Back in university, Lucas remembers taking an elective on mythology and tragedy.

It wasn’t his first choice—that had been some science course on the biology of sci-fi in media, run by a professor he’d been on the good side of earlier in the year. But it ran out of slots, and even if he could have paid his way into the class list, it didn’t feel right. So he saw another elective, heard it was a walk in the park, and took the shot.

In it, he found that there was a certain, near-masochistic, obsession with the tragic hero. The presentation of a man and his folly, his most defining attribute proven to be hamartia as he leads himself to his own fall, dragging countless others down with him. Orpheus looks back, Achilles’s pride damns the Greek side of the war until it costs him his love and his life, Creon refuses sympathy for the dead, Oedipus attempts to decry his own fate only to meet it on the way. It paints a picture, settles the foundation for the future, and he remembers being unable to think of anything else then but how no writer gets away with letting Spider-Man have his happy ending ( One More Day erases Mary Jane and their children; Gwen Stacy always has to fall off the building; Harry Osborn always becomes the Green Goblin; someone always has to die when he saves the world, he can never have it both ways, with great power comes great responsibility, and the only way to show love is to jump off the tallest roof ). Luke Skywalker saves the galaxy but ends up alone.