I want to be a kid again. See me staying home, bunking school. Knowing wrong from right just rules…
Life, finances, writing, and the Fall Semester of classes at the University of Iowa have been kicking my ass with no end in sight, so I guess it's time for a philosophy post ramble. The theme today? One which has been eating at my brain recently: issues and considerations in morality/social responsibility when doing horrible things in roleplay
( Read more... )
In a lot of ways, this character... well. He ran away from home because he was a bit of a fuckup, fell in with the way wrong crowd and wound up working as a torturer, tried to run away and ask for amnesty but couldn't get out of the organization, and then his home (which he thought was the last place likely to provide him an out) got destroyed. And he went a bit insane and started looking for vengeance against the people he thought did it. And then, to put icing on the cake, all memory of events that happened before he went insane were blocked off. Sort of. It's complicated.
So he's deeply screwed-up, ad at least part of that is understandable, but at the same time, the things he does because of it... are not condonable. They just aren't. They're about a lightyear too far, and I don't like going there in my mind, and I don't like bringing other people there with me.
At the same time... I think it might be an equal disservice to establish these things and not examine their full effects. One you've made a commitment to that sort of damage, part of me thinks that you need to follow it through - because it's unpleasant and dark and horrible, but isn't the alternative to lay this sort of thing out and say "But I refuse to show that it's that bad?"
I think, in some cases, the knife should be twisted. When pictures came back fro Abu Ghraib, I think people should have been revolted. I think people should have seen the pictures of corpses floating after Katrina, because that sort of horror is merited by the subject matter, and if you portray a tragedy and don't let people get socked in the gut by it, people may begin to think (even if unconsciously) that tragedies are, on balance, not actually that bad.
...I'm restating things so many times because I'm not sure exactly how to put it. I guess that there's a certain merit in not making things superfluously horrible, but fiction shouldn't be a palliative, making things feel better by only masking the issue underneath.
Reply
Fiction can be a harsh mistress. :(
Reply
Leave a comment