Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 54th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are about, visit the Blog Banter page.

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Today’s topic comes Diaries of a Space Noob blog and other sources:

Do classic heroes exist in EVE? Is such heroism even possible in EVE? How would you go about being one without opening yourself wide open to scams? Is the nature of the game so dark that heroes can’t exist? How do you deal with that irony? What effect does this have on us and the psyche of new players coming in from other MMOs? Is it something special that we don’t have classic heroes, or should we? Are our non-classic heroes more genuine?

Heroes, I scoffed at the word in my thoughts.

I used to be a hero. There was a time when I was the poster boy for the Republic Fleet. I couldn’t go anywhere without screaming hordes of admirers clamouring for my attention. At first, I welcomed it. After a while, it started to become a burden. I found myself acting the “hero” for their benefit instead of simply doing what I had always done, which was killing Amarr.

Which reminds us that it is all about perspective. To the Amarr, I was no hero. I was the villain, the story you tell your fat little religious pig children about so they’ll sleep at night after you’ve made sure the slaves are drugged and passed out from exhaustion and undernourishment.

I was never a hero. I was simply a man who did what he believed was right. What more could the universe ask of any of us?

There were many that didn’t even live by a moral compass, that could care less about right or wrong. It was about padding their accounts, or increasing their killboard, or simply living from one emotion to the next, deriving simplistic pleasure like any other uncontrolled infant.

Heroes. I snorted in derision once again.

Infamy went to men like the Mittani, whom built entire empires on lies and deceits, who fed the media only what he wanted them to know in order to continue the cycle of fear and mystique when the reality was he was no different than the rest of us.

That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? We are all equal in our inequality. We are all imperfect despite our marvels of technology. Sure, some like the Mittani command thousands of pilots and occupy most of New Eden than not, but does that beget fame or heroism? Is he a hero to his own people? It’s doubtful, and somewhat irrelevant.

New Eden devoured those that strived to do what was right, those that led by righteous example. There was no clear definition of right and wrong, and like humanity had demonstrated throughout its entire history, there would most likely not be.

“Believe in our loving, merciful, forgiving god, or we will destroy you.” That right there summed up humanity. How could we, as capsuleers, think to do better, think to be beacons of evolution, when we were still rooted by our own humanity? Maybe Sansha had it right all along. Maybe freeing ourselves from the bonds of humanity and embracing technology was a way out, a way to become a hero.

You could ask my wingmates in Stay Frosty. Some of them have heroes, I’m sure. There are moments of heroism all around us if we haven’t grown desensitized to it all. We see someone do something “heroic” and we call them a glory hound, perhaps while secretly envious of their deed.

Maybe I had given up on myself. Maybe that is why I no longer believed in heroes. Or maybe I had come to accept that I had been a fool all along …