasive and death common place?
  I find in my son an opportunity that I have desired for years, and never dared speak of.  I have an opportunity to go back.  And even faced with the opportunity, I find myself frightened by it.  I have no wish to bring my cold world of misery to him any sooner than I must.  I know he'll seek it out on his own in due time, as I did.  Just as I know he'll not truly understand what it is he sacrifices, as I did not.  But if I try to go to that perfect world with my son, it's inevitable that the world I live in will follow.  So I don't dare go back, honestly, and that is perhaps the saddest thought of all.

I just don't understand...  how we gave it all away so easily, so foolishly...  and we never even thought to ask for anything in return.

[Torak]

You don't give up innocence, it dissolves in time. There's no way to avoid it.

[Hawkfrost]

Innocence is ignorance, knowledge is guilt.

Its all a part of growing older, sadly.

[Fenrir]

This must be beyond my ken, for I don't understand completely. You have an opportunity to go back where? How? Did I use the word ken correctly? Perhaps you could explain in less vague terms; we wolves have a hard time with this manner of thinking, you know.

[G-Flex]

Innocence is ignorance, knowledge is guilt.

I think it's kind of naive (ironically?) to say that ignorance and innocence are the same thing.

I'd say that you can have deep knowledge of something while still retaining innocence. Innocence is simply lost when the knowledge and experience around that subject in question distort and get in the way of your natural, genuine inclinations.

In other words, someone's first romantic relationship might be innocent, but it's not because they don't know much about them or don't have experience (at least not directly); it's because experience in them tends to lead to emotional and intellectual baggage which prevents the person from treating subsequent ones with the same level of unfettered, natural sincerity and lack of presumptions as the first.

[Aqizzar]

I think what you're missing is the idea that world outside is a place where good things eventually happen to good people and the badguys always lose.  Frankly, I would try to discourage that kind of expectant optimism, as you'll create a son who either rattles through life gullible to people who want to exploit that assumption of good intent, or he'll crash into the reality of villainy and turn jaded and cynical.

Instead, be honest but hopeful.  Tell him that sometimes good people just don't lucky, and sometimes the badguy gets away with his schemes.  Success at kind-hearted endeavors is never guaranteed, and villains will triumph.  Tell him none of that means he shouldn't try to be a kind and helpful person and encourage that behavior in others.  Instead, he should try all the harder, and treasure successes even more.  But never think that good intention entitles him to success or reward.

Ignorance does not entail innocence, nor the other way around.  Guilt may stem from knowledge, but knowledge doesn't have to breed guilt.  Doubt yes, but not guilt.

By the way, the world of your childhood is alien to me.  I always thought heroes were kind of chumps (though the late 80s early 90s, "anyone can be a hero!!1" icons were often chumps) and identified much more with the villains, at least the stylish ones.  Mum-Rah, Zed, Megabyte, and ol' Cobra Commander, badasses all.  Batman and Sonic were heroes more my speed, they knew being the hero wasn't as important as actually beating the villain.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, I identified more with the bad guys.  It annoyed me that the good guys always won, when the bad guys were so much cooler.  I still have a bit of that in me.  I still fondly remember when I fell to the Dark Side in KotOR.  Oh, the looks on Jolee and Juhani's faces, right before I killed them...  Good times.  I also made Zalbaar kill the Twi'lek girl, but I felt bad about that later.  It was taking it a bit too far.

[G-Flex]

I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because "heroes" tend to adhere to some strict sets of cultural standards, while villains can be any sort of foreign-looking weird guy you want. I'm not sure. Just another reason I don't like the whole "heroes vs. villains" moralistic dichotomy.

[Hawkfrost]

I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because "heroes" tend to adhere to some strict sets of cultural standards, while villains can be any sort of foreign-looking weird guy you want. I'm not sure. Just another reason I don't like the whole "heroes vs. villains" moralistic dichotomy.

Because the goodguys were always too much of a pussy to kill the villians.

I think if a dude causes mass destruction and devestation every week, without stop, I would just kill him and end it there.
But no, they have to put them in jail.
Where they break out in like 3 hours.

*sigh*

[G-Flex]

That was an issue in a lot of things because they needed to have recurring villains.

I mean, it wouldn't have been a problem if the guys actually STAYED in jail, but then they'd be out of a character, now wouldn't they?

It's more an issue of writing fiction than it is anything else, I think.

Think about it: Let's say the hero is okay with killing villains, and does so, to counteract the problem of villains busting out of jail constantly. This poses the exact same problem to the writers (and more, probably) as the heroes STAYING in jail in the first place; it would be trying to solve Problem B by causing the exact same Problem A that Problem B was devised to avoid, leaving you at square one.

[Aqizzar]

You can solve that problem by not using urban superheroes and criminal villains.  Zed never had to worry about getting locked in the pokey.

[Warlord255]

Luckily, my innocence was shattered not so much by the terrors of the modern age so much as bullies and girls. Woohoo!

[Rooster]

This made my day...

Yeah, I cannot find one person around my that wouldn't be a villain even a little bit
I'm not a good artist but I designed 13 characters for my "story" only 1 is NOT a villain
And its not the main character either

OH! Maybe you know some good series with villains as main heroes? (Just don't post obvious dungeon keeper here!)

[WorkerDrone]

I'd agree...that villains are usually 'cooler' then the 'good guys', but mostly because the good guys are pretty much all the same. I mean...well you have the superdude who throws the chain with the ball at the end on the bad guy, and five seconds later, the bad guy already has a pickaxe out to smash the chain. All to give the kids a moral at the end of every episode of those cartoons they watch in their PJ's eatting surgary cereal, and feel perfectly secure in knowing that cheating is wrong, or that telling the truth is the only way to go.

But does that really 'prepare' you, for what you have to deal with later on in life? That people will cheat to get their way, sometimes people who would normally be 'good' people. Or lie to hide the truth, even though the truth is hurtful? Its not likely.

And sometimes the villains, well they always seem to be hidden by their evil laughs, and usually their inept henchmen, making them seem rather incompetent, until you find that one villain, that evildoer that seems to have his head together, and you connect with him on a level far greater then most of those classic superdorks you see on the TV around this time. And then when you mature, you start to notice the differance in it all, like when you play video games, or watch really good movies, or read a book that doesn't place the central factor as 'Good' VS 'Evil'.

And at somepoint, that security wains and vanishes. I guess what I mean is, people start to grow up, and with that, they do new things, learn new stuff. And with that, the little things they grew up with start to get bigger and bigger, until they don't know where they are in the mess. Is it up to other people to lead them out of it? I'm...not really sure.

[andrea]

and feel perfectly secure in knowing that cheating is wrong, or that telling the truth is the only way to go.

well, cheating is wrong (wrong should be part of the meaning of the word)
and telling the truth is often better (altough sometime you might prefere to tell some small lies)

unluckly, the world doesn't work that way many times.