Agreed entirely on that last point. I'm just extremely surprised and puzzled that so many people on my friends list reacted to the ending with complete surprise and indignation.
Perhaps this is why we keep watching, because his stories _can_ affect us emotionally this much, because love it or hate it (or both) we're never indifferent to it.
I don't think caring about these fictional characters comes at the cost of caring about real-world problems. It is the purpose of art to be more real than reality, to give us the emotional investment exactly so that we can feel strongly about the unreal.
I don't think that caring about fiction vs. reality is mutually exclusive, and that investing one's emotions in one reduces one's ability to care about the other. We don't feel the real tragedies of the world quite as immediately as fictional because we don't get a play-by-play of them presented to us on a platter, we don't get the build-up, we don't get to meet and love the given person first. So, while we can still feel strongly about them, the immediacy is missing because we aren't close to them. If anything, I think it's stories like this that give us some of the tools with which to care about the lives of strangers.
Perhaps this is why we keep watching, because his stories _can_ affect us emotionally this much, because love it or hate it (or both) we're never indifferent to it.
I don't think caring about these fictional characters comes at the cost of caring about real-world problems. It is the purpose of art to be more real than reality, to give us the emotional investment exactly so that we can feel strongly about the unreal.
I don't think that caring about fiction vs. reality is mutually exclusive, and that investing one's emotions in one reduces one's ability to care about the other. We don't feel the real tragedies of the world quite as immediately as fictional because we don't get a play-by-play of them presented to us on a platter, we don't get the build-up, we don't get to meet and love the given person first. So, while we can still feel strongly about them, the immediacy is missing because we aren't close to them. If anything, I think it's stories like this that give us some of the tools with which to care about the lives of strangers.
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