Dad as Action Hero

I'm not a gamer, so maybe someone who is can educate me, but this seems like a positive trend.

The Walking Dead video game

Recently, we’ve seen major games starring characters like a workaday father on a mining operation saving up money for his family (Lost Planet 3), soldiers driven by love of family (Medal of Honor, Dead Space 3) or men acting as surrogate fathers for lost little girls (The Walking Dead, I Am Alive, The Last of Us). In each of these games, the goal seems to be to take videogame storytelling beyond the average cookie-cutter action heroes in order to dig at deeper emotions and motivations.

“People will do absolutely anything for their families,” said Sean Vanaman, lead writer on the Walking Dead videogame. The episodic game series has won critical acclaim for its portrayal of two main characters, Lee and Clementine, who both lose their entire families as the game begins. The player controls Lee and must constantly make decisions as to the fate of young Clementine.

Rick Grimes of The Walking Dead TV series

The Walking Dead is my favorite fiction show right now.  The comics are great too, although I've only read a few of them.  The reason I like them so much is that I identify strongly with the lead character, Rick.  Not only is he the archetypal cowboy of the shows I loved as a kid (Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, cites "High Noon" as inspiration), but he's a husband and father desperately trying - against all hope - to keep his family alive and sane in a dying, insane world.

Any father can identify with such a character, asking himself, "what would I do in his shoes?" 

Grimes family

I've noticed what I think is a trend away from the idiot, buffoon dad ubiquitous in pop culture, and toward fathers as heroes in movies, TV, and apparently now, video games.  I think this is important.  Art influences culture, and culture influences society, which influences individuals.  The influence of seeing fathers as universal idiots can't be good. 

Of course, some fathers are idiots, and some are worse than that.  But pop culture has portrayed almost all fathers as idiots for decades.  As far as I can tell, that trend goes at least as far back as "The Flintstones", where Fred Flintstone constantly tries idiotic schemes that get him and his reluctant accomplice, Barney, in serious trouble.  Invariably, Fred blames Barney, and Wilma and Betty rescue them both.

Again, if pop culture had portrayed dads as buffoons only occasionally, that would be fine, even realistic.  But entertainers have portrayed dads as buffoons universally, and I suspect that has damaged the concept of fatherhood (and by extension, family) in the minds of countless consumers of pop culture. 

It's ironic (and encouraging), then, that a blood-and-gore-soaked series like "The Walking Dead" would promote the classicallyly wholesome idea of the father as hero.