100 Quotes That Caught My Eye: #2

[upupa_epops]

Ok, I'm not done with the intelligent stuff yet. So sue me. Today comes a quote I've actually hanged on my wall, because sometimes I have this desire to shove it down some people's throats.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the

Comments

[snickfic]

This is tangent to what you're saying, I think, but to me learning to empathize and appreciate characters whom one wouldn't like in real life is actually a good exercise in being more empathetic to the people who are in one's life. I have seen most of the key moments in Dean Winchester's life, I know how much more complex he is than just his crude, brutish, PUA exterior, and that reminds me that a person's exterior isn't all there is to them. Quite possibly most of the guys I meet in RL with Dean's exterior are not going to have his interior, which I think is an important point for me to remember, but they're still complicated, flawed individuals with tons of screwed-up history (because we all have screwed-up history) who have value and are worth treating as human - even if I heartily dislike them personally.

And then there are characters like Buffy, who gets tons of flak because, I think, people don't empathize with her enough. How can a person look at everything she's gone through, all the sacrifices she's made, the severe

[pocochina]

Quite possibly most of the guys I meet in RL with Dean's exterior are not going to have his interior, which I think is an important point for me to remember, but they're still complicated, flawed individuals with tons of screwed-up history (because we all have screwed-up history)

Yeah. idk, it's tough for me to talk Dean now, because I've just accepted that he's hit three strikes on my triggers and I'm done. (Even if at least two out of those three instances were fantastic storytelling! Separate issues!) But a big part of his value for me as a character in those early seasons is exactly that. I could see how his fucked-up relationship to gender and women came in part from this basis that I did find really sympathetic. It's kind of a safe way to try to understand how sexist dudes think, without actually taking the emotional risk that getting close to them entails.

A lot of my favorite characters are exactly those whose personhood and sense of self (and therefore ethics, etc) don't have real-world equivalents, like Spike, Illyria, the

[angearia]

Well, just to draw a distinction, sometimes I like characters because I like them as people. And yeah, fictional, but sometimes they become so well-known and familiar that they feel real.

I think it's okay to like/dislike characters based on if we feel they're good/bad/annoying/etc. But the problem occurs when people take their personal taste and act like that means the character is a poorly constructed character.

So there's plenty of characters who I HATE who are incredibly great characters, such as Warren Mears. But I'd never pretend that my visceral feelings about his character mean he's a poorly constructed one. It's about distinguishing between feelings and judgment -- not moral judgment, but rational judgment.

[pocochina]

LIKE.

I almost think this perspective makes more sense if you're consuming media while feminist? Because our values are pretty much never going to be expressed in mainstream media anyway. I approach most television with the informed expectation that it will be overtly hostile to my worldview, so I am well used to setting moral judgment aside anyway. I don't know if that means my bar is set way too low and I give the benefit of the doubt too much to shows that aren't THE WORST like 90% of stuff out there.

I do understand criticizing framing when it's morally/socially questionable -- that's a completely different thing. But the characters themselves? What does it matter what kind of people they are? Characters are well-written or badly written. That is all.

I do think that reasonably sophisticated writing will at least be aware of the ethical issues it raises, and I think paying attention to whatever philosophical question makes a narrative a lot stronger. But even then, quality of writing is kind of separate from moral judgment.

[ever_neutral]

Dorian Gray likes this post.

[novin_ha]

Heh, I come from an entirely different place. I think that actually fiction does have a moral responsibility for what it projects: if it presents moral decay as inevitable, or makes a rapist more sympathetic than his victim, or proposes that gay people are disgusting, or just seems overtly misanthropic, or is all about how poor white menz have it tough cause of all them Others, then the odds of me finding it great based on its style are minuscule. I'm not saying that video games make people into killers, I'm just saying: if you spend your time and energy on representation, do it well - and good doesn't have to triumph over evil for that to occur, but you def. shouldn't be Ayn Rand propose values I despise as admirable [unless it is clearly so that people stop and think