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
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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 ( ... )
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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 ( ... )
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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.
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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.
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