Are stories that feature 'good vs evil' a bad thing?

[Neu Leonstein]

The good guy/bad guy myth

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

he first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star Wars (1977), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all kinds of things a good guy would never do. But then the nature of a bad guy is that he does things a good guy would never do. Good guys don’t just fight for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values.

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. 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. In Marvel comics, Thor has to be worthy of his hammer, and he proves his worth with moral qualities. But in ancient myth, Thor is a god with powers and motives beyond any such idea as ‘worthiness’.

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. Defending a consistent set of values is so central to the logic of newer plots that the stories themselves are often reshaped to create values for characters such as Thor and Loki – who in the 16th-century Icelandic Edda had personalities rather than consistent moral orientations.

[...]

The article goes into a discussion of why almost all our modern fairy tales have a clearly-identified set of good guys fighting a clearly-identified set of bad guys. Rather than complex motivations, at best the bad guys have cartoonish plans for wanting power over everything (think a James Bond or Marvel super villain), while in plenty of other cases they're just evil by design (e.g. Sauron, or 'the dark side of the force'). Go back to the folk tales on antiquity or the middle ages, and it was a question of heroes and gods having personalities and motivations that were more complex, and the stories were about their interaction with codes of honour and acceptable behaviour.

It's worth having a read, but I'm most interested in the potential implications for modern politics. In another thread, the inability to engage with the motivations of the other side is mentioned as a reason for damaging hyper-partisanisation of politics.

Do you think there's a link? If someone grows up reading Harry Potter, the question of needing to understand Voldemort's motivations, and the possibility of some sort of win-win situation doesn't really come up. If you take the same mindset into how you see the real world (we don't need to understand Iran, because they just want nukes to rule over the whole middle east anyway) or politics (the GOP are fascists who want to destroy democracy to destroy all minorities on the way to creating a corporatist oligarchy), then you're forever engaged in an existential fight between good and evil and compromise is a moral failing. And, of course, anything the 'good guys' do becomes excusable by virtue of who is doing it, independently of the act itself.

Do you agree? Should we stop pumping kids full of good vs evil stories?

[Socialist Czechia]

Grey stories are better: luckily, anti-villains and anti-heroes are more common these days.

Deadpool is certainly no sweetheart

[Aellex]

Grey stories are better: luckily, anti-villains and anti-heroes are more common these days.

Deadpool is certainly no sweetheart

Muh Berserk. Neither Griffith nor Gut did anything wrong, BTW.

And white and black story can be good too tho I will admit I prefer grey ones where everyone is an asshole.

[Olthar]

A few scenes later, [Darth Vader is] blowing up a planet.

Darth Vader never blew up a planet.

[Donut section]

A few scenes later, [Darth Vader is] blowing up a planet.

Darth Vader never blew up a planet.

He may not have blown up alderan, but you don't know what he did in his spare time?

[Divitalia]

I don’t see any problem with “good vs evil” stories. In my opinion, having morally grey characters is much more interesting, but you specifically mentioned kids. At a young age, such black and white characters are much more easy to comprehend, no?

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

There are loads of stories where, if you look into it, the good/bad guys aren't really as good/bad as they seem.

[Valrifell]

See, the thing is a simple morality can just be beneficial to the narrative. I don't think many people like when a lot of action is bogged down to discuss the nuances of good and evil.

[Forsher]

Harry Potter is a bad example for (at least) three reasons...

Firstly, there's the line from the movies, "The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters". This is particularly challenging in light of the partisanship thread. It should be fairly obvious that

Secondly, the whole distinction between Riddle, Voldemort and He Who Must Not Be Named raises some really interesting questions. If you understand the intellectual points Dumbledore (iirc) makes about why Voldemort should be called such (fear of the name), it's clear the corollary is that calling something evil changes what that thing is.

Thirdly, the Harry is Snape is Voldemort parallel issue. If you're willing to set aside all the murdering, Voldemort's a lost fish with an unclear identity, which is actually fairly sympathetic.

On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons why Harry Potter is a great example but the best one is undoubtedly the Death Eaters = Nazis thing. The Evil Nazi problem generates much anxiety among historians for a reason and it's something the Harry Potter books just naturally direct people towards. (It shouldn't be necessary, and would prove quite difficult, to list other good reasons.)

I think we have to exercise a vast amount of caution when dealing with these kinds of topics. I mean, look at your title "Are stories that feature 'good vs evil' a bad thing?" There's only one place this can go and it's a "you're a bad person for writing a good versus evil plot". This kind of creative suppression in the name of spillovers really annoys me. It vastly privileges external contexts rather than the actual features of the text (oh, the irony) which can wildly modify how to understand something.

When we look at what's going on in any given text it's fairly obvious that a lot of the time we impose our moral values on events as well as motives we see playing out. Consider:

• Achilles and co. don't come across as evil or good in the Odyssey precisely because they don't give us any kind of trend to grab hold of. There's no systematic error/signal because half the time they're complete dicks and the other half of the time they're kind of good. They can have whatever kind of motive they want (from a certain point of view, Achilles and Voldemort literally have the same one) but it's the proportion of "dick moves" that make us think, "Ah, bad guy".
• It's often said that the closest figure to a hero in the Odyssey is Hector... and this is probably because from our point of view his situation is the moral one. There he is minding his own business when his brother brings home a strange woman (via abduction??) and then a massive army rocks up to keep him stuck in a city for nearly ten years... We give him a lot of slack for this context because we think what's going on is unjust. Our perspective gives us a kind of confirmation bias when it comes to looking at the proportion of dick moves.
  
  • There is the counter-example interpretation... the LAPD bossman clearly thinks that John McClane is evil at one very obvious point in the first Die Hard... why? Because unlike the audience who know McClane's the hero, his sceptical interpretation means he doesn't excuse everything McClane does (a point Neu Leonstein made).
• We're even able to judge dickishness by context. Take the Punisher. Dude's a mass murderer but we give him a pass because the people he kills are even worse, at least by some ways of looking at it. Therefore, not evil because the consequences are justifiable to us in some fashion.
  
  • However, I must acknowledge that the Punisher is also a counter-example. Because of his code we gain the ability to pretend it's a blue and orange morality situation... that there is some internally consistent logic, even if we disagree with it.

Also, productions which don't have Big Messages tend to get ridiculed and why evil for the sake evil baddies are likewise laughed at by critics... the idea that something should have some particular meaning is a massive incentive to produce moral questions in texts.

Finally... strictly speaking, if it's got enough time/details for nuanced characterisation, it's probably not a fairy tale. The genre is very, very different structurally to other kinds of fiction.

tl;dr -- to the extent that moral structures in texts encourage thinking in moral terms, there can be a problem but this is not to say that good versus evil stories are bad... and, indeed, even very obvious examples of good versus evil stories can possess elements which really should lead to divergent conclusions.

[Sovaal]

Nah

[Purpelia]

I very much like a proper good vs evil, black and white story. But it needs to be proper. None of that gray stuff. Just strait up simple perfect good vs perfect evil.
Stories like this exist for a reason and they do a man good.

[Internationalist Bastard]

Nah. I prefer stories where it’s more complicated, but there’s nothing wrong with the old adventure standby
That said, the evil can be really evil, but the good can’t be really good. Few things piss me off more then a charecter who’s flaws are “they care too much”

[Minoa]

It depends on the context: a story about a hero on a mission to save someone from a dangerous villain like a dragon or Dr. Evil may not attract controversy, but things like The Poisonous Mushroom is justifiably a big no-no.

[Deads Heads]

If we don't indoctrinate our kids with morality, they'll learn it by themselves from some other source or authority and I can't exactly imagine any responsible parent wanting that.

[USS Monitor]

I disagree with their characterization of ancient lore not having this dichotomy. They're cherrypicking folktales where the morality is not black and white. Consider the stories in the Bible, where whoever God says is the good guy is the good guy.

And they're talking about how one folktale will have an opposite moral lesson to another, but ignoring that this can also happen with modern work. You can find modern work that teaches the value of listening to advice, and then find another work that teaches the value of thinking for yourself and not accepting everything you're told.

People need to stop looking at age-old human flaws and attributing them to "modern society" or "Western culture." Refusing to listen to the other side is just tribalism, which is not new.

[Holy Tedalonia]

I disagree with their characterization of ancient lore not having this dichotomy. They're cherrypicking folktales where the morality is not black and white. Consider the stories in the Bible, where whoever God says is the good guy is the good guy.

And they're talking about how one folktale will have an opposite moral lesson to another, but ignoring that this can also happen with modern work. You can find modern work that teaches the value of listening to advice, and then find another work that teaches the value of thinking for yourself and not accepting everything you're told.

People need to stop looking at age-old human flaws and attributing them to "modern society" or "Western culture." Refusing to listen to the other side is just tribalism, which is not new.

Tbf, the Bible has some moral grayness when it comes to mortal vs mortal. Take Cain for example, he who travels the world for enternity unless he dies of unatural causes. That character is morally grey as in he killed someone because of self-interest and he ends up wandering the world regretting his action and asking for forgiveness. There are others examples Ofcourse, but regardless I think any story/folktale has some black and white to it even if you do grey the kind a bit.

[USS Monitor]

I disagree with their characterization of ancient lore not having this dichotomy. They're cherrypicking folktales where the morality is not black and white. Consider the stories in the Bible, where whoever God says is the good guy is the good guy.

And they're talking about how one folktale will have an opposite moral lesson to another, but ignoring that this can also happen with modern work. You can find modern work that teaches the value of listening to advice, and then find another work that teaches the value of thinking for yourself and not accepting everything you're told.

People need to stop looking at age-old human flaws and attributing them to "modern society" or "Western culture." Refusing to listen to the other side is just tribalism, which is not new.

Tbf, the Bible has some moral grayness when it comes to mortal vs mortal. Take Cain for example, he who travels the world for enternity unless he dies of unatural causes. That character is morally grey as in he killed someone because of self-interest and he ends up wandering the world regretting his action and asking for forgiveness. There are others examples Ofcourse, but regardless I think any story/folktale has some black and white to it even if you do grey the kind a bit.

Darth Vader turns back too, yet he was still named as an example of an obvious bad guy. Villains that see the error of their ways are actually pretty common in pop fiction.

But it's still pretty clear which of their actions are meant to be evil and which are meant to show their repentance/redemption. This is different from a character whose decisions throughout the story are morally ambiguous.

[Kramanica]

I wouldn't necessarily view it as a bad thing. While I do prefer people who have more complex motivations, classic battles of light and darkness are always fun.

[Neanderthaland]

If it wasn't a staple, then stories which break the mold wouldn't be as interesting.

And that would be bad. I like my anti-heros.

[The Rich Port]

I find stories that start with a seemingly black and white world that slowly faces the realization of the gray realities of life is the best kind. In much the same way the characters mature, the audience is allowed to mature with them.

Also, I prefer happy endings. Sure, the world is gray and nothing is certain, but that doesn't mean that being good is pointless, nor is being evil consequenceless or one-sided.

[Ethel mermania]

i like morality plays

[Liriena]

I think a little bit of strict "good vs evil" is just as good and necessary as a bit of "grey morality". The latter gets our critical thinking muscles working, sure, but at the end of the day, I'd argue that having some strong shared moral convictions is useful. Watchmen is good, but so is 1960s Batman handing over his Batmobile's keys because he's too drunk to drive. It's good to subject traditional narratives and moral absolutism to some deconstruction, to question what we've learned to take for granted and not blindly embrace black-and-white thinking and tribalism, because a lot of the time, those narratives and moral values come with some pretty bad historical baggage. A lot of "good vs evil" narratives categorize what we might call victimless sins as "evil" while upholding arguably harmful notions as naturally virtuous.

[Liriena]

i like morality plays

It's a wonderful life became a personal favorite the first time I watched it.

[Ethel mermania]

i like morality plays

It's a wonderful life became a personal favorite the first time I watched it.

Who can not like George bailey.

[Olthar]

I find stories that start with a seemingly black and white world that slowly faces the realization of the gray realities of life is the best kind. In much the same way the characters mature, the audience is allowed to mature with them.

Also, I prefer happy endings. Sure, the world is gray and nothing is certain, but that doesn't mean that being good is pointless, nor is being evil consequenceless or one-sided.

Then I bet you'd like Code Geass since it is exactly like this.

Well, arguably it becomes black vs. black at the end rather than grey vs. grey, but whatever.