#SunshineMoot

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Sunshine Moot 2023; “A successful leader often combines courage, resolve, intelligence, intuition, persuasion, and physical ability. Often these qualities are accompanied by pride, entitlement, impetuousness, and a “fatal flaw” — yet a leader is also called to demonstrate humility, self-sacrifice, and regard for others. It’s a tall order. How are these qualities brought forward and balanced in the leaders of fantasy and science fiction, and what lessons can be taken from their stories?” (Signum University Regional Moot Page)

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Scoping this talk was hard. There are so many fantastic leaders in the books, shows, and movies I love. I knew from previous experience that I needed to keep the focus narrow to avoid the inevitable sprawl that ultimately results in unfinished works or hectic deletions at the end to fit within allocated time limits. It was a bit easier because I went into this one planning to write a series of talks on leadership, with this one just being the first instance. 

I went with Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard because they are the heroes I grew up with and after whose example I patterned my own leadership style. They come from different story genres (superheroes, fantasy, and science fiction) told in disparate formats (comics, novel, television) which allows us to look at leadership from a few different perspectives. They are skilled leaders and fascinating characters in their own right. I’m not saying my three are the best fictional leaders, just that they resonate deeply with me. 

I realize that they are not a demographically diverse set. This isn’t a problem in itself, but I wanted to acknowledge that reality. Pictured on the left are just a few of the leaders I hope to study in future installments. 

The Marvel comics and movies are replete with leaders of diverse styles and descriptions but so is Fullmetal Alchemist, both manga and anime (Brotherhood). Voltron not only features a female leader, Princess Allura is successfully reimagined as a fascinating character in the 2016 reboot of the now nearly-unwachable 1984 original, but as a bonus it affords us a look at team- and coalition-building, a topic my wife and I looked at in our first joint Mythmoot presentation back in 2020. Galadriel’s career has long interested me, especially with the alternative and mutually-exclusive versions described in the History of Middle-earth series. I have not yet seen the Rings of Power series so I’m curious to see which elements they incorporated into her character for their adaptation.

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It’s always hard to tell how a presentation is being received in the room when presenting via Zoom but judging by the discussion in the following Q&A portion it seemed like it went over well. The crowd really seemed to respond both to the selected examples (Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard) and to the idea of looking at leaders in the light of their failure moments. This was really a result of my rejecting the notion of a “fatal flaw”. Whether they are historical or fictional, realistic characters seem to me to be more nuanced than that, but everyone experiences failure so I thought that would be a more relatable approach to the prompt. 

Some interesting questions were raised by the audience about an apparent period of dormancy between failure and recovery. I didn’t think of it in the moment, but this actually resonates with one of the ideas in an earlier paper on Disappointing Dualism which Kerra and I presented in our first moot back in 2020 where was observed that recovering heroes seemed to move through a period of solitude and reflection between a fall from grace and a return to active goodness. This question has me thinking and may spawn a future line of research. 

There was also a discussion later on about whether self-sacrifice was an essential trait for a heroic leader. I can think of a few examples where my three leaders put their lives on the line for others, but it seemed to me that a good leader needed to have vision to see the greater plan and understand the greater good as well as discernment to comprehend which of the many competing needs was the one to sacrifice for and when was the right time to do it. Again, this is a line of thought that merits more investigation. 

[arnorion-in-arda]

Failed Mythical Leaders

It has been said that good leaders are a force multiplier and that truly great leaders embody the highest virtues, bringing out the best in their people. But no one is perfect, and that is equally true of leaders, whether historical or imagined. Many heroes of myth are described as having a fatal flaw alongside their more admirable qualities, a not-so-hidden vice which holds them back or even leads to their tragic downfall. 

But real people (whether historical or invented) are less cartoonish than that. Real heroes like real people have a variety of strengths and weaknesses, and at times they fall short of the mark. They might even experience failures so significant that their peers and followers (or even they themselves) might question their fitness to command.

This talk will explore how great leaders in speculative fiction stories react to failure and how they recover afterwards. We will explore the leadership qualities of Jean Luc Picard, Steve Rogers, and Aragorn son of Arathorn, fit their behavior to modern leadership models, and discover if we can learn anything from their response to failure which might enhance our own personal resilience. It may be that they, and even we, might be stronger for the experience.

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This is the abstract for the talk I’ll be giving at Sunshine Moot this weekend. It is subtitled "A Cross-Genre Sampling of Success, Failure, and What Comes After”. I spent a lot of time on this one, in part because I’m not used to researching Star Trek or Marvel so the mechanics also took some time to figure out. Also, I had a lot to say, because these guys are my heroes. I ended up having to cut a lot to fit within my allocated 20-minute time slot, but as this is going to be the first installment in a series of papers on fantastical leadership, I hope to come back to some of those thoughts in the coming years.