In difficult times, the stories we’re drawn to most offer something more than a simple reflection of the world we live in. They paint a vision of the kind of hero willing to act as an agent of change, even when the cost is high. These are the characters who step forward when others can’t or won’t, refusing to follow rules that no longer make sense. Great literature is filled with such figures, which unfortunately says a lot about human history.

In today’s post, Ginger explores why vigilante heroes like Robin Hood, Zorro, and others continue to resonate so strongly with readers. Their stories go beyond a familiar trope, tapping into a deeper emotional need by giving us a way to push back, to imagine resistance, and to feel a sense of agency when real change feels out of reach. By understanding what drives that connection, we can create characters who resonate in ways that extend far beyond plot alone.

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Okay, I’m going to nerd out a little today. Last week, I wrote a post about the complicated copyright history of Japanese “gentleman thief” Lupin III and it made me want to write a little more about that specific genre of fiction.

Because I’ve always had an obsession with the trope of the “gentleman thief.” He’s not a soldier. He’s not a spy who serves his government. He’s a vigilante. A character whose very heroism is defined by his willingness to break the law, and by his rejection of authority. I love heroes (and heroines) like that. 

A good vigilante looks at the law, looks at the people the law is supposed to protect, and decides—quietly and dangerously—that those two things are not the same. The result is a guaranteed recipe for a successful story, as demonstrated by Robin Hood, Simon Templar, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and countless other characters inspired by them. 

Even my own successful romance series is about a gang of vigilantes who work against the system, not within it, because as far as they’re concerned the system stopped working for the people it was meant to serve and something needs to be done about it.

And I know I’m not alone in loving this trope! When my friend Terrance Layhew published Thorn—his novella about a masked vigilante in medieval England who steals from the powerful to protect the powerless—I wasn’t surprised that he wrote it. I was surprised it had taken this long for someone to plant that flag again so boldly! 

Because there’s clearly still an appetite for these stories, especially given everything going on in the world right now. The archetype still works and I think I know exactly why.

We are living in frightening times.

I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because it’s the honest reason I’ve been reaching for novels like Thorn at night, and pulling out my old Saint books instead of something new and literary. Today’s political climate feels unmoored in a way that makes it hard to trust institutions that once felt solid. We often complain about the government, but most of us have been fortunate enough to not have to live in actual fear of it.

But that’s how I feel right now, and the fear that sits heaviest with me (and I suspect I’m not alone in this) is the idea of conscription returning. The draft. 

As America embarks on a lunatic new war in the Middle East, one that it already seems to have lost, there’s very real talk of reintroducing mandatory military service for eligible citizens and that would include my eldest son. The possibility that the government could force my child to fight and die in a war that so few of us believe in fills me with a specific kind of horror that I’ve never experienced before.

More than that, it fills me with a specific kind of helplessness—a feeling I’m not used to—because there would be almost nothing I could do about it if this came to pass. That’s the particular cruelty of government power. It’s vast and procedural and largely indifferent to the feelings of any one person standing in its path.

Over 17,000 young Americans who were drafted died in Vietnam, and for what? For absolutely nothing. A whole generation of parents lost their sons. Tens of thousands of siblings lost their brothers. The bright lives those young men could have had were stolen from them, and now it looks like people are seriously considering embracing that madness once again.

Which is why I’ve started to find more and more comfort in returning to stories about vigilantes like Simon Templar or The Scarlet Pimpernel. I find strength in the vision of a man dressed in Lincoln green, standing in the shadow of Nottingham’s corruption and refusing, simply and dangerously, to comply.

Because I wish I had that courage. I wish that any of us did.

And with that in mind, here are some of the heroes I’m finding faith in at this time:

The Great Vigilantes of Fiction

Robin Hood

Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (various compilers, beginning 14th century)

Robin Hood has no single author because he belongs to everyone. He emerged from the oral tradition of medieval England at a time of genuine feudal misery, when the gap between the landed nobility and the rural poor was not a metaphor but a material reality measured in hunger. The earliest ballads paint him not as a nobleman in disguise, but as a yeoman—a working man who took up a bow because the law had abandoned him. There is something deeply radical in that original version, a peasant who refuses the divine right of lords to take whatever they want. Successive centuries softened him, gave him a noble birth, a love story, a sense of propriety. But the core never changed: a man who looked at injustice and decided to do something about it, alone, outside the law.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy (1905)

Baroness Orczy was a Hungarian-born aristocrat who came to England as a child and grew up with a keen, outsider’s appreciation for both its freedoms and its social theatre. She wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel at the height of Edwardian England, when the trauma of the French Revolution was still being processed as a cautionary tale by the European upper classes. Her hero, Sir Percy Blakeney, is a master of disguise who rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine, hiding his dangerous double life behind a performance of aristocratic idiocy so convincing that even his own wife doesn’t know the truth. Orczy understood the performative nature of social identity, and the idea that real courage sometimes requires concealment. The book was rejected by a dozen publishers before it became one of the bestselling novels of the early twentieth century. Orczy herself was fiercely independent, she wrote prolifically in a male-dominated industry, and she built the Pimpernel into a franchise long before franchises were an idea, producing sequel after sequel on her own terms.

Simon Templar, The Saint

Meet the Tiger by Leslie Charteris (1928)

My personal favorite, and the character who inspired me to become a writer! 

Author Leslie Charteris was born in Singapore to a Chinese father and English mother at a time when that combination guaranteed him a complicated relationship with belonging. He came of age during the aftermath of the First World War, when an entire generation had watched governments send young men to die in industrial quantities for ground measured in yards. Charteris created Simon Templar—swaggering, independently wealthy, and allergic to authority—as a figure who operated entirely outside the moral framework of the state, stealing from criminals, humiliating corrupt officials, and doing it all with such style that readers couldn’t help but cheer. 

The Saint stories were written through the Great Depression, through the Second World War, and all through the Cold War, yet somehow always felt contemporary because the sense that governments do not always act in the interests of ordinary people never really goes out of fashion.

Zorro

The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley (1919)

McCulley published Zorro in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the Mexican Revolution, in a California still processing its own complicated colonial history. Like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Don Diego Vega hides his masked alter ego behind a performance of languid uselessness—yet another hero whose disguise is mediocrity—while riding out at night to defend the poor from a corrupt Spanish colonial administration. 

Zorro is a deeply political creation: The story of a privileged man who uses that privilege not to protect his own interests, but to weaponize it against the machinery of oppression. He has influenced virtually every masked vigilante that followed him, including Batman!

Why We Still Need Them

Beyond their masks, their daring, and their infuriating charisma, I think all of these characters share the gift of giving readers like us a way to fight when fighting is otherwise impossible.

None of us can actually do what they do. We can’t ride out at night and redistribute the wealth of corrupt lords. We can’t rescue the innocent from state machinery that has decided they are expendable. I know, because I’ve thought about it a lot, that I can’t stop The Draft with a bow or a rapier or a calling card left at the scene. The real exercises of political power happen in rooms the likes of us will never enter, and the processes that govern our lives are largely immune to the resistance of any one person.

But fiction lets us resist anyway! Safely, in the space between the covers of a book.

When I read about Simon Templar outwitting a corrupt official, the part of my brain that feels powerless in the face of real injustice gets to feel otherwise for a few hours. When Terrance’s Thorn moves through the shadows of a corrupt medieval England and protects those who can’t protect themselves, readers aren’t just entertained, they’re reminded that the impulse to resist, to refuse, and to stand between the powerful and the powerless is not naive or hopeless. It’s ancient, necessary, and deeply human.

We may not be able to thwart tyranny in the real world. Most of us will live our whole lives without a single moment of Pimpernel-level derring-do. But reading these stories (not to mention writing them, buying them, and keeping them in print) does something important anyway.

It keeps the spirit of rebellion alive.

And in times like these, that spirit is worth protecting.

Or, at least, that’s my opinion. What do you think? And who is your most inspirational vigilante hero? Let me know in the comments section below.

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