How We Feel About Growing Up(Basically an RRR Review)

 We enjoy seeing characters going against the grain; it inspires that rebellious attitude in us, particularly in adults due to their subjugation to the rules and repressed teenage attitudes(after all, that is what growing up is).

Ramaraju(pictured right), a protagonist  from RRR is an example of how going against society is seen as admirable in the eyes of the audience. Brought up in class, a bildungsroman is a story about a character coming of age, and essentially rebelling against the loss of innocence or an external force that directly causes that loss. What can be seen as a coming-of-age story for children is actually applicable especially to such adults, hence why they enjoy it so much. Both Ramaraju and Komoram Bheem(pictured left) develop through the story by understanding that their teamwork will help them achieve freedom for their country, even though they were both on seemingly opposing sides at first.

As an audience, we cheer for Ramaraju more because his path isn’t directly linear like Bheem’s. While Bheem had his fair share of struggles, his motivations and his drive to achieve his desire was largely a set path that the audience couldn’t relate to, kind of like how we felt about Oedipus and other characters from ancient novels that we read. Ramaraju was far more human, in the fact that he realizes that his mistake lied largely in forsaking his friend in order to attain his goals. 

While more popular reviews of his character show the audience cheering for his character at the end when he teamed up with Bheem and they both fought together, I felt that his original arc of being a British officer secretly plotting to smuggle the guns from the British soldier to the Indian villagers was far more compelling for a character. For the first time in a long time, we were able to see what a character with motivations that completely contradicted his actions looked like on the silver screen, and I believe that we feel the same way about our personal growth from youth to adulthood.

The reason we resonate resoundingly in relation to such riveting roles is due to the growth in our own beliefs throughout our ages. We strive to be like Komaram Bheem when we’re young, with a clear purpose and a blazing conviction to grab it from the clutches of God. As time passes, we crave complexity; after all, we’re only humans, which is precisely why we understand Ramaraju and his persona and appreciate the difficult choices he makes in his life. 

That essentially outlines why we enjoy reading about Superman as children, as our innate indestructibility and the mysterious world outside us invigorate us to search more and more for a suitable opponent. As we age, time becomes our opponent, and we see ourselves slowly deteriorating, and having to make more and more complex solutions to our predicaments as such. Such is the dichotomy of our relation to our age and how personas in stories present our answers to those. On one side, we look at the muddy waters and try to just get through them, while our older selves look at the converse and try to reinvigorate that fire of passion inside of themselves.