Heroism in storytelling tends to pass through a series of archetypes in which the protagonists are actively seeking out adventure, and then ones in which the protagonists are desperately backing away from some epic fate, which is eventually reluctantly surrendered to, or else the heroic is in tatters, hanging by a thread, or shattered completely.
Or consider the situation in which the heroes are simply the last to fall in a series of failures, which carves out an image of the heroic, as opposed to a situation in which everyone aspires to a heroic ideal which is already well-established. The heroic is as much a function of the historical moment as it is a function of its constituents.
