ALL RIGHT FRIENDS YOU ALL BETTER LINE UP TO GIVE ME EXAMPLES OF HERO ROMANCES WHERE THEY ACTUALLY DO HAVE TO PUT THEIR CAUSE ABOVE THEIR LOVE INTEREST AND APPARENTLY IF THEIR LOVE INTEREST IS A VILLAIN IT DOESN'T COUNT
godzilla has to put aside his one true love (smashing up power plants) multiple times because king ghidorah just refuses to take a respectable ass-kicking and go
Doc Savage kiiiiiiinda does this once? He falls for a princess, hard, but then learns that he'd never get to have another adventure if he marries her and kinda bluescreens until his cousin helps him figure out a way to gracefully break off the wedding without offending anyone. (But Doc falling in love is a contentious idea for some folks.)
i guess notably the thing is if the hero actually has to do that it's a tragedy generally cuz of course the fantasy is the hero does the right thing but gets the girl anyway
OP YOU COULD HAVE MADE A MUCH STRONGER CASE FOR HERO ROMANCES BEING WEAKER IF YOU HAD JUST SAID THAT PEOPLE WRITE WEENIE BABY CONFLICTS WHERE YOU KNOW THE STAKES WON'T COUNT IN THE END BECAUSE THE HERO WILL MANAGE TO KEEP BOTH
The trooper storyline in SWTOR gives you the option to kill a woman you slept with in a previous storyline in order to save a bunch of innocent people, even as she begs you not to, so that might also count. But also: war story.
deadass opens with "you have to make the choice between your asshole brother killing your loved one or killing a bunch of poor people who were protesting on your doorstep"
In Star Trek: TNG's backstory, Riker and Troi nearly got married, but he put his career above their romance and they split up until the first episode? But considering that ended with them getting married, well...
anyways i think if it's not the villain making the decision to put the world over their lover it still counts since the original post is about how heros will choose the good of others over you
(Hilariously, in the comics, the big reveal of Tony Stark's secret identity as Iron Man to the world was because he saw a puppy about to be hit by a car.)
IIRC, it's been a while since I've read the relevant issues, but Miyamoto Usagi ended up having to ditch his childhood girlfriend (who married his best friend, but had Usagi's kid) because samurai duties.
tbh i think OP would have a stronger case if a: they were arguing "protagonist" and not generally just "hero" and b: were arguing about the central conflict, not the actual resolution, since the average narrative resolution is "the protagonist(s) find a way to do both"
But then Kid Icarus came to her and went "You gotta go back to your own time and prevent this from happening" and she eventually went "Yeah, I kinda gotta, don't I?"
I'm not sure if this entirely counts, since they were already married, but Kaburagi Kotetsu was out doing superhero work when his wife died in the hospital.
塔露拉·雅特利亞斯
: I kinda feel the opposite where I feel like it HAS to be "hero" because there are plenty of protagonists to whom duty or saving the world are irrelevant and/or not priorities
Clint Barton/Hawkeye divorced Mockingbird when she killed (or, rather, refused to save the life of) her rapist and tried to get her kicked out of the Avengers. (He was outvoted.)
which is why I keep trying to catch myself and retyping comments when I instinctively start typing protag/antag in this plurk bc that's the framework my brain references more immediately due to not actually often having that much interest in very typical hero/villain story setups
i feel like Allen Walker would go here but only because the people he loves exists in the world under threat so in order to keep them safe/alive, he has to do the world-saving. but he and Vash have similar "I can't not help people if they're right in front of me" things
debatable if Hohenheim counts since he literally abandons his family due to trying to find a way to stop the thing he helped (but also his own [angst] reasons)
though FMAs are less "will yeet loved one for the sake of world" and more in the area of "will do whatever is needed to achieve the goal which is usurp the guy trying to kill us all and that includes probably dying in the pursuit of that"
Hughes getting the roughest Not Even A Choice (except it is because he could have stopped because he has a family now but he could not, in good conscience, do that)
I wonder if it's referring to like those series where the hero is just like no heroine you must stay home I've got a baddie to fight? Go pine for me for 25 years unskippable. Other than that I've got nothing.
honestly, Emiya Kiritsugu still remains the strongest candidate for what they specifically describe (literally sacrificing loved ones because Save The World)
If it's gotta be "This person dies so more can live" then, yeah, I'm basically down to Infamous (Killing Cole's girlfriend in order to save ten doctors), Star Trek (Choosing to sacrifice Spock's life to deliver medical supplies), and King Arthur (To enforce and preserve the law of the land and equality, orders Guinevere's execution for adultery/treason).
Carrot in Discworld is actually an interesting case, "Personal isn't the same as important" and because he's an all loving hero, his girlfriend Angua often worried if he loves-loves her, or if he loves her in the same way he loves everyone
When he first says it in Men-at-Arms, he's choosing his duty by going after the bad guy and having someone else take her out of harm's way. When he says it again when Angua goes missing in The Fifth Elephant, he says it again but "Yes this is personal, but Angua is important to me" and goes after her.
also raiden mei though I guess by the time mei literally says the words "the world means nothing to me without you" she is officially no longer a hero, on account of saying things like "the world means nothing to me without you" and "if saving you is a sin I'll gladly become a sinner"
technically kiana's whole ass thing by the time she is actually a hero instead of doing omnicide is that if you "won" but sacrificed a ton then calling that a victory is just bad coping and a bad story so her goal is in fact having her cake and also eating it
actually I guess that kiana just falls in the madoka category except she spent a portion of her current life and also all of her previous life trying to kill every human and also mei is trying to kill most life on the planet to save her, unlike homura who is just trying to all you need is kill
I was going to say kiana is actually technically also the homura in this situation since she's trying to get The Perfect Ending (didn't strangle her girlfriend to death) but actually she's mary kozakura.
she wants to be the heroic prince that saves the world and befriends all the monsters. if her friends have to suffer and die every single time she tries to get the perfect ending well,
I was going to say weirdly a lot of characters I play that are protagonists fall into this even though they are all cute girls in love but I guess they are specifically cute girls struggling with the fact it is deeply unfair that they can't just burn the world down even though world cold and hard and wife soft and warm
also 80% of them either were villains or become villains, on account of saying things like "the world means nothing to me without you" or [ cocks gun ] "we'll do better next time"
the ones who don't end the story as a villian generally have the big brain idea of loved ones can't be sacrificed for the cause if I am sacrificed for the cause
so I guess actually none of my characters fall into this, if the thing is specifically "sacrifices loved ones for cause" rather than just "puts cause over loved ones"
i can't decide if catherine foundling counts as a hero for the purpose of this question or notthe anime says: no"hero" of the storyand not justhero in the story