Game of Thrones S4

[pocochina]

Int: Does it worry you to lose your two best villains in the show this season?

Benioff: Absolutely.

Weiss: Who’s the second?

Benioff: Joffrey.

Weiss: Well, I don’t think Tywin is a villain.

Benioff: That’s a fair point. If you read the story from the Stark point of view…

Weiss: …then I guess he would be a villain.

Benioff: But Tywin isn’t torturing

Comments

[local_max]

The problem, I think, is that I get the impression that this attitude that I'm describing is something that, *at best*, one could get to in a Zen place after working through one's own *natural emotional responses* of rape being way worse in a fictional character than attempted child-killing or whatever -- and that it may in fact be that even this is suspect. I think about the general category of what one's emotional response to fictional (and real life, for that matter) horrible actions should be, and I *think* that I believe, in a fundamental way, that anyone is capable of doing terrible things given the right circumstances, and I find that horrifying but ultimately less horrifying than the idea that certain people do bad things just because they're "made" bad in some way, or (what basically amounts to the same thing) that some people are capable of choosing to be bad and others aren't. The problem comes that this goes into conflict with the necessity of "openly opposing" it when people do horrible things, or, rather, I seem to have difficulty finding the balance to my satisfaction.

[pocochina]

Right. And I think that's something that people kind of....diligently know they should give lip service to, that of course people are morally gray? but we're less comfortable with that in practice. Understandable, but it can make conversation very frustrating.

[local_max]

Yeah. I mean, I suspect that I have come to a lot of self-questioning from the other side of it -- like, I had been very much in a "everyone is capable of good and bad but we all have our reasons" space, and then I realized that this made it difficult to make value judgments at all -- and value judgments even in terms of how to tell when making a request for someone to stop being an asshole was reasonable. We actually do come by our desire to see people categorized into good and bad honestly, because it's pretty necessary from both a survival perspective and a perspective of how to evaluate our own behaviour and try to modify it, in a way that we really can't (or have very little power to) modify the behaviour of people around us. So, like, you know.