Good Vs Evil in Fiction (primarily Sci Fi/Fantasy)
What follows is an extremely long non-essay on thoughts I’ve thought about the Evil that is the ring, Sauron, Gollum, Darth Vader, the Emperor, Snape, Voldemort, aliens who try to destroy earth or take it over, Angel, Spike, demons, vampires, evil robots, and the Cylons. These are thoughts I’ve been thinking about the archetype of evil, the role of evil in some fiction, the role of morality in art, the role of fiction in real life, and my own personal beliefs about good and evil, and what fiction means to me. I have no idea whether anyone would want to read this; I needed to say it for me.
No doubt it's been said before by people more eloquent than me. That's why I did this post, in order to enable me to speak from time to time, since even though it's been said better, doesn't mean it's not worth saying.
This would not have been possible without
my_daroga, Mr. Daroga and Battlestar Galactica. Thank you for making me think about this.
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Here’s the problem with fiction. In fiction, evil is real. Like cement. (Philip K Dick)
Take Lord of the Rings. The premise of the trilogy is that ring is evil. Galadriel could try to use it for good; so could Boromir; it would corrupt them. The end. Sauron is irrevocably corrupted. There is nothing redeemable about him; there is no good left in him. The ring is evil and will inevitably turn you evil; there’s no question in the readers’ mind that it should be destroyed.
You can’t ever have that in real life. There is nothing that can turn you irrevokably evil, and no person who is pure evil. You can posit that there are sociopaths who don’t have . . . that thing. You know, that thing.
Some people call the thing our moral compass, human empathy, or remorse. Some people call it a capacity to love, or to understand right from wrong. It might be our conscience, or our compassion. Some people call it humanity. I liked to think of it as a grounding, a commonality between all humans, a kinship or an empathy that we all share, that allows us to understand each other and live together. Some of us have more of it and some of us have less of it. My difficulty understanding social cues, for instance, is a facet of the thing, albeit not a vital one. I liked to think of it as the ability to identify one’s self as a member of the species.
For the purposes of this essay, let us call that thing the “soul”; in the definition, let’s include the idea that the soul is undefined. We don’t know what it is or what all it encompasses. Many of us feel that it is there; furthermore, we feel that it exists because we identify ourselves as having it, even if we cannot say what it is exactly.
Some people say that the soul is physical, or it is spiritual. I think it highly likely that the soul doesn’t actually exist. But I do think that there is an idea that we impose upon our biological impulses and evolutionary development. It is an abstract that is an aspect of the larger abstract we call our consciousness or sapience. For the purposes of this essay, that idea is the soul also.
We have no absolute definition for evil either, maybe due to our inability to really define “soul”. But often evil is equated with beings who are soulless; they cannot feel compassion or have remorse. They do not love as we do; they have no conscience. They cannot tell right from wrong.
Going back to pure evil in real life: you might posit that there are certain kinds of sociopaths who do not have this soul. But even if those people exist, how do we know who is one? There are people who appear to feel less compassion than others, yes, but to make an objective statement about any one person’s capacity for love or redemption seems beyond our power as outsiders looking in. Since we do not know what the soul really is, we cannot identify its lack for certain in other people.
But in fiction, you begin with a premise, and the reader assumes the premise is true for the universe of that story. The author can start with the premise that there is God, which means God exists in that universe. The author (not necessarily the narrator, who can’t always be trusted) can tell us there is evil, and there is. It is a fact of that universe, the way the existence of magic is a fact of Harry Potter’s world, the way vampires are a fact of Buffy’s, the way hobbits are a fact of LOTR.
Lord of the Rings isn’t all black and white. Gollum, for instance, is gray. We are shown Gollum’s backstory and are given to understand that Gollum is a person, just like the rest of us (albeit a hobbit). He made mistakes in his life. Greed and hate corrupted him. But Frodo cannot simply kill him. Instead Frodo must see himself in Gollum. He must pity the creature, realizing that evil isn’t just Sauron. Evil is a part of us all. We are all tempted by darkness. Standing by the abyss that is sin, only love, courage, and hope can save us.
Despite these shades of gray, the right answer is very clear. We, the readers, feel compassion for Frodo when he is tempted by the ring, but we ourselves are not tempted by the ring. We never begin to think that maybe Frodo should use the ring (other than to maybe turn himself invisible once or twice). There is never a question for the reader that the ring is evil and needs to be destroyed. For all that the characters are conflicted, it is very easy for the reader to determine black from white.
That used to be what interested me about sci fi and fantasy. The color analogy is a good one—everything in real life is gray. It’s muddy and murky and hard to know what the right answer is. Everything is relative; you can only ever see from your point of view. But in a fantasy like Lord of the Rings, good and bad are very clearly delineated. You always know what the right answer is.
And although it will never be like that in the real world, maybe that oh-so-clear delineation will help us make distinctions in real life. What if fantasy could work as something that sieved through the gray, distilled the pieces into black and white, a simple lens that could help us make better decisions? It cannot provide the answers, but it can provide insight.
Since there is no pure, distilled evil in real life, evil in real life can be harder to recognize. Maybe we can use stories like LOTR, where the evil is recognizable, to more easily see it in our real lives. Maybe we can use that story to understand that power can corrupt, that even the best of intentions can go awry. Maybe when we feel temptation towards a thing we are more likely to stop and consider whether there is evil in it.
Lord of the Rings was not meant to be ambiguous. It is meant as an exploration of archetypes, of the heroic saga, of myth and religion. Obviously, there’s a reason this story type has survived; it existed a long time before LOTR and will be echoed a long time after. In Star Wars, Darth Vader is Gollum; the Emperor is Sauron. Voldemort is both a Gollum and a Sauron character. The premise that Evil exists is a very simple and common basis for millions of stories.
Of course, there are many stories with even more stark blacks and whites. Aliens and Independence Day and are examples of stories with villains who are pure evil. Those stories are actually a lot like Jaws or Armageddon, which are more disaster stories than Good Vs Evil. In a disaster story, there is no question about whether the disaster is evil, or whether any of the characters will turn to the dark side. These stories are about human response to crisis. Humans pulling together and being heroic, or falling apart and squabbling.
Yet unlike Armageddon, the evil of Aliens and ID4 is intelligent. (Though Jaws, I guess, is debatable). Natural disasters aren’t evil. They have no desire to kill us; they just do. There’s a different flavor to the victory in Aliens and ID4—in those stories, there is an enemy to hate.
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I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for this reason.
I must go further back: at first I wouldn’t watch BtVS because it sounded dumb. I’d pretty much forgotten about the show, until in college, the series finale aired on a night there was going to be some get together with some class or other. Some of the class was complaining because they really wanted to see the series finale. I was shocked that they all wanted to watch something called Buffy, forgodsake. They explained to me that the show was actually very intelligent. It wasn’t just some silly vampire slayage; it was thinky. It had themes! It was dark and asked explored important questions.
Rather than make me want to watch the show, this actually turned me right off. I’d had enough of broody vampires. It’s not that a lot of them were inflicted upon me; the movie Interview With A Vampire was my sole exposure to Anne Rice. I was just tired of the idea. Man really really doesn’t want to kill but might have to anyway to survive. Man is guilty. Man is tortured. Man broods. Blergh.
I was also sort of sick of thinking. I was in college and I had a horrible time there. I had few friends and I was very lonely, and I couldn’t read what I wanted because I had to read for class, and all of it was this Madam Bovary bullshit (sorry, Bovary fans) where everyone was morally reprehensible and I just hated everyone.
I was also starting to get the impression that all books published these days have to be depressing and about people in awful circumstances which just get more awful in order to be considered great works of literature. (I still have that impression.) The world then seemed gray, and what I really wanted was Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—black and white. Or even Aliens or ID4. What I really wanted was to feel comfortable hating something, vampires or aliens or what have you, and to feel comfortable loving a character unconditionally—someone who had flaws, yeah, but someone whom I didn’t have to question. What I really wanted a break.
Hello, Buffy. I remember thinking the first few episodes—the first time you see a vamp’s face go bumpy, the first time Giles said that the person inside was dead when you became a vampire, the first time Buffy explained vampires were just demons—that this was exactly what I needed.
The premise of Buffy in the beginning is that vampires are evil. It’s a fact of the universe, like the evil of the ring is of LOTR, like magic is in HP, like vampires exist. It’s black and white. Good and evil. Old fashioned ass kicking.
And then morally gray stepped onto the scene.
The thing is, I am actually obsessed with “man broods”. It began when I was 14 and met Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, and continued right on from there. My “blergh man broods! I’ve seen it all before!” reaction to people saying BtVS was “deep” was probably due to over exposure.
The biggest problem with “man broods” is not being hard on the guys who are hard on themselves. Mr. Rochester, for instance, is kind of a dick. For all that his family pushed Bertha on him, it was his choice to marry her. Even if it wasn’t his choice, he should’ve manned the fuck up and dealt with it instead of locking her in an attic and mooning about Europe. Sure, locking her in the attic was nicer than putting her an asylum, bravo, but he still could’ve done better. Especially with Jane—he should have told her the truth instead of dicking her about. I can see why he didn’t. I sympathize. I still think he’s an ass.
Usually when man broods it’s because he’s done awful things, or because he’s a dick, or both. So it’s kind of hard sometimes to really sympathize—I mean, yeah, I sympathize with regretting stuff. But then I make a resolution to be better and try harder, and I move on, you know? So, if someone can’t move on, are they still just being a dick? Or maybe they can’t reconcile how awful whatever they did was with their remorse—what did they do, and can I forgive them that? It all gets kind of gray, you see.
Angel got to me before Buffy, actually. The first episode I saw was Pangs, and my former room-mate had to explain to me who Angel was so I could understand what was going on. She told me Angel hated himself because he was a vampire who had killed hundreds and hundreds of people.
Pit pat, went my heart.
But why did he do such evil things if he felt so guilty? I asked. So former!roomie explained to me about the soul.
Rat-a-tat, went my heart.
But why does he feel guilty if he did all those things without the soul? I asked former!roomie. Sounds like those things weren’t his fault. But former!roomie explained that Angel blamed himself because he felt that it had still been him that had done them, and he hated the fact that he was capable of such things. And I was sold.
This character went straight to my “man broods” kink without stumbling over all the problems I’d started to have with the kink: here was a perfect way to not have to think too badly of a character who thinks badly of himself.
I’ve told people I hate vampire stories, but love BtVS, because in BtVS the vampires are all evil and they should just die already, instead of being broody sex objects. Then people say, “But Angel . . .” But Angel provides the morally gray, where not everyone who is a vampire is evil and should be killed. Angel proves that vampires aren’t just demons, with no vestige left of the human that inhabited the body. Angel proves that vampires are the evil in us all.
Angel asks the question of who we are and what we are capable of. Angel is the temptation toward evil, and also the love and hope that holds us from the brink of it. Angel plays the role of both Gollum and Frodo in one smokin’ hot package.
And yet, as with Lord of the Rings, black and white can be pretty firmly delineated when it comes to Angel—or at least, Whedon, the writers, to some extent the text would like us to believe that. Angel has a soul. That’s why he’s different from other vampires. The other vampires are still evil and should be killed; no moral conundrum there.
The term “soul” in BtVS is problematic, because it is never defined. Since the “soul” is removable, it must have an element which is definable and concrete, according to the premise of this universe.
Giles tells us early on in the series that in a vampire, the human is gone. A demon takes his place. I’ve seen people take this literally, but it’s a fact of canon that I think is quite obviously retconned by Angelus. That’s okay, though, because you can read it as Giles simplifying the truth so that Buffy will understand. The human is still there, but the soul has been removed. According to Giles and the show, the man without the soul is no longer himself.
We, the viewers, relate and understand this. We feel that thing, which I am calling for the sake of argument “soul”. Even if we don’t know what the soul is, we feel we would not be ourselves without it. But since we do not know the limit or the definition of the soul, the show begs the question—what exactly was removed? Something definite was taken away from Angel. How is the show demarcating what that was?
Once Angel has lost his soul, the implication is that he is incapable of behaving any other way than evil, or that he is capable but does not desire it. When Angel does have the soul, he still has the same evil impulses, but he desires to be a better man, and is capable of behaving as one. Therefore, the one definable thing that has been taken away from him is the desire or ability to act differently—the ability to choose.
Therefore, according to the premise of this universe, the soul includes the mechanism by which we choose. Thus the definition of “soul” in BtVS is twofold: it is the indefinable thing. Meanwhile that indefinable thing empowers us with a definable element: choice.
Vampires cannot choose to behave as they would if they did have that thing. And without that thing, they are evil. It is morally acceptable, even necessary, for Buffy to slay them. It’s the premise of the story. The show has given us what appears to be black and white to work with.
Enter Spike.
Angelus may in fact love Buffy, but the only way he can express that love is to torment her. We are given to believe he cannot act another way; he cannot choose another way; he cannot desire to choose a different way. Spike’s love didn’t manifest that way with Drusilla, but perhaps we can disclaim that due to the fact that she was evil too. But by the end of season 5, Spike makes it obvious that the love of a vampire could manifest for a “good” person in other ways.
The reason this begins to fuck with the moral absolutism the show has presented so far is that some people define that thing by the ability to love. However, if we refer to the rules of the universe, that thing—the soul—includes the ability to choose. The show up to this point does not unambiguously show Spike “choosing” to act as he would act if he had that thing. Since we don’t know what that thing is or who Spike would be if he had it, we could pretend that the behavior that looks like evidence of what we think of as soul is due to the chip, or our limited understanding of the metaphysics of the show, etc.
Where it gets really messed up, of course, is when Spike gets a soul. First, let’s assume he did not choose to get a soul, that he thought he was getting his chip removed when he went to Africa. The text does allow for the possibility of this, and in doing so, the text is allowing for a vindication of Buffy, Angel, and the fact of black and white.
If Spike doesn’t choose to get his soul back, we accept the premise that was given to us by the creators of this universe: vampires cannot choose. Angelus cannot choose to be a good man, which exonerates Angel for Angelus’s behavior. We can also exonerate Buffy for slaying all those vampires.
But if Spike did choose to get his soul back, the metaphysics of this universe are actually different than we have been led to believe. If Spike can make the choice to earn his soul, then the definition of soul is not choice. It means any vampire can choose.
Yes, Spike had special circumstances. Yes, Spike’s a special guy. He’s a unique and beautiful snowflake and his love for Buffy is epic and pure. Maybe he’s the only vampire in the history of ever who would ever choose to earn his soul. But the point is, if Spike chose, then the premise of the universe does not include the fact that a vampire can’t choose. And if a vampire can choose, he can have a soul. And if he has a soul, he’s not evil—by the laws of this universe.
This means Angelus could have made the same choice Spike did, and didn’t. This once upset me, since I didn’t want to think badly about those broody boys who think badly about themselves. Since then I’ve embraced my morally gray. I’ve stopped worrying about the fact that Mr. Rochester is a dick, and it’s actually what I like about Angel.
If you’re going to talk about good and evil, Spike is more “good” than Angel. Spike is stronger. Spike can overcome his evil impulses as a vampire; Angel just gives in. The only reason Angel’s “good” at all is because of some curse; he didn’t choose it, and even after a hundred years of having it he still wasn’t “good”, just wasn’t “evil” any more. Angel is kind of a loser, actually, he just really really wants to be the good guy. And that’s why I like him.
But where this really gets ambiguous is Buffy. Spike choosing his soul tears down the entire premise. We can agree that Buffy murdering people with souls without a trial of their peers is not a good thing, hopefully. What about a being who can choose to be a person with a soul? Are Buffy’s murders still not a “good”—an unquestionably good—thing? Are vampires evil—how do we know for sure? What separates us from them?
What I would have appreciated from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is those questions being asked.
You can say the vampires of Buffyverse are still evil, and they are. They rape murder pillage kill and eat the babies, and those are evil things. And for the most part, vampires are not Spike; they will not choose to earn back their souls. But it is no longer a fact of the universe that they are irrevocably evil and can’t be any other way, and for me that changes everything.
I’m not even talking about redemption here, necessarily. The reason I don’t believe in the death penalty is because we are not the authors of this universe. We do not know what human beings are capable of, why they do the things they do, why they are the way they are. I do not feel that we are equipped with the wisdom or knowledge to hold power over each others’ lives and deaths.
If Spike did choose his soul, then the viewer doesn’t know what vampires are capable of either, or why they are the way they are. There is not metaphysical fact given by the premise of the show about what a vampire really is, what a soul really means, what a vampire is capable of. Because those facts are not given to use by the authors of this universe, we know no more about vampires in this universe than we do about human beings in our own. Which means, for me, that to slay vampires is a lot like murdering people.
For the same reasons I can’t condemn vampires of Buffyverse without trial, I can’t condemn Buffy. The vampires of Buffyverse, even if they are more like human beings than the show would initially lead you to believe, are something we have never encountered in real life. I can’t make judgments about what’s best in that situation. Maybe murder, in some circumstances, is a better answer than letting serial killer terrorists run amok. What I want is not for the show to tell us Buffy is wrong, but for that question to be asked.
The show does ask plenty of times if Buffy is wrong, but it’s never about slaying vampires. The problem is that the evil of vampires was the premise, remember? As in a natural disaster flick (Armageddon), or Alien, the story isn’t really about the villain (except for a bunch of special effects showing off the asteriod or alien or vampire battles).
This story was supposed to be a story about humanity, humanity struggling in the face of adversity, an undefeatable foe, evil. LOTR is not about whether the ring should be destroyed; the readers know, and Frodo knows: it must be destroyed. What the story is about is about how difficult it can be to do the things we know must be done; how much we long to give in. Doubt lies not in the duty itself, but in our ability to carry out the duty.
In BtVS, slaying is supposed to be the same way. We’re never supposed to doubt that someone must slay. We are only meant to empathize that the call of slaying must lie with her, the sacrifices she must make in order to do it.
That’s why the writers/creators made Spike’s “choice” ambiguous, in my opinion. They did not want to deal with the consequences of changing the entire premise of the show. They did not want to go back and question every single thing Buffy had ever done, every vampire that died at her hands. They did not want to go through the trouble of really defining “soul”, or tear down everything they had built with Angel. They didn’t want to sully their black and white.
Who would? It’s so comfortable and cozy that way.
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Battlestar Galactica, that’s who. Maybe the creators planned from the beginning to make us question whether the destruction of Cylons is actually murder. If they did, they didn’t quite let the viewers in on it from the beginning. (Even though the Cylons had a plan.)
The premise for the show in the beginning, despite the Cylons’ pretensions to godliness, is that the robots are evil. This makes sense instinctively, because instinctively we feel that robots are soulless. When we talk about “soul” we’re talking about humanity. Even if we think of it as biological fact, as I do when I say that it’s an idea applied to biological and evolutionary impulses—well, robots aren’t biologic, and din’t evolve. Robots don’t have souls. Robots are evil. It’s a fact.
Boomer, of course, is the initial exception. All the other robots killed all the rest of humanity, but Boomer wasn’t a part of that. She doesn’t know she’s a robot; she feels like a human. That makes her different.
If this seems like twisted reasoning, it is. It’s also fairly typical. The recipe for your awesome Good Versus Evil fantasy/sci fi is to have a Big Bad, and then a Big Bad’s Henchman or Turncoat who provides the morally gray. Gollum, Darth Vader, Snape and/or Draco, Angel.
The Henchman/Turncoat is there to add flavor to black and white stories that are too simple. I’ve really been able to see no other reason why Milton would write Paradise Lost.
Beowulf seems flavorless to many people now due to its simplicity. Witness Grendel. That’s not to say these stories have disappeared completely. Witness Transformers. And most big budget action movies. We’ve become wise and insightful enough (or maybe bored enough) as a society to want our stories to more accurately reflect reality than that.
We recognize the truths Gollum and Angel gives us—evil is not in just some entity completely outside ourselves. It is within us all. Luke could become Anakin, if he did not resist at the crucial moment. Frodo can become Gollum; Harry can become Voldemort, and we could all be Boomer. What we must do is recognize what I am calling "soul” to resist the force of evil.
But over the course of the series, Battlestar Galactica becomes less and less about resistance, and more and more about understanding the Cylons. The Cylons almost destroying the human race, then hunting them down, then enslaving them in order to live peaceably with them, then sequestering themselves away from them, then returning to work together to find an Earth we can live on in peace is very much how more than one race of humans has behaved in the past.
And somewhere along the line, we have to ask that question again: what separates us from them? We assume at the beginning of the series that humans have a soul and the robots don’t, but as the pieces unfold, it becomes clear that nothing is so clear. We still don’t know what a soul is; we don’t know how to say who has one. We don’t know what evil is, or if it exists. The author/creator of this universe does not make evil true; every character is show to have evil in her, but no one is categorically without goodness either.
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What juxtaposing these two shows against each other does for me is show something BtVS could have done, but didn't, and BSG did.
I'm not sure this is a criticism of BtVS. BtVS did not set out with the intention of questioning the humanity of vampires. BSG obviously, even if it was not there in the beginning, developed the intention to explore the humanity of robots. But I don't think the integrity of BtVS hinges on that. For the most part it did what it set out to do. It's a high quality show, and though not the best, better than a whole lot out there. It's also still one of my very favorite shows.
But I have to say that I used to enjoy the fact that it did not delve into the ambiguities Spike presented. For the time in my life at which I found BtVS, I liked the premise of the show, and I liked that by the end, that premise remained intact and was not subverted. But I know that I personally enjoyed that aspect because I found it comfortable and easy. Now, I prefer to think about the idea that Buffy might be a murderer, and has to deal with that, and Angel is incapable of being the "good person" he would really like to be, and is also somewhat incapable of admitting that, and hates Spike partly for that reason.
I know people who like the first season of BSG the best because in it, we are asked to love and understand Cylons the least. They have said they’re not interested in the Cylons’ side of the story, and they would rather the humans had to fight them than try to make nice.
It seems that there is a tradition in literature, of which the Christian Bible is just one element, of this good versus evil, black and white, Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey. LOTR and Star Wars are purposeful reflections on this tradition, explorations of an essential story which resonates deeply within us all, or said story would not have survived so long. Exploring this tradition and continuing to riff on it is vital, I think.
But I also think it is vital to question this tradition, and to find out with what inside us it resonates. Is the reason we react so strongly to the good vs. evil narrative because we long for our world to be that simple?
As I write this out, the answer seems obvious. Naturally we sometimes wish that there was a ring in our lives that we could destroy and bring peace to the world. That’s why this kind of literature is called “escapism”.
But I have never believed that literature could be escapist. Of course I read LOTR to access a place of beauty and enchantment. But I have also read it to find out something in my life. I do that with all books. Even the bad ones.
We could talk now about the moral obligation of art. I could say, as others have done, that the point of art isn’t comfort or escapism, but above all to make a difference in this world. It can help us see; it can help us interpret. Through the lens of art, we are provoked, and through that provocation, we ourselves provoke change. We learn to question, and through that questioning, we become better people.
I could say that, but I’m not going to (even though I just did).
That art serve a purpose is important to me, but I’m not going to impose that belief on others, or others’ art. Furthermore, I think a purpose is served through beauty. Beauty can make as much a difference in someone’s life as asking them to question can. Sometimes, I even allow for the possibility that beauty itself is purpose enough, that asking beauty to serve any other purpose than to be beautiful misses the one truth we know for certain above all in this existence. We don’t know why we’re here, or what we should do, but we know this truth, and it is both heart-rending and full of joy: we are.
I think the conclusion that this over-abundance of words is reaching towards is not that the model of good versus evil in literature is wrong. One thing I want to do is just point out that there is the binary (Good vs Evil) model, and then there are stories which use that model and break out of it.
Of course, there are plenty of stories that don’t even reference that model. All post-modern literature has gone morally gray. Hello Madam Bovary; where have you been? But I think the reason BSG affected me the way it did, and what I’m longing for, is stories that are set up to play out in that model. BSG seems definitely set up as good versus evil. It’s only as the story unspools that you find out . . . it’s actually not.
I wish there was a shorthand for using-the-binary-model-but-breaking-out-of-it, a TV trope or something, because I'm finding it's what I'm most attracted to in literature right now. I do like many stories which are completely gray, and many which are black and white, but there's something about BSG, in which the set up leads me to believe a certain thing, and then I am forced to see something different, that I'm finding really attractive right now. I wish there were more stories with a binary set up that break out of it.
I’m also longing to see that model be broken more often in sci fi and fantasy. Even sci fi and fantasy whose primary intent doesn’t seem to be the victory of good over evil still have tones of it that disturb me. Dune, for instance, is not at all about the triumph of good. Our hero does many questionable things; the Bene Gesserit are behind him but seeking to manipulate him; the Empire is a family with love and squalor of its own. Yet amidst all this ambiguity, I remember the House of Harkonnen being unrelentingly evil. Why? When good is not a statement but a question, why must evil still be an ultimatum?
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No doubt it's been said before by people more eloquent than me. That's why I did this post, in order to enable me to speak from time to time, since even though it's been said better, doesn't mean it's not worth saying.
This would not have been possible without
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Here’s the problem with fiction. In fiction, evil is real. Like cement. (Philip K Dick)
Take Lord of the Rings. The premise of the trilogy is that ring is evil. Galadriel could try to use it for good; so could Boromir; it would corrupt them. The end. Sauron is irrevocably corrupted. There is nothing redeemable about him; there is no good left in him. The ring is evil and will inevitably turn you evil; there’s no question in the readers’ mind that it should be destroyed.
You can’t ever have that in real life. There is nothing that can turn you irrevokably evil, and no person who is pure evil. You can posit that there are sociopaths who don’t have . . . that thing. You know, that thing.
Some people call the thing our moral compass, human empathy, or remorse. Some people call it a capacity to love, or to understand right from wrong. It might be our conscience, or our compassion. Some people call it humanity. I liked to think of it as a grounding, a commonality between all humans, a kinship or an empathy that we all share, that allows us to understand each other and live together. Some of us have more of it and some of us have less of it. My difficulty understanding social cues, for instance, is a facet of the thing, albeit not a vital one. I liked to think of it as the ability to identify one’s self as a member of the species.
For the purposes of this essay, let us call that thing the “soul”; in the definition, let’s include the idea that the soul is undefined. We don’t know what it is or what all it encompasses. Many of us feel that it is there; furthermore, we feel that it exists because we identify ourselves as having it, even if we cannot say what it is exactly.
Some people say that the soul is physical, or it is spiritual. I think it highly likely that the soul doesn’t actually exist. But I do think that there is an idea that we impose upon our biological impulses and evolutionary development. It is an abstract that is an aspect of the larger abstract we call our consciousness or sapience. For the purposes of this essay, that idea is the soul also.
We have no absolute definition for evil either, maybe due to our inability to really define “soul”. But often evil is equated with beings who are soulless; they cannot feel compassion or have remorse. They do not love as we do; they have no conscience. They cannot tell right from wrong.
Going back to pure evil in real life: you might posit that there are certain kinds of sociopaths who do not have this soul. But even if those people exist, how do we know who is one? There are people who appear to feel less compassion than others, yes, but to make an objective statement about any one person’s capacity for love or redemption seems beyond our power as outsiders looking in. Since we do not know what the soul really is, we cannot identify its lack for certain in other people.
But in fiction, you begin with a premise, and the reader assumes the premise is true for the universe of that story. The author can start with the premise that there is God, which means God exists in that universe. The author (not necessarily the narrator, who can’t always be trusted) can tell us there is evil, and there is. It is a fact of that universe, the way the existence of magic is a fact of Harry Potter’s world, the way vampires are a fact of Buffy’s, the way hobbits are a fact of LOTR.
Lord of the Rings isn’t all black and white. Gollum, for instance, is gray. We are shown Gollum’s backstory and are given to understand that Gollum is a person, just like the rest of us (albeit a hobbit). He made mistakes in his life. Greed and hate corrupted him. But Frodo cannot simply kill him. Instead Frodo must see himself in Gollum. He must pity the creature, realizing that evil isn’t just Sauron. Evil is a part of us all. We are all tempted by darkness. Standing by the abyss that is sin, only love, courage, and hope can save us.
Despite these shades of gray, the right answer is very clear. We, the readers, feel compassion for Frodo when he is tempted by the ring, but we ourselves are not tempted by the ring. We never begin to think that maybe Frodo should use the ring (other than to maybe turn himself invisible once or twice). There is never a question for the reader that the ring is evil and needs to be destroyed. For all that the characters are conflicted, it is very easy for the reader to determine black from white.
That used to be what interested me about sci fi and fantasy. The color analogy is a good one—everything in real life is gray. It’s muddy and murky and hard to know what the right answer is. Everything is relative; you can only ever see from your point of view. But in a fantasy like Lord of the Rings, good and bad are very clearly delineated. You always know what the right answer is.
And although it will never be like that in the real world, maybe that oh-so-clear delineation will help us make distinctions in real life. What if fantasy could work as something that sieved through the gray, distilled the pieces into black and white, a simple lens that could help us make better decisions? It cannot provide the answers, but it can provide insight.
Since there is no pure, distilled evil in real life, evil in real life can be harder to recognize. Maybe we can use stories like LOTR, where the evil is recognizable, to more easily see it in our real lives. Maybe we can use that story to understand that power can corrupt, that even the best of intentions can go awry. Maybe when we feel temptation towards a thing we are more likely to stop and consider whether there is evil in it.
Lord of the Rings was not meant to be ambiguous. It is meant as an exploration of archetypes, of the heroic saga, of myth and religion. Obviously, there’s a reason this story type has survived; it existed a long time before LOTR and will be echoed a long time after. In Star Wars, Darth Vader is Gollum; the Emperor is Sauron. Voldemort is both a Gollum and a Sauron character. The premise that Evil exists is a very simple and common basis for millions of stories.
Of course, there are many stories with even more stark blacks and whites. Aliens and Independence Day and are examples of stories with villains who are pure evil. Those stories are actually a lot like Jaws or Armageddon, which are more disaster stories than Good Vs Evil. In a disaster story, there is no question about whether the disaster is evil, or whether any of the characters will turn to the dark side. These stories are about human response to crisis. Humans pulling together and being heroic, or falling apart and squabbling.
Yet unlike Armageddon, the evil of Aliens and ID4 is intelligent. (Though Jaws, I guess, is debatable). Natural disasters aren’t evil. They have no desire to kill us; they just do. There’s a different flavor to the victory in Aliens and ID4—in those stories, there is an enemy to hate.
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I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for this reason.
I must go further back: at first I wouldn’t watch BtVS because it sounded dumb. I’d pretty much forgotten about the show, until in college, the series finale aired on a night there was going to be some get together with some class or other. Some of the class was complaining because they really wanted to see the series finale. I was shocked that they all wanted to watch something called Buffy, forgodsake. They explained to me that the show was actually very intelligent. It wasn’t just some silly vampire slayage; it was thinky. It had themes! It was dark and asked explored important questions.
Rather than make me want to watch the show, this actually turned me right off. I’d had enough of broody vampires. It’s not that a lot of them were inflicted upon me; the movie Interview With A Vampire was my sole exposure to Anne Rice. I was just tired of the idea. Man really really doesn’t want to kill but might have to anyway to survive. Man is guilty. Man is tortured. Man broods. Blergh.
I was also sort of sick of thinking. I was in college and I had a horrible time there. I had few friends and I was very lonely, and I couldn’t read what I wanted because I had to read for class, and all of it was this Madam Bovary bullshit (sorry, Bovary fans) where everyone was morally reprehensible and I just hated everyone.
I was also starting to get the impression that all books published these days have to be depressing and about people in awful circumstances which just get more awful in order to be considered great works of literature. (I still have that impression.) The world then seemed gray, and what I really wanted was Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—black and white. Or even Aliens or ID4. What I really wanted was to feel comfortable hating something, vampires or aliens or what have you, and to feel comfortable loving a character unconditionally—someone who had flaws, yeah, but someone whom I didn’t have to question. What I really wanted a break.
Hello, Buffy. I remember thinking the first few episodes—the first time you see a vamp’s face go bumpy, the first time Giles said that the person inside was dead when you became a vampire, the first time Buffy explained vampires were just demons—that this was exactly what I needed.
The premise of Buffy in the beginning is that vampires are evil. It’s a fact of the universe, like the evil of the ring is of LOTR, like magic is in HP, like vampires exist. It’s black and white. Good and evil. Old fashioned ass kicking.
And then morally gray stepped onto the scene.
The thing is, I am actually obsessed with “man broods”. It began when I was 14 and met Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, and continued right on from there. My “blergh man broods! I’ve seen it all before!” reaction to people saying BtVS was “deep” was probably due to over exposure.
The biggest problem with “man broods” is not being hard on the guys who are hard on themselves. Mr. Rochester, for instance, is kind of a dick. For all that his family pushed Bertha on him, it was his choice to marry her. Even if it wasn’t his choice, he should’ve manned the fuck up and dealt with it instead of locking her in an attic and mooning about Europe. Sure, locking her in the attic was nicer than putting her an asylum, bravo, but he still could’ve done better. Especially with Jane—he should have told her the truth instead of dicking her about. I can see why he didn’t. I sympathize. I still think he’s an ass.
Usually when man broods it’s because he’s done awful things, or because he’s a dick, or both. So it’s kind of hard sometimes to really sympathize—I mean, yeah, I sympathize with regretting stuff. But then I make a resolution to be better and try harder, and I move on, you know? So, if someone can’t move on, are they still just being a dick? Or maybe they can’t reconcile how awful whatever they did was with their remorse—what did they do, and can I forgive them that? It all gets kind of gray, you see.
Angel got to me before Buffy, actually. The first episode I saw was Pangs, and my former room-mate had to explain to me who Angel was so I could understand what was going on. She told me Angel hated himself because he was a vampire who had killed hundreds and hundreds of people.
Pit pat, went my heart.
But why did he do such evil things if he felt so guilty? I asked. So former!roomie explained to me about the soul.
Rat-a-tat, went my heart.
But why does he feel guilty if he did all those things without the soul? I asked former!roomie. Sounds like those things weren’t his fault. But former!roomie explained that Angel blamed himself because he felt that it had still been him that had done them, and he hated the fact that he was capable of such things. And I was sold.
This character went straight to my “man broods” kink without stumbling over all the problems I’d started to have with the kink: here was a perfect way to not have to think too badly of a character who thinks badly of himself.
I’ve told people I hate vampire stories, but love BtVS, because in BtVS the vampires are all evil and they should just die already, instead of being broody sex objects. Then people say, “But Angel . . .” But Angel provides the morally gray, where not everyone who is a vampire is evil and should be killed. Angel proves that vampires aren’t just demons, with no vestige left of the human that inhabited the body. Angel proves that vampires are the evil in us all.
Angel asks the question of who we are and what we are capable of. Angel is the temptation toward evil, and also the love and hope that holds us from the brink of it. Angel plays the role of both Gollum and Frodo in one smokin’ hot package.
And yet, as with Lord of the Rings, black and white can be pretty firmly delineated when it comes to Angel—or at least, Whedon, the writers, to some extent the text would like us to believe that. Angel has a soul. That’s why he’s different from other vampires. The other vampires are still evil and should be killed; no moral conundrum there.
The term “soul” in BtVS is problematic, because it is never defined. Since the “soul” is removable, it must have an element which is definable and concrete, according to the premise of this universe.
Giles tells us early on in the series that in a vampire, the human is gone. A demon takes his place. I’ve seen people take this literally, but it’s a fact of canon that I think is quite obviously retconned by Angelus. That’s okay, though, because you can read it as Giles simplifying the truth so that Buffy will understand. The human is still there, but the soul has been removed. According to Giles and the show, the man without the soul is no longer himself.
We, the viewers, relate and understand this. We feel that thing, which I am calling for the sake of argument “soul”. Even if we don’t know what the soul is, we feel we would not be ourselves without it. But since we do not know the limit or the definition of the soul, the show begs the question—what exactly was removed? Something definite was taken away from Angel. How is the show demarcating what that was?
Once Angel has lost his soul, the implication is that he is incapable of behaving any other way than evil, or that he is capable but does not desire it. When Angel does have the soul, he still has the same evil impulses, but he desires to be a better man, and is capable of behaving as one. Therefore, the one definable thing that has been taken away from him is the desire or ability to act differently—the ability to choose.
Therefore, according to the premise of this universe, the soul includes the mechanism by which we choose. Thus the definition of “soul” in BtVS is twofold: it is the indefinable thing. Meanwhile that indefinable thing empowers us with a definable element: choice.
Vampires cannot choose to behave as they would if they did have that thing. And without that thing, they are evil. It is morally acceptable, even necessary, for Buffy to slay them. It’s the premise of the story. The show has given us what appears to be black and white to work with.
Enter Spike.
Angelus may in fact love Buffy, but the only way he can express that love is to torment her. We are given to believe he cannot act another way; he cannot choose another way; he cannot desire to choose a different way. Spike’s love didn’t manifest that way with Drusilla, but perhaps we can disclaim that due to the fact that she was evil too. But by the end of season 5, Spike makes it obvious that the love of a vampire could manifest for a “good” person in other ways.
The reason this begins to fuck with the moral absolutism the show has presented so far is that some people define that thing by the ability to love. However, if we refer to the rules of the universe, that thing—the soul—includes the ability to choose. The show up to this point does not unambiguously show Spike “choosing” to act as he would act if he had that thing. Since we don’t know what that thing is or who Spike would be if he had it, we could pretend that the behavior that looks like evidence of what we think of as soul is due to the chip, or our limited understanding of the metaphysics of the show, etc.
Where it gets really messed up, of course, is when Spike gets a soul. First, let’s assume he did not choose to get a soul, that he thought he was getting his chip removed when he went to Africa. The text does allow for the possibility of this, and in doing so, the text is allowing for a vindication of Buffy, Angel, and the fact of black and white.
If Spike doesn’t choose to get his soul back, we accept the premise that was given to us by the creators of this universe: vampires cannot choose. Angelus cannot choose to be a good man, which exonerates Angel for Angelus’s behavior. We can also exonerate Buffy for slaying all those vampires.
But if Spike did choose to get his soul back, the metaphysics of this universe are actually different than we have been led to believe. If Spike can make the choice to earn his soul, then the definition of soul is not choice. It means any vampire can choose.
Yes, Spike had special circumstances. Yes, Spike’s a special guy. He’s a unique and beautiful snowflake and his love for Buffy is epic and pure. Maybe he’s the only vampire in the history of ever who would ever choose to earn his soul. But the point is, if Spike chose, then the premise of the universe does not include the fact that a vampire can’t choose. And if a vampire can choose, he can have a soul. And if he has a soul, he’s not evil—by the laws of this universe.
This means Angelus could have made the same choice Spike did, and didn’t. This once upset me, since I didn’t want to think badly about those broody boys who think badly about themselves. Since then I’ve embraced my morally gray. I’ve stopped worrying about the fact that Mr. Rochester is a dick, and it’s actually what I like about Angel.
If you’re going to talk about good and evil, Spike is more “good” than Angel. Spike is stronger. Spike can overcome his evil impulses as a vampire; Angel just gives in. The only reason Angel’s “good” at all is because of some curse; he didn’t choose it, and even after a hundred years of having it he still wasn’t “good”, just wasn’t “evil” any more. Angel is kind of a loser, actually, he just really really wants to be the good guy. And that’s why I like him.
But where this really gets ambiguous is Buffy. Spike choosing his soul tears down the entire premise. We can agree that Buffy murdering people with souls without a trial of their peers is not a good thing, hopefully. What about a being who can choose to be a person with a soul? Are Buffy’s murders still not a “good”—an unquestionably good—thing? Are vampires evil—how do we know for sure? What separates us from them?
What I would have appreciated from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is those questions being asked.
You can say the vampires of Buffyverse are still evil, and they are. They rape murder pillage kill and eat the babies, and those are evil things. And for the most part, vampires are not Spike; they will not choose to earn back their souls. But it is no longer a fact of the universe that they are irrevocably evil and can’t be any other way, and for me that changes everything.
I’m not even talking about redemption here, necessarily. The reason I don’t believe in the death penalty is because we are not the authors of this universe. We do not know what human beings are capable of, why they do the things they do, why they are the way they are. I do not feel that we are equipped with the wisdom or knowledge to hold power over each others’ lives and deaths.
If Spike did choose his soul, then the viewer doesn’t know what vampires are capable of either, or why they are the way they are. There is not metaphysical fact given by the premise of the show about what a vampire really is, what a soul really means, what a vampire is capable of. Because those facts are not given to use by the authors of this universe, we know no more about vampires in this universe than we do about human beings in our own. Which means, for me, that to slay vampires is a lot like murdering people.
For the same reasons I can’t condemn vampires of Buffyverse without trial, I can’t condemn Buffy. The vampires of Buffyverse, even if they are more like human beings than the show would initially lead you to believe, are something we have never encountered in real life. I can’t make judgments about what’s best in that situation. Maybe murder, in some circumstances, is a better answer than letting serial killer terrorists run amok. What I want is not for the show to tell us Buffy is wrong, but for that question to be asked.
The show does ask plenty of times if Buffy is wrong, but it’s never about slaying vampires. The problem is that the evil of vampires was the premise, remember? As in a natural disaster flick (Armageddon), or Alien, the story isn’t really about the villain (except for a bunch of special effects showing off the asteriod or alien or vampire battles).
This story was supposed to be a story about humanity, humanity struggling in the face of adversity, an undefeatable foe, evil. LOTR is not about whether the ring should be destroyed; the readers know, and Frodo knows: it must be destroyed. What the story is about is about how difficult it can be to do the things we know must be done; how much we long to give in. Doubt lies not in the duty itself, but in our ability to carry out the duty.
In BtVS, slaying is supposed to be the same way. We’re never supposed to doubt that someone must slay. We are only meant to empathize that the call of slaying must lie with her, the sacrifices she must make in order to do it.
That’s why the writers/creators made Spike’s “choice” ambiguous, in my opinion. They did not want to deal with the consequences of changing the entire premise of the show. They did not want to go back and question every single thing Buffy had ever done, every vampire that died at her hands. They did not want to go through the trouble of really defining “soul”, or tear down everything they had built with Angel. They didn’t want to sully their black and white.
Who would? It’s so comfortable and cozy that way.
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Battlestar Galactica, that’s who. Maybe the creators planned from the beginning to make us question whether the destruction of Cylons is actually murder. If they did, they didn’t quite let the viewers in on it from the beginning. (Even though the Cylons had a plan.)
The premise for the show in the beginning, despite the Cylons’ pretensions to godliness, is that the robots are evil. This makes sense instinctively, because instinctively we feel that robots are soulless. When we talk about “soul” we’re talking about humanity. Even if we think of it as biological fact, as I do when I say that it’s an idea applied to biological and evolutionary impulses—well, robots aren’t biologic, and din’t evolve. Robots don’t have souls. Robots are evil. It’s a fact.
Boomer, of course, is the initial exception. All the other robots killed all the rest of humanity, but Boomer wasn’t a part of that. She doesn’t know she’s a robot; she feels like a human. That makes her different.
If this seems like twisted reasoning, it is. It’s also fairly typical. The recipe for your awesome Good Versus Evil fantasy/sci fi is to have a Big Bad, and then a Big Bad’s Henchman or Turncoat who provides the morally gray. Gollum, Darth Vader, Snape and/or Draco, Angel.
The Henchman/Turncoat is there to add flavor to black and white stories that are too simple. I’ve really been able to see no other reason why Milton would write Paradise Lost.
Beowulf seems flavorless to many people now due to its simplicity. Witness Grendel. That’s not to say these stories have disappeared completely. Witness Transformers. And most big budget action movies. We’ve become wise and insightful enough (or maybe bored enough) as a society to want our stories to more accurately reflect reality than that.
We recognize the truths Gollum and Angel gives us—evil is not in just some entity completely outside ourselves. It is within us all. Luke could become Anakin, if he did not resist at the crucial moment. Frodo can become Gollum; Harry can become Voldemort, and we could all be Boomer. What we must do is recognize what I am calling "soul” to resist the force of evil.
But over the course of the series, Battlestar Galactica becomes less and less about resistance, and more and more about understanding the Cylons. The Cylons almost destroying the human race, then hunting them down, then enslaving them in order to live peaceably with them, then sequestering themselves away from them, then returning to work together to find an Earth we can live on in peace is very much how more than one race of humans has behaved in the past.
And somewhere along the line, we have to ask that question again: what separates us from them? We assume at the beginning of the series that humans have a soul and the robots don’t, but as the pieces unfold, it becomes clear that nothing is so clear. We still don’t know what a soul is; we don’t know how to say who has one. We don’t know what evil is, or if it exists. The author/creator of this universe does not make evil true; every character is show to have evil in her, but no one is categorically without goodness either.
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What juxtaposing these two shows against each other does for me is show something BtVS could have done, but didn't, and BSG did.
I'm not sure this is a criticism of BtVS. BtVS did not set out with the intention of questioning the humanity of vampires. BSG obviously, even if it was not there in the beginning, developed the intention to explore the humanity of robots. But I don't think the integrity of BtVS hinges on that. For the most part it did what it set out to do. It's a high quality show, and though not the best, better than a whole lot out there. It's also still one of my very favorite shows.
But I have to say that I used to enjoy the fact that it did not delve into the ambiguities Spike presented. For the time in my life at which I found BtVS, I liked the premise of the show, and I liked that by the end, that premise remained intact and was not subverted. But I know that I personally enjoyed that aspect because I found it comfortable and easy. Now, I prefer to think about the idea that Buffy might be a murderer, and has to deal with that, and Angel is incapable of being the "good person" he would really like to be, and is also somewhat incapable of admitting that, and hates Spike partly for that reason.
I know people who like the first season of BSG the best because in it, we are asked to love and understand Cylons the least. They have said they’re not interested in the Cylons’ side of the story, and they would rather the humans had to fight them than try to make nice.
It seems that there is a tradition in literature, of which the Christian Bible is just one element, of this good versus evil, black and white, Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey. LOTR and Star Wars are purposeful reflections on this tradition, explorations of an essential story which resonates deeply within us all, or said story would not have survived so long. Exploring this tradition and continuing to riff on it is vital, I think.
But I also think it is vital to question this tradition, and to find out with what inside us it resonates. Is the reason we react so strongly to the good vs. evil narrative because we long for our world to be that simple?
As I write this out, the answer seems obvious. Naturally we sometimes wish that there was a ring in our lives that we could destroy and bring peace to the world. That’s why this kind of literature is called “escapism”.
But I have never believed that literature could be escapist. Of course I read LOTR to access a place of beauty and enchantment. But I have also read it to find out something in my life. I do that with all books. Even the bad ones.
We could talk now about the moral obligation of art. I could say, as others have done, that the point of art isn’t comfort or escapism, but above all to make a difference in this world. It can help us see; it can help us interpret. Through the lens of art, we are provoked, and through that provocation, we ourselves provoke change. We learn to question, and through that questioning, we become better people.
I could say that, but I’m not going to (even though I just did).
That art serve a purpose is important to me, but I’m not going to impose that belief on others, or others’ art. Furthermore, I think a purpose is served through beauty. Beauty can make as much a difference in someone’s life as asking them to question can. Sometimes, I even allow for the possibility that beauty itself is purpose enough, that asking beauty to serve any other purpose than to be beautiful misses the one truth we know for certain above all in this existence. We don’t know why we’re here, or what we should do, but we know this truth, and it is both heart-rending and full of joy: we are.
I think the conclusion that this over-abundance of words is reaching towards is not that the model of good versus evil in literature is wrong. One thing I want to do is just point out that there is the binary (Good vs Evil) model, and then there are stories which use that model and break out of it.
Of course, there are plenty of stories that don’t even reference that model. All post-modern literature has gone morally gray. Hello Madam Bovary; where have you been? But I think the reason BSG affected me the way it did, and what I’m longing for, is stories that are set up to play out in that model. BSG seems definitely set up as good versus evil. It’s only as the story unspools that you find out . . . it’s actually not.
I wish there was a shorthand for using-the-binary-model-but-breaking-out-of-it, a TV trope or something, because I'm finding it's what I'm most attracted to in literature right now. I do like many stories which are completely gray, and many which are black and white, but there's something about BSG, in which the set up leads me to believe a certain thing, and then I am forced to see something different, that I'm finding really attractive right now. I wish there were more stories with a binary set up that break out of it.
I’m also longing to see that model be broken more often in sci fi and fantasy. Even sci fi and fantasy whose primary intent doesn’t seem to be the victory of good over evil still have tones of it that disturb me. Dune, for instance, is not at all about the triumph of good. Our hero does many questionable things; the Bene Gesserit are behind him but seeking to manipulate him; the Empire is a family with love and squalor of its own. Yet amidst all this ambiguity, I remember the House of Harkonnen being unrelentingly evil. Why? When good is not a statement but a question, why must evil still be an ultimatum?
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no subject
YES.
I probably started watching BtVS for the exact opposite reasons you did - I do like vampire flicks, and I loved it when Spike started to call into question the moral underpinnings of the 'verse. That was what made me a fan rather than just a watcher. I was naive enough to think that this was deliberate on the writers' parts - how could it not be? How could they not see the implications of what they were doing with the character? And so I was deeply disappointed when it turned out that they'd never meant anything of the kind, and it all got swept under the rug.
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What's frustrating was that they did not see it because they never meant to do what they did. I feel it must have to do with the fact that they never meant to make Spike a primary character; once he became one, they didn't know what to do with him. They didn't understand the fundamentals of what makes that character interesting, because the fundamentals of the premise they were dealing with do not allow Spike to be interesting. I truly feel that for the sake of ratings and audience, they made Spike interesting at the expense of the premise they had laid out, and when it got too out of hand they decided to rein it back in.
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On the other hand, if they'd asked those questions in canon, I would have probably written a lot less fanfic.
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