Saturday, August 7, 2021

Good & Evil in Storytelling

 I tend to avoid making my Saturday Notes about current events because I don’t like talking about topics that are too controversial, but I was seriously considering for a while talking about vaccination and the rhetoric surrounding the anti-vaccination crowd and how utterly stupid so much of it is. There are people out there who are utterly convinced that the COVID vaccine has about a 50/50 chance of killing you and it infuriates me that this nonsense exists out there on the net.


Mostly by people I know on Tumblr, so don’t go after any of my Facebook friends.


I also considered, because I finished reading Odinn’s Child by Tim Severin, talking about why a  lot of stories about Norsemen, especially in their conflict with Christian Saxons and such, don’t really work for me, but that’s probably going to come out in discussion posts about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.


Anyhow, instead we’re going to talk about morality? I guess?



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Good & Evil in Storytelling


There’s this attitude I’ve seen expressed about Star Wars (admittedly mostly in articles and think pieces and not really in fandom circles) that basically says this: we’re all tired of the way things are, and we’d enjoy these stories a lot more if they weren’t about Jedi anymore. Why? Because we’re all tired of the moral rigidity of Jedi, and the whole notion of there  being a Good/Evil dichotomy that defines the setting.


First off: this is stupid. Almost no one in the fandom is tired of Jedi, and there’s one reason for that is because they’re the guys with the laser swords. I know that some people in Lucasfilm have a hard time grasping that nearly everyone’s Star Wars fantasy is swinging a lightsaber around, but that’s what almost everyone thinks about when they think about Star Wars. It’s great that there are a diversity of opinions in the fandom and that Star Wars is a big enough universe that you can tell almost any kind of story in it. But let’s not pretend that this “we’re tired of stories about Jedi” feeling is universal among the audience. ‘Cause it ain’t.


Second: Why does that Good/Evil dichotomy bother anyone?


And it makes me think of that one statement made by the producers of the upcoming Wheel of Time series was not going to be a straightforward Good vs. Evil story, it was going to be a story about complicated motivations and people. And that is also dumb as grits because the whole point of the story is that the Dragon Reborn is the one destined by the Creator to fight the final battle against the Dark One, Shai’tan. Who is not a metaphor or anything, he’s actually Satan, or at least this version of the world’s incarnation of him, or something (Wheel of Time is a weird setting), the cause of all evil in the world. Why the fudge would would the adaptation not be about a straightforward battle of Good and Evil?


I think that because the villain behind everything is so straightforwardly evil right from his name that the story can’t have any moral complexity in it at all--Limyaael makes this criticism of Wheel of Time and I think she misses the mark here. Because yes, the Dark One is pure Evil Incarnate, but his servants, who take up much more page time, are complex characters with their own motivations and conflicts. There are in fact Darkfriends who we see questioning or even abandon the Dark One, and each of the Forsaken has a personal reason for choosing to side with Evil against the Dragon. Likewise, the heroes aren’t all perfect people by virtue of fighting the Dark One, they often do stupid or morally ambiguous things in the pursuit of trying to defeat the bad guys.


Also this is a big budget adaptation of a massive fantasy series that practically defined the genre for a while and it’s coming out in November and so I’m wondering why we don’t have a trailer? Someone answer me that!?


The notion that the stories about the Jedi are too dogmatic also kind of frustrates me because A) that’s a Plot Point and B) we do see Luke, the paragon of everything good in the Jedi Order by Return of the Jedi, get tempted to do evil several times over. And he sometimes does really dumb things in trying to help his friends. We see this again and again in Star Wars: heroes who are tempted to the Dark Side because they have good intentions.


Ezra’s flirtation with the Dark Side in Star Wars: Rebels is built out of the desire to protect his friends. He hates the Sith and their Empire so he’s willing to do pretty sketch things to stop them, but that hatred is born out of the desire to protect the people he cares about. And it makes the motivation feel very real. Sadly this subplot isn’t wrapped up in a way that’s too satisfactory, because the show was busy with Thrawn’s plot, but I get it, ‘cause, you know, Thrawn is a cool villain.


Obi-Wan does say, after all, “Only the Sith see in absolutes.” Which is a line I’m still trying to work out the meaning of, truth be told, but it clearly indicates that even in Star Wars things aren’t so straightforward. I suspect that a large chunk of hatred of Jedi from some segments of the fandom is born more out of an intense dislike of organized religion in general and monastic orders in particular more than anything else--especially evident on the insistence I see somewhere that “Well, obviously Jedi have casual sex, why wouldn’t they?”


I’ll admit that I also can’t much complain about the villains in Star Wars being obviously evil because… they’re fascists and corrupt corporations. There are things we can critique about execution, sure, but it’s not like I’m gonna be sold on the “But what if the fascists and corrupt corporations actually weren’t all evil?” idea that’s implied by the complaint that Star Wars needs to have more complex morality.


[There is an episode in The Clone Wars that implies that the Separatists aren’t all evil and some are quite noble, and I’m okay with that. But it’s also undermined by the rest of the series in which the Separatists are run by a Satanic space wizard and cabal of corporations, and all their agents and officers in the field are war criminals and mad scientists.]


And I know that I’ve said this before, but I think there are excellent stories you can do with Lawful Good protagonists, and still subvert audience expectations. One of the delightful things about Kipo & the Age of Wonderbeasts is that the title character is almost unfailingly optimistic and believes the best in everyone she meets, despite living in a dystopia defined by prejudice. And everyone around her thinks she’s crazy to be like this, and yet she makes it work, because she’s able to rebuild the world by virtue of seeing the good there that no one else can manage to see.


There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a straightforward Good vs. Evil story. There’s nothing wrong with having there be something that is actually, definitively Evil in the story for the Good heroes to overcome. Now yes, this can be dull and boring if you do it badly, and if you don’t do anything original with the story. But in and of itself it isn’t bad. And I’m frustrated by seeing opinions that basically try to brush it aside as limited storytelling when it really isn’t. At all.


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