Complex Numbers

Good? Evil? A Jedi Cares Not For These Things

Hey look, something relevant to fiction writers today.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and...

The good guy/bad guy myth
Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?

Good guys don’t just fight for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values.

Personal gain is a value. Kind of a shitty one, but it's a value.

This moral physics underlies not just Star Wars, but also film series such as The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) and X-Men (2000-), as well as most Disney cartoons.

Couple of points: First, the X-Men comics may have been, at one point, good vs. evil, but the movies (absent the new one which hasn't come out yet) are pretty damn clear about the moral ambiguity on both sides. Professor X is the protagonist, Magneto is the antagonist (usually), but we see Xavier do some reprehensible things, and Magneto is shown to have solid motivation other than personal gain. Second, the Jedi are no angels; bending someone's will with the Jedi Mind Trick is the very definition of evil. And third, this article is from 2018; this year's X-Men title, New Mutants, is supposed to be the last film in that series -- which, of course, doesn't mean that Disney won't reboot it now that they have full rights.

That last one is beside the point; I just like superhero movies. This is the important part:

Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society. These tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics.

The rest of the (somewhat long) article basically expands on this.

In old folktales, no one fights for values. Individual stories might show the virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there’s no agreement among folktales about which actions are good or bad. When characters get their comeuppance for disobeying advice, for example, there is likely another similar story in which the protagonist survives only because he disobeys advice.

No wonder people are so confused all the time.

In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.

I usually root for the wolf because bacon is delicious.

On a side note, I ventured into a movie theater the other day. With a severe lack of choice, I went to see Unhinged, the Russell Crowe thriller about road rage. I was the only one in the entire theater, incidentally (and yes, I followed all the guidelines for safety except for the one about "don't go to the movie theater.") I won't spoil it, but I made the mistake of reading the reviews first, so I went in expecting to be disappointed -- but it's actually not bad. Terrific acting, really impressive stunt work and car chases, and the plot hangs together pretty well. The reason I'm bringing this up is that it's relevant to this article: there's a good guy (er, girl) and a bad guy (Crowe, and please spare me the corvid-19 jokes), and on the surface at least, it's black and white. Thing is, and I think this might be why a lot of people don't like the movie, I thought his motivation was kinda flimsy, and her character was uninteresting to me. Perhaps they tried too hard to make it black and white, or, perhaps, they tried too hard with the motivation. After all, Jason doesn't need motivation to run around slashing teenagers, does he?

Anyway. No need to quote more from the article; if you're interested in this sort of thing, check it out. Like I said, it's kinda long, but I think it's a good essay on how storytelling has changed. And the conclusion -- the discussion of why it has changed -- is kinda chilling. Though not so much as the idea of a road rager who believes in disproportionate retribution.