Author: Xiang Xiang Liew
Date: Thursday, July 9, 2009 3:23:59 PM CDT
Subject: WARNING: long rambling post (yes, more than the usual)
(tried to skim over the TDK stuff cause I’m planning to watch it soon and I don’t want accidental spoilers, yes, I haven’t watched it yet, believe it or not; so forgive me if I’m not responding to your entire post :D)
Well, first off, I personally don’t think it’s evil even if you want Iago dead. (Would you call me evil for being happy that I finally managed to kill the insane final boss in Fire Emblem 7? Or for wanting to eat the four ghosts in Pacman?) Or that we root for evil characters sometimes, which we tend to do when the bad guy is interesting/funny/cool in some way (which tends to be the case – just look at Satan in Paradise Lost. No, I haven’t read the work, but I’ve heard about it. Good guys have an alarming tendency to be mindnumbingly boring. Probably because normal humans have some measure of ‘evil’ to some extent but since we can’t give it full reign in real life we fulfill those desires vicariously through fiction. If you deny this using yourself as an example [which won't work because personal experience doesn't say anything about the population in general], you are obviously in denial, and the more you deny it, the more certain we will be that you are in denial, just because psychodynamic defense mechanisms work that way. Damn that Freud! He just refuses to play fair…) How we react to a character depends on how the character is depicted, how the writer/director/whatever manipulates the audience’s emotions. (This is why we find Jesse and James being blasted off to space every single episode to be so funny – the violence is treated in a humorous way, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad thing to do because we should want them to be punished through the legal system etc etc etc, if there is even a legal system in the Pokemon-verse.) You are right to say that we should have such and so reactions, we should hate the Joker, we should want Iago to be punished through the judicial system (which, as we all know, is rotten to the core anyway, have you read the studies on how easily juries can be manipulated, I mean, the law is not always right, like institutionalized discrimination just to mention one example out of millions), but as we all know, people just don’t think when it comes to things like this. We like or hate someone or want someone to die based on how we feel, not on what is right. Just look at how the world is going crazy right now over MJ’s death (may he rest in peace) – only a handful of people are saying, “Whoah, wait a minute there, this guy molested children which means he is EVIL, can we stop treating his passing like the canonization of a deity now?” But just look at the way a lot of people reacted to his death – we forgot about all the bad stuff and starting focusing on the good. The coolness. The awesomness of Michael Jackson in his prime. This is the same process that goes on when we see evil fictional characters (I’m not implying that MJ is evil, in case you were wondering). We have a gut emotional reaction to them that makes us like them or want to see them die. We don’t really THINK, rationally, about the ethical implications of their actions. It’s like how people react so strongly to the issue of gay marriage, abortion, or evolution – they don’t really think about the issue logically, they just turn on the hate at full blast because of this extremely strong gut reaction. (People who noticed the shift in pronouns, have a virtual cookie. :D)
It’s a human thing. It’s normal. People who don’t should experience this phenomenon are either not human, or belong in a psychiatric ward. But sometimes, after watching a movie/reading a book, after we’ve managed to get our heads out of the fictional universe, we can reflect on what we’ve been feeling or reading (well, some of us do anyway, sometimes I think that – ugh never mind *succeeds in stopping digression*), and then we think things like “Damn, how could I even possibly feel that way towards that character?” and “That was not a acceptable reaction – s/he’s obviously a sadistic bastard who cares nothing about humans!” and “God I want to strangle that evil [CENSORED] – ohnoes I’m being evil, how can I even think about killing someone even if s/he’s just a fictional character!1!11one!!1″ (Personally I didn’t react that way when Iago didn’t die, meaning I wasn’t thinking about evil vs our reaction to evil, I was more preoccupied with thinking “OH NO OTHELLO NOOOOO THIS IS SO SAAAD” but yeah.) I can offer up millions of examples and a few techniques on how creators of fiction get audiences/readers to sympathize with evil characters. It’s all a matter of presentation; where to focus, where to emphasize, contrast, etc etc etc.
Plus, evil just tends to be more interesting, like the Joker you mentioned. That is why conflict is essential to any decent piece of narrative fiction. But really, it’s fiction, you shouldn’t really worry if you’re going to go ax crazy on everyone just because you like, say, Sweeney Todd from the musical of the same name. That’s just absurd. (Meaning my sentence, not you. :D) Most of us know perfectly well the boundaries between reality and fiction, and can like evil characters perfectly well while condemning their actions if we see them in real life. Likewise, just because we scream at the screen “KILL THAT BASTARD” doesn’t mean that we’re going to go out and kill criminals because they’ve escaped the claws of so-called justice. Like Yagami Light with his Death Note. (Now that’s a show to watch/manga to read for its greyness of morality. Only the first part though. After L [my darling baby!!] – uh, you know what happened to him, everything goes downhill.) However, the cases of religious extremists killing abortion doctors is one example of how this phenomenon is not restricted to fiction – it happens through media too. We see certain news anchors talking about baby killers and we are so consumed by religious insanity that we go out and kill the killers. Whee. Fun stuff. (No, not implying that abortion is wrong or evil.)
As for, shouldn’t evil be extinguished even in fiction, my answer is yes if you’re thinking about vicarious reinforcement and seeing evil people win will vicariously reinforce people to do evil (but as I’ve said before, just because we see a rapist get away scot free in FICTION (or more often, PR0N) doesn’t mean that we’ll go out and do it ourselves because GEEZ, just think of all the STDs you could get I mean it’s a bad, bad thing to do in real life and we all know it. Hopefully.) However, my answer is NO because let’s face it, this would be a mindnumbing, insufferably boring world if all we watched were black and white morality stories with good winning each time and bad losing. I mean, we’re not children, we’ve grown out of fairytales (though those have really twisted morality schemes going on, I mean, it’s okay to steal the giant’s golden hen and then kill the giant just because he’s a giant and must therefore be evil. WOW. I sense the stink of racism going on there.) Seriously, I maintain that a decent work of fiction should have complex characters and storylines and plot – it would be great if good and evil were totally mixed up in all the characters so there’s no clear good guy/bad guy, which is, as I’ve said before, utterly, mindnumbingly, insufferably boring. Sure, good-triumph-stories can feel good and make you be all fuzzy and warm inside, but geez, we all need a variety in our diet. We can’t eat sugar all day long. Unless you’re the type of individual that can’t get enough of Barney the Purple Dinosaur. I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family, with a great big hug and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me tooooo~~~~ <3 (ohgawd I can remember all the lyrics someone please KILL ME NAOW.)
For more on morality in fiction, check out Morality Tropes. Be warned though, going on this stie will ruin your life because you won’t be able to stop reading.
