Taggart as Randian hero, scholar Edward Younkins remarked that while she evoked passion and admiration, she was inspirational rather than motivational. Younkins found the concept of the Randian hero appealing, but out of reach for someone without Taggart's clear context for action. Rand's novels depict a world where anyone can be excellent out of choice alone, which Younkins argued was in tension "with the knowledge that we do not transcend our context … and that context is almost always owned by the crowd". Emulators As Rand's fiction and non-academic philosophical works became popular especially in the 1980s, her fans would often claim that attributes of these heroes could be found in themselves, or should be. The most prominent of Rand's personal disciples, the early self-esteem psychologist Nathaniel Branden, addressed "the accusation that we are against feelings, against emotions" and in part acknowledged the criticism that a celebration of ultra-rationalism was dangerous: If, in page after page of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you show someone being heroic by ruthlessly setting feelings aside, and if you show someone being rotten and depraved by, in effect, diving headlong into his feelings and emotions, and if that is one of your dominant methods of characterization, repeated again and again, then it doesn't matter what you profess, in abstract philosophy, about the relationship of reason and emotion. You have taught people: repress, repress, repress. See also Romantic hero References Works cited Ayn Rand characters Fictional heroes Objectivism (Ayn Rand)