Villainy, Sin, & Discord
As a young Catholic-I’m talking grade school-I sometimes envisioned sins as little black marks on a tally of a soul, and confession a way to erase them. Maybe that was bad catechism or maybe just a child’s brain, but I’ve since come to a much different understanding. (FYI fell away from the Church in my teen years, but that is a whole other story.)
Today at work I was amused to find Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike, in a sense a novel-length fanfic on Hamlet
seeing the story from a different angle, not unlike the currently popular Wicked which riffs similarly on the witches of Oz. The fact that antagonists so easily become protagonists (part of the appeal of the “Death Note” movies is the shift of Light to darkness) reminded me of a basic observation of people in life and art.
The villain acts with conviction that his own actions and beliefs are Right. He rarely sees himself or his actions as evil, or at least sees them as justifiable. Tybalt saw that he was defending his dear cousin from a union disastrous for the whole city, and Mercutio’s death an accident. Hamlet, generally held a hero, destroyed an entire royal court including himself to avenge a single murder-not justice but simply revenge. In the afterword to Updike’s novel William Kerrigan puts it well, “''Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counselor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.'' So really who is the villain of the piece? Gertrude one could argue meant to preserve what she loved, a lapse of judgement only maybe. Who knows what Hamlet Sr.’s darknesses would have wrought had he not gone just then to Hell? Evil may not simply be a matter of perspective but to those who do it it is not so clear.
So I turn to my current brain-toy, “In Nomine: the Mile Higher Club”. Sin as defined in the In Nomine system takes the form of ‘dissonance’ and ‘discord’. It’s not a tally of deeds but a shift in perspective, taking a point that feels wrong and letting it get comfortable enough that it no longer seems wrong. This is the basis of the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy and its credibility within an argument. You break one taboo without consequence and you break slightly greater ones until you hit resistance, usually outside resistance because the very process wears away at internal resistance. Eventually noise becomes music to the one playing.
This is Corat’s dilemma (Corat being my main character in MHC), and why Dominic (Archangel of Judgement) is so dark. Corat’s nature is friendship, connection, agape, the very core of his being. By being tried, perhaps justly, for leading pilgrims to Yasukuni he was taught to hate. As he cannot afford to hate an archangel-unlike Michael he does not understand the quiet grudge-he cannot forgive as ‘ just doing his job’ because he was faulted for just doing his own, does not appreciate the attempt to keep him in tune and for lack of understanding this falls further down. Dominic’s triad was rough and overzealous. Michael’s intervention saved his forces but pulled him into enmity which he cannot process. He knows the bitterness of a Word, the formalized definition of what and who he is, taken away when it was nearly in his grasp. The grief of this loss adds pain to fuel the enmity which so far few have seen and none can undo.
And so he hates Pepito because it is a sanctioned and uncomplicated hate. Pepito did not see the significance, only that he had a persecutor. It was Samedi perhaps who took a ripe situation and make it blossom. Maybe it came earlier, though Pepito is more lucky than bright. An open wound will eventually infect, and so it has.
One slip, one misunderstanding, one difference of judgement dealt with too harshly and with too little grace, to a slow and deadly Fall.
Yes I do like my tragedies.
Today at work I was amused to find Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike, in a sense a novel-length fanfic on Hamlet
seeing the story from a different angle, not unlike the currently popular Wicked which riffs similarly on the witches of Oz. The fact that antagonists so easily become protagonists (part of the appeal of the “Death Note” movies is the shift of Light to darkness) reminded me of a basic observation of people in life and art.
The villain acts with conviction that his own actions and beliefs are Right. He rarely sees himself or his actions as evil, or at least sees them as justifiable. Tybalt saw that he was defending his dear cousin from a union disastrous for the whole city, and Mercutio’s death an accident. Hamlet, generally held a hero, destroyed an entire royal court including himself to avenge a single murder-not justice but simply revenge. In the afterword to Updike’s novel William Kerrigan puts it well, “''Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counselor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.'' So really who is the villain of the piece? Gertrude one could argue meant to preserve what she loved, a lapse of judgement only maybe. Who knows what Hamlet Sr.’s darknesses would have wrought had he not gone just then to Hell? Evil may not simply be a matter of perspective but to those who do it it is not so clear.
So I turn to my current brain-toy, “In Nomine: the Mile Higher Club”. Sin as defined in the In Nomine system takes the form of ‘dissonance’ and ‘discord’. It’s not a tally of deeds but a shift in perspective, taking a point that feels wrong and letting it get comfortable enough that it no longer seems wrong. This is the basis of the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy and its credibility within an argument. You break one taboo without consequence and you break slightly greater ones until you hit resistance, usually outside resistance because the very process wears away at internal resistance. Eventually noise becomes music to the one playing.
This is Corat’s dilemma (Corat being my main character in MHC), and why Dominic (Archangel of Judgement) is so dark. Corat’s nature is friendship, connection, agape, the very core of his being. By being tried, perhaps justly, for leading pilgrims to Yasukuni he was taught to hate. As he cannot afford to hate an archangel-unlike Michael he does not understand the quiet grudge-he cannot forgive as ‘ just doing his job’ because he was faulted for just doing his own, does not appreciate the attempt to keep him in tune and for lack of understanding this falls further down. Dominic’s triad was rough and overzealous. Michael’s intervention saved his forces but pulled him into enmity which he cannot process. He knows the bitterness of a Word, the formalized definition of what and who he is, taken away when it was nearly in his grasp. The grief of this loss adds pain to fuel the enmity which so far few have seen and none can undo.
And so he hates Pepito because it is a sanctioned and uncomplicated hate. Pepito did not see the significance, only that he had a persecutor. It was Samedi perhaps who took a ripe situation and make it blossom. Maybe it came earlier, though Pepito is more lucky than bright. An open wound will eventually infect, and so it has.
One slip, one misunderstanding, one difference of judgement dealt with too harshly and with too little grace, to a slow and deadly Fall.
Yes I do like my tragedies.