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

[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 Cylons in BSG, Sam in S6 of SPN, etc.

I always enjoy these characters too, and for a lot of the same reasons. I feel like they make it a lot easier to deal with ethical concerns, if they're that other. Nobody could possibly be like them, so there's no need for me to wonder about if there's a should of it all.