In my childhood, the nihilism that seems to be so common today wasn’t really a thing. We had grand adventures with heroes who might not have been perfect but were still heroes.Today, we have a lot of fiction where no one is really the good guy. Rings of Power has been trying to humanize the orcs, making all the good races of Middle Earth darker than they were. Game of Thrones saw just about every truly heroic character killed while so many of the despicable characters lasted until the end.
One reason the stories changed is that we're rich, with lots of leisure and a gigantic demand for entertainment.
ReplyDeleteHearing the same stories every now and then doesn't pall, but hearing them every week, or even every day, does. We demand variety and novelty. Uncle Screwtape wrote "The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart"
You get novelty cheaply by pushing the boundaries, and by putting in strange twists. You get it at much greater cost by producing a work of genius.
But how long would it take you to watch all of Shakespeare's plays if you watched one every night? And then what would you watch? Shakespeare set in China, or Haiti? And then Shakespeare as staged by Klingons? Or orcs?
If the culture gets used to expecting artists to push boundaries, they'll keep taking the cheap way.
Tom's post is why I write the books that I do. Because there's a market of readers hungry for heroic stories about good people who fight evil and come out battered (perhaps) but unbowed, and remain decent humans. And who get a "happy for the moment," if not ever after.
ReplyDeleteGrey Goo, as one writer called it, is toxic in large doses. People want and need heroes.
LittleRed1
Give me a link, and I’ll be happy to post it here.
DeleteIf there are no heroes, then there is no exemplar to make you feel "less than", and the last thing the modern man wants is to feel less than. It's all affirmation all the time.
ReplyDeleteWe've forgotten how to find it laudatory to yearn and strive.
Hit send too quick, that was I.
ReplyDeleteTo extend what Douglas is saying, if a woman reads a story about the blackmailing madam being kind to cats, and the preacher's daughter going to second base on prom night, then she doesn't have to look at whether her own behavior is whorish. She can rationalise that everyone is pretty much the same. No need to improve.
ReplyDeleteSocialists have been pushing this for more than a century. It's just gotten so ubiquitous that it seems like news, I guess.
ReplyDeleteIf there are no heroes, then there is no exemplar to make you feel "less than".... We've forgotten how to find it laudatory to yearn and strive.
ReplyDeleteI don't entirely agree with the underlying premise. Heroes don't make anyone feel "less than;" that attitude is solely within the individual and it's entirely his choice to feel that, or not. Heroes, in fact, give us reasonably concrete targets on which to focus yearning and striving.
She can rationalise that everyone is pretty much the same.
This is even more an act of cowardice in that it's hiding from morality and ethics. It claims the easy route that what's ethical or moral is whatever is convenient to the moment or that someone else doing it/having done it somehow legitimizes the behavior. It shrinks away from recognizing that morality/ethics is intrinsic in the behavior. Accepting that, and acting within that, takes courage.
Cowardice and courage aren't necessarily opposites, but in this milieu, they are.
Eric Hines
Here's my blog. The series titles are tabs from the home page. History-based fantasy includes the Merchant series, which has been called "blue collar fantasy." The Familiars books are urban fantasy, Colplatschki is military sci-fi, and the Shikari series is "Kipling in space."
ReplyDeleteThank you!
https://almatcboykin.wordpress.com/
LittleRed1
"Blackbird" in the Colplatschki series, and "The Lone Hunter" (Familiar Generations 1) are about heroic gentlemen (or "eventually become gentlemen") who are not perfect, but do their best.
DeleteLittleRed1
I will admit to the occasional mild discomfort about the utter dehumanization of hearly all the enemies faced by LOTR heroes. It's a harder and more interesting story when the foes are people too.
ReplyDeleteI think it's possible to write a story that finds something good in mostly bad people and something bad in mostly good people, without sacrificing all sense of a moral order. Look at how C.S. Lewis treated the largely vile dark-skinned Calormen: they weren't loyal to Aslan, so mostly they were bad guys, but individuals could rise above their society. And that's a very simplified sort of fairy tale. Fine literature can be both moral and discerning about the mix of good and bad in fallen humans, as when Solzhenitsyn observed that the line between good and evil runs through the middle of every human heart.
It's really hard for us to remember that some behavior is beyond the pale, not to be explained or excused, while at the same time no human beings are in a final sense inferior to us upright types. Aren't we always supposed to hope that the lost sheep will return home?
Also: acknowledging a mix of good and bad in people is not the same as maintaining that good is the same as bad and who's to judge?
ReplyDeleteI don't think the enemies in Tolkien are dehumanized. Except for the Nazgul, most of the enemies were never human and so cannot be dehumanized. The humans in LoTR are very human -- Aragorn is brave, humble, noble; Boromir wants power to do good things, even if he has to commit evil to get that power; there are human armies both serving Sauron and opposing him. Most of the human leaders are misguided in one way or another.
ReplyDeleteThe orcs and other non-human enemies are there for a reason. Tolkien had a wide moral range of humans, but that is not all that's real. There are angels. There are demons. I think Tolkien was pointing that out as well.