Post by Lady Ten on Aug 27, 2012 14:03:05 GMT -6
Note: this article is a repost from dA. As always, critique is welcome, so feel free to comment. Hopefully the ideas in this article can help us have clearer, more informed, and more specific discussions of canon characters who are better known for their dastardly deeds.
The Axis of Good and Evil
Moral Alignment Labeling in Fandoms and Character Creation
alternative title: Is this character evil?
Introduction
In the standard setup for fictional storytelling, an antagonist opposes a protagonist in achieving a goal, and often, a writer will construct the narrative with the intention of persuading the reader to root for one character over another. It is natural, then, to draw distinctions between which characters fall to which "side". In discussions between fans, one group gets categorized as the "good guys" and another as the "bad guys," delineating whose goals they approve of and whose they do not.
Sometimes, in some genres more than others, the writers, fans, and creators of fan characters have a tendency to not only speak of a character's allegiances in terms of in-world attributes (ideology, citizenship, interpersonal loyalties, etc.) but to also -- in the case of antagonists -- label some of the characters as evil. There is a fundamental problem with this.
Clarification of Terms
For our purposes here, good and evil will not be clearly defined -- that is, for all ideologies in which good and evil exist as valid concepts, this exploration will remain applicable. If you use these terms at all (without quotation marks) and believe them to be appropriate descriptions for certain categories of behavior, any at all, then that is enough, without us having to go into a discussion as what counts as which. This discussion is not going to approach any of those particulars.
Applications of Terms -- Active vs. Passive
All too often, upon encountering a villain with a developed motive or a character with any hint of ambiguity, somewhere in the fandom someone's going to start a thread entitled, "Is (Character) evil?" Such discussions always start with the assumption of evil as a state of being. This assumption is rarely challenged, unless the notion of evil itself is also challenged, triggering some doldrum schlock about how not everything is black and white and the world is a big complicated place where decisions are hard, or the pointless point is made that the character does not see themselves as evil.
However, even without discrediting the notion of evil as a valid descriptor, the "Is (Character) evil?" discussions are asking the wrong question. Evil is not a state of being. It is not a mood, a status, or a personality. Because people and their fictional analogues are complex creatures, no one is truly good or truly evil, for all of us are perpetrators of good and evil acts. And that's just it -- evil is a category of action, not a state of being. Thus evil does deserve its place as a valid concept, simply not as people are wont to use it.
Discussions of "Is (Character) evil?" tend to be messy because they're trying to cover an entire lifetime of growth and change in the mindset and habits of a whole person, without specifying what exactly all this means. What are people looking to discuss here? More appropriate questions might include "Is (action) right or wrong?" (referring to a choice made by a character), or perhaps they're looking to discuss to which others this character is loyal, what lengths the character would theoretically go to for what ends (and whether that would be justified), and whether any particular actions or beliefs of theirs are legitimately justifiable (as opposed to simply understandable). One might also ask whether a frequent string of choices by the character should be judged as a propensity for this choice and whether the character should be trusted by the others. This may sound the same as judging a character as evil, but the difference is that these examples are more specific and accurate, getting to the heart of the matter and focusing on choices, whereas fighting over whether a character "is" evil doesn't actually mean anything. Evil is not a state of being. Evil is an action.
Under the perspective of evil as a type of choice or action, not a state of being, we can still make judgements about a character's behavior, but the approach is more fluid; we can judge on a case-by-case basis and come to conclusions about a character's beliefs and tendencies without slapping the whole character, virtues and all, with one ambiguous and wide-spanning label (that is, relative to more specific terms for varieties of evil behavior).
Even when you think that there is a category of heinous deeds that are purely evil, and even if everyone agrees with you on what these are (this is a very hypothetical situation), the perpetrators of evil may favor some evil acts over others, and commit them in different numbers and in different degrees with different frequency, so unless you believe there is one sole, simple criterion like an on-off switch to make a soul wholly good or wholly evil, you must either accept that evil is an action rather than a status, or you've got to face the challenge of determining which characters are "more evil" than others, suggesting that an "amount of evil" can be quantified.
This is impossible.
How does one calculate a person's level of evil? Do you accumulate one tally mark for each evil deed? Do you accumulate a different number of evil points depending on the vileness of the act? How is all that sorted out? Is this accumulated over a lifetime? Do you start fresh every day? How much information do you need on all the details of someone's life before you can make an accurate judgement about just how much evil they have committed? Is someone who does terrible things in youth and then changes their ways over time just as evil as someone who commits scattered and infrequent acts of evil for the duration of their life? Can you "erase" any of the marks against you? How? How is that determined? Is there a time limit? What if you don't do enough atoning for yourself before you die? Is there one special "reset button" you can press and wipe your slate clean? How is it activated? Is there a limit to that too? How do you draw the line?
There may well be an answer to all this, but unless you're intending to deliver a heavy-handed Aesop regarding all of your beliefs on the subject, deciding to label one of your characters "evil" is less advisable than simply fleshing out a personality and a set of beliefs and letting the reader make the call. Likewise, when you're discussing other characters on a fandom forum, this probably isn't the philosophical and spiritual Pandora's box you're looking to set loose. Characters may do any number of things deserving of the label of "evil," but trying to decide whether an entire character itself "is" evil brings up a needless level of complexity that diverts from the issue at hand.
Even within the framework of so-called "black and white morality," it makes more sense to discuss fictional evil in terms of actions and behavior. Rather than excuse the individual for the deeds, as this might seem to do, viewing evil as an action emphasizes it as a conscious choice, whereas the "state of being" model diminishes responsibility in comparison and makes it sound like an inescapable part of an inherent nature, at which point it fails to qualify on any scale of morality (the same way a tiger killing prey on instinct isn't seen as immoral). So when it turns out that a character has a motivation and a reason for the terrible things they've done, it doesn't mean those things are no longer evil or that the evilness should come under question, unless you believe that "evil" means "doing things without a reason, any reason, at all". That's simply inaccurate, as no one does anything without a reason. But perhaps that's a discussion for another day.
