16 ms·

The good guy/bad guy myth

154 points by anacleto 9y ago

schoen 9y ago
> Not only do people in ancient stories not switch sides in fights but Achilles, say, would never win because his army was composed of the rejects from the Trojans’. It's not in the Iliad, but in the Aeneid one of the Greeks pretends to desert in order to sell the story of the Trojan horse, and the Trojans do kindly accept him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinon (However, it turns out that that he was still really loyal to the Greeks and the Trojans made a mistake by believing him.)
hacknat 9y ago
I racked my brain in disagreement at first with her claim (I took a fair amount of ancient literature classes in college and continue to read ancient literature when I can), only to find I couldn’t come up with many examples that contradict her. In fact I even began to think on the Bible, the one document I’m sure we would all think of as being moralizing, but even it contains passages that don’t assume the good guy/bad guy trope: In the Joshua narrative (a part of the Bible that troubles a lot of people for its wholesale slaughter of ethnic groups) before they sack Jericho Joshua sees an angel and asks which side he is on, and the angel replies, “neither” (Joshua 5). Similarly in Deuteronomy the existence of other deities is presumed in some passsages, but they are meant for “other nations” (Deuteronomy 4). And my favorite example, God tries to kill Moses after he commissions him (Exodus 4:18). Here’s the thing though, when ethnicity and familial ties no longer are the thing binding a society together, the only thing left is ideology. If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology. Universalism is a powerful tool, it can create a society like the US, which has many faults and sins to be sure, but is the only society in history to elect a member of, what was very recently, a slave class to its highest political office. Universal also has its dark side in things like the fascisms of the early 20tj century. It seems like we might be migrating back (or around?) to a non-Universalist sentiment around the world in the current backlash against globalization. The impetus definitely has some nationalism and racism in it, but it feels different to me than a moralizing racism of the past that assumed racial superiority, and now seems to be rooted in a theory of primacy (it’s not that we’re better, but we come first, e.g. “America first”). It makes sense to me that we are migrating away from Universalism. Our collective psyche cannot fathom the indirect violence that we are all wreaking on each other right now (and the immense catastrophes we are all about to suffer).
- lsd5you 9y ago
  If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology Does this not seem coercive and borderline orwellian to you? We have to embrace narratives sounds an awful lot like 'accept things which are not true'. It is hardly any different to a religion in this sense. Abstract ethics class morality plays itself out in my opinion. It is a platonic ideal that can be used as a model for behaviour but not as some kind of absolute. It deconstructs ways of life and papers over real differences. It promises us a sterile world that noone actually wants to live in. We want progress, but we (in my opinion) manifestly don't want eventual the destination the 'end of history'. As such like the business cycle there may well be a morality cycle that we cannot banish. There is a similarity with technology. What if we as a society demand and enjoy change, but our actual happiness is reduced in the long term (you can imagine modeling this as happiness a function positive in progress - rate of change, but negative in the overal level of enlightenment - or whatever progress accumulates as).
  - hacknat 9y ago
    I definitely didn’t mean that in a statist way, as in enforced morality. I just meant that societies that don’t use kinship bonds inevitably use something else to maintain cohesion in society, religion has been used, founding myths (American republicanism, etc), and now it seems there’s a backlash against it all. My only point was that maintaining social cohesion in a pluralist society is no mean feat. As a side note, short of making sure everyone gets a strong foundation in philosophy, I don’t see how you can maintain an agreed upon set of values in a pluralist society without some sort of myth. You call it “accepting things that aren’t true”, but myth goes beyond truth, IMO. Most values are untestable hypotheses, so they don’t really fall into a modern definition of knowledge or truth, at least as I learned them in my undergrad science courses. Humans are wired to think in narrative terms so inevitably the process of transmitting values across generations is going to generate some distracting cruft that is patently absurd, but that doesn’t mean the attempt at transmitting values is absurd.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
natecavanaugh 9y ago
I have to disagree with the assumptions here that there are no ancient good guy/bad guy narratives. David vs Goliath. Samson and the Philistines. Jesus against Death in Revelation. And that's just the Bible. People's stories going through history follow all sorts of narratives, some that are hero/villain, some that are proverbial, some where some virtue is being exemplified by one or more people, and some evil exemplified by people or elemental forces and nature. There's nothing modern about it, it's just that you can make anything seem hazier or more opaque or you reduce it to a binary, depending on just how much you want to over analyze it.
- badestrand 9y ago
  I don't know the other stories well and Christianity is a big good-bad theme in itself with its hell and heaven but in David versus Goliath the giant never was the bad guy. He was just fighting for the other side and David killed him, that's it as far as I know.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    I think that's a fair point. But otherwise, David is very much a "good guy" in virtually all of his stories. King David's famous "Slice the baby in half, so that both 'mothers' can have half of it" is clearly a fight of good vs evil. The Evil mother doesn't care for the child, while the good mother cares deeply for the child. And that's how King David solved one child-custody problem... (not actually killing the baby, but by judging the reactions of the two 'mothers' to the potential act). ----------- The story of "Sodom and Gomorrah" is implicitly about evil. The town faces divine punishment because 10 good people couldn't be found. Its perhaps not "good guy vs bad guy", bit the concepts of "bad guy" are definitely explored.
    - hacknat 9y ago
      David wasn’t the king who proposed to slice the baby in half it was Solomon, and the whole point of that story is to illustrate how wise Solomon is not to belabor some point about an evil mother.
ccleve 9y ago
It's a fine essay, right up to this point: "The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one." What utter drivel. The moral face-off between good and evil is core to a great many religions, most notably Christianity. Concepts of right and wrong, and the clash between them, has formed the core of many strains of philosophical, religious, cultural and literary thought for 2,500 years, at least. Such thought, particularly Christian thought, has influenced the literature of Western Europe for many centuries. It's hard to find a writer who was not at least aware of God-vs-the-devil story lines. Sorry, professor, but western civilization has existed for much longer than you imagine. Not everything is political, ok?
- taeric 9y ago
  What are the "God versus the devil" storylines you are referencing? Seems most of those are much more modern in origin.
  - sjsbsh 9y ago
    Well the temptations of Christ for one. The various demons Christ casts away. The Passion has references to the Evil Spirit entering Judas. The Nicean Creed mentions the harrowing of hell (can’t get more God vs. Devil than first asserting Christ is God. Then he dies and goes to Hell for our salvation. Then he arises from the dead to join the Father). And that’s sticking to material almost 100% of Christianity agrees on. If I’d limited myself to the Apostolic churches (Orthodox/Catholic) I could add from their rich history (they don’t agree w/ sola scritura)
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    The temptation of Christ. Revelations. The Garden of Eden. Job. There are plenty of teachings about how demons are evil and dangerous as well. 1 and 2 Peter, for instance.
    - taeric 9y ago
      Garden of Eden? At no point is that good versus evil, is it? They disobey and are cast out. Job? Everything done to him is with God's will. If anything, this would sway the other way. Good literally willed the killing of his family, and he accepts that. More to the point, where are the bad guys? There is a general sense of good, but evil is less present than "not good."
dexwiz 9y ago
In a Song of Ice and Fire there are no good guys or bad guys. Each side has moral quandaries and a drive to survive. The only “Evil” characters are sadists, and there are quite a few. That is part of the reason the books are so engrossing. People have lamented the Game of Thrones show has gone down hill after passing the books. I argue that is because the narrative has shifted to a war against the White Walkers, a clearly malevolent force. Instead of a mutlifaceted story about amoral factions, it’s become Lord of the Rings. The story lost its spark and rejoined the common good versus evil narrative.
- qznc 9y ago
  Yes, there are plenty of gray characters in Game of Thrones, but has Jon Snow done anything evil? Has Ramsay done anything good? Afaik the show follows the general story line as planned by Martin.
  - hacknat 9y ago
    One of my biggest beefs with the Game of Thrones “there are no bad guys” assertion is the Wights. Seems to me they are George Martins Orcs.
    - qznc 9y ago
      I do not consider the Wights (or zombies in general) as evil since they do not have a free will. They are more like a force of nature like a stampede or a forest fire. The will behind the Wights are the white walkers and if they are evil is still open.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  If the writers are any good, the white walkers will also turn out not to be clearly bad.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    They are kind of described as out-of-control biological weapons the Children of the Forest used against the First Men. So it's possible they are more like a weapon of mass destruction (zombie virus) unleashed for complex reasons (war, survival) and less like a people.
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dvt 9y ago
This article is embarrassingly wrong. In every single interpretation of the monomyth, we have a hero that strives to be victorious over some form of evil -- often times at great cost. But Ms. Nichols is being disingenuous by cherry-picking The Iliad (which is politically complex) -- why not Beowulf, or The Odyssey -- where we have very clear cases of antagonists and protagonists. Also, the argument that moral face-offs are "a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism" is so unequivocally wrong, if you said it, you'd be laughed out of an undergraduate English class. Morally relativist and historically revisionist BS.
- hacknat 9y ago
  In Beowulf the antagonist is a monster, she at least gives a corollary in the Arthur legendarium. Also, who is portrayed as being evil in the Odyssey? The only two examples I can think of are the suitors and Polyphemus, but the text refers to Odysseus being cunning against these foes rather than “morally justified”. Odysseus even plays the suitors game, because in that culture their behavior is justified. Honestly I think Odysseus is one of the most morally ambiguous characters in all of literature, he’s practically the first anti-hero, to use him as a counter example seems like a huge stretch to me.
  - dvt 9y ago
    Wait, are you seriously saying that Grendel and his mother have no moral valence in the context of Beowulf? As far as the Odyssey is concerned, Athena (Odysseus' patroness and mentor) is literally the god of wisdom and justice. If that's not at least some indication that what he's doing is justified, I don't know what is.
    - hacknat 9y ago
      I think you’ve made a straw man of her argument. She didn’t claim there was no morality in the ancient world or no moral perspective in the folklore, just that there are no good guy/bad guy tropes. I have yet to see you give a textual example, at least in the Odyssey, that contradicts her.
tzs 9y ago
A few years ago I grabbed a free ebook of Grimm stories from Project Gutenberg for light bedtime reading. There are several there, based on different translations and containing different subsets of the stories. This one seems to be the most complete: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314 I was surprised by how many of the stories fell under one of these templates: • Main character in story is cruel and dishonest. This brings him wealth, power, love, and/or happiness. • Main character in story is victimized by someone cruel and dishonest. Responds by finding someone weak and/or stupid that he can victimize in order to boost his wealth or position back to what they were originally. It was very hard in most of the stories to find anyone who could be described as what we would call a "good guy".
- maxerickson 9y ago
  In the first tale the king is a minor character but seems to be a "good guy". The protagonist does do something nasty and go on to live happily ever after with the victim though.
mjw1007 9y ago
I think people telling stories like Star Wars choose to make the antagonists Capital-E-Evil because modern audiences are much less happy to root for people who are fighting a war if they aren't shown that the war is thoroughly justifiable. A few hundred years ago you could happily put a character in a saga and have them go off on viking raids and kill any number of people whose only crime is living near the coast, and still put them forward as morally admirable. Nowadays if you want to have your protagonists shooting at their enemies or hitting them with sharp bits of metal you basically have to choose between a good-vs-evil narrative or having only anti-heroes rather than plain heroes (and both choices are now common). So I think this bit is pretty much backwards: « Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. » What modern Good-vs-Evil narratives are collectively yelling at us is the idea that _only_ outright visible evil justifies making war.
- taeric 9y ago
  The interesting thing, to me, is that the original Star Wars stick out to me as not being pointedly good guy versus bad guy. There is villainy, but the main arch that sticks out is not Luke versus the villain, but Luke versus the way of the villain. He does not defeat the emperor and the "not Jedi." Instead, he finds the Jedi path and acts as an example that redeems his father. I'd go so far as to say he even rejected the jedi teachings in the original story. They were teaching that Vader had to be defeated by him. And that his attachment to his friends was a bad thing. He manages to win, despite not following the directions of his teachers. Yoda literally disappeared right after telling him he has to confront and defeat Vader. Something Luke throws away his saber while doing.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Are you perhaps forgetting the part in the first movie where they blow up a planet full of people as a demonstration? Luke's story arc may not focus on that exclusively, but it does focus on it some, and he's not the only major character. Each has their own arc, but the backdrop is always "let's overthrow these horrible evil people."
Animats 9y ago
This is an American filmic convention. Maybe it's a holdover from the Hays Code, which explicitly mandated a good guy/bad guy structure by regulation.[1] Japanese anime and Russian literature do not follow it. [1] https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPictureProductionCode.pdf https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPic...
skywhopper 9y ago
Darth Vader was not the one who wanted to blow up a planet. In fact, he dismissed the idea of such a weapon as futile and silly. The followup movies in the original trilogy added layers to the question of good and evil, and the most recent film in the series explicitly questioned the entire premise. So maybe opening with Star Wars is not the best example.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > ...the most recent film in the series explicitly questioned the entire premise. Did it? The bad guys are still blowing up planets and murdering the people who love them.
- deleted 9y ago
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dnautics 9y ago
The increasing prevalence good guy bad guy dichotomy is probably driven by the conatraint of the shorter forms. There's a great videoessay on why star trek movies are awful (all of them except I and IV have a villain, and only II pulled it off well) while the series deep space nine pulled off an incredibly complex villain by virtue that they had 7 years to develop his story arc. Even Darth Vader, the example from the OP essay got complexity as the franchise spanned decades.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Good point. Good TV, shows like Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, and Mad Men use their longer format to take their time and develop more complex characters.
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krylon 9y ago
Huh. Once upon a time, as a young boy, I had dreams of becoming a writer. A couple of years ago I actually started writing what might have become a novel. But I remember that back then, it changed the way I watched movies and TV programs. And I started having on an almost regular basis these epiphanies of things about writing that people can learn in college in the USA. I do not remember what movie, series, scene or character triggered that one, but the "biggest" one I got was that in real life, Good and Evil exist only as approximations. Asymptotically, if you will. (Almost) Nobody is purely good or evil. And even the people we consider evil, tend to see themselves as good. And they consider us evil. Sorry to pull a Godwin in the first round, but consider a prime example if ever there was one: Even Hitler did think of himself as basically good. He ordered unspeakable atrocities, but from his point of view, it all served the greater Good and was therefore justified. The question of how somebody could arrive at such a fucked up value system will probably never be answered to anyone's satisfaction. Or Captain Ahab. He has a twisted moral compass, but again, from his point of view, he is doing "the right thing"(tm). Or Major Weissmann, Dominus Blicero. And often enough it is just egotism, "I want to be super-duper rich", or "I want to rule the ENTIRE world!" And what a crap job that would be! Does nobody ever think of that? No wonder terrible villains fail to conquer the planet, they are idiots. But to get a villain with depth - or at least the illusion of it - we need somebody who has another goal than just petty materialistic things or power over people. OH!! Watchmen!!! So that particular epiphany taught me that a good (meaning "halfway believable") "villain" never does anything "evil" for its own sake, but from their own perspective, the villain does what needs to be done, terrible as it may be, because it serves a higher purpose, whatever that may be. Although I wonder about Judge Holden, he was an awesome antagonist, but I think he would have considered "good" and "evil" irrelevant. Anton Chigurh, too. He is possibly the closest anyone has come to creating a character that is pure evil. Then again, neither of these two has depth.
lkrubner 9y ago
When I was a kid, one thing I loved about Japanese manga was that the bad guy was often somewhat admirable. I couldn't stand the USA tradition of exaggerated and simplistic evil bad guys. I couldn't stand the lack of nuance in 99% of anything produced by Disney. But Japanese manga often had antagonists who had purposes and motives that were at least understandable, and sometimes as morally justified as the protagonists. In the cartoon show Starblazers, the villain of the first season end most shows by sending compliments to the brave crew of the Argonaught, because their courage and cleverness allows them to continue forward despite all the odds. If I ever had children, I'd want to expose them to that kind sportsmanship, rather than the good-versus-evil attitude of most USA created children's shows.
bagacrap 9y ago
Why is it a bad thing if the moral is usually that goodness triumphs? Seems better than arbitrary person triumphs. Also, Macbeth is a story about one bad act dooming Lord and Lady Macbeth. So when is this shift meant to have taken place? In the Bible, the main guy goes around healing and feeding the sick and turning the other cheek. His life starts and ends with power hungry figures trying to kill him. Let's keep working backwards. Wasn't the Minotaur a pretty evil guy? Just sits there eating virgins until a hero selflessly, bravely, and cleverly manages to slay him. I'm not convinced.
- bornonline1 9y ago
  You see, your whole worldview is based on good vs bad. Not with true nature's of people. What's true is that we want to survive, we want cheap convenience , we want it our way. You delusion yourself and your friends with good and bad to justify horrible actions. True Honesty is more admirable even if you cause great harm, because we are just animals who have advanced tools.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  I think the point the author is trying to make is that there may be a connection between the "moral physics" (as she puts it) in modern folktales and the genocidal nature of war in the modern world. It seems like the intent of these stories is to nurture a sense of innate moral superiority in the audience, often for explicitly political purposes, as she mentions with the Robin Hood story. The protagonists in these stories never go to war except against people who are true villains and have no morals at all, so it's as if war draws a line between good and evil so clearly that it justifies wiping your enemies off of the face of the earth completely. If the point of telling a story is to create a shared experience like a football game, where the audience roots for a certain side to win, then yes, it's better for the "good guys" to win. But why is that the point of stories? If we look at ancient folktales, it becomes harder and harder to root for the good guys, if there even are any. If there is a moral battle, it's between two individuals, not an army of good and an army of evil, like in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. It's a pretty broad, sweeping claim to make, but I think she brought enough historical examples to make a strong case. We can't go back in time and ask the ancients themselves.

154 points by anacleto 9y ago

> Not only do people in ancient stories not switch sides in fights but Achilles, say, would never win because his army was composed of the rejects from the Trojans’. It's not in the Iliad, but in the Aeneid one of the Greeks pretends to desert in order to sell the story of the Trojan horse, and the Trojans do kindly accept him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinon (However, it turns out that that he was still really loyal to the Greeks and the Trojans made a mistake by believing him.)

hacknat 9y ago

I racked my brain in disagreement at first with her claim (I took a fair amount of ancient literature classes in college and continue to read ancient literature when I can), only to find I couldn’t come up with many examples that contradict her. In fact I even began to think on the Bible, the one document I’m sure we would all think of as being moralizing, but even it contains passages that don’t assume the good guy/bad guy trope: In the Joshua narrative (a part of the Bible that troubles a lot of people for its wholesale slaughter of ethnic groups) before they sack Jericho Joshua sees an angel and asks which side he is on, and the angel replies, “neither” (Joshua 5). Similarly in Deuteronomy the existence of other deities is presumed in some passsages, but they are meant for “other nations” (Deuteronomy 4). And my favorite example, God tries to kill Moses after he commissions him (Exodus 4:18). Here’s the thing though, when ethnicity and familial ties no longer are the thing binding a society together, the only thing left is ideology. If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology. Universalism is a powerful tool, it can create a society like the US, which has many faults and sins to be sure, but is the only society in history to elect a member of, what was very recently, a slave class to its highest political office. Universal also has its dark side in things like the fascisms of the early 20tj century. It seems like we might be migrating back (or around?) to a non-Universalist sentiment around the world in the current backlash against globalization. The impetus definitely has some nationalism and racism in it, but it feels different to me than a moralizing racism of the past that assumed racial superiority, and now seems to be rooted in a theory of primacy (it’s not that we’re better, but we come first, e.g. “America first”). It makes sense to me that we are migrating away from Universalism. Our collective psyche cannot fathom the indirect violence that we are all wreaking on each other right now (and the immense catastrophes we are all about to suffer).

lsd5you 9y ago
If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology Does this not seem coercive and borderline orwellian to you? We have to embrace narratives sounds an awful lot like 'accept things which are not true'. It is hardly any different to a religion in this sense. Abstract ethics class morality plays itself out in my opinion. It is a platonic ideal that can be used as a model for behaviour but not as some kind of absolute. It deconstructs ways of life and papers over real differences. It promises us a sterile world that noone actually wants to live in. We want progress, but we (in my opinion) manifestly don't want eventual the destination the 'end of history'. As such like the business cycle there may well be a morality cycle that we cannot banish. There is a similarity with technology. What if we as a society demand and enjoy change, but our actual happiness is reduced in the long term (you can imagine modeling this as happiness a function positive in progress - rate of change, but negative in the overal level of enlightenment - or whatever progress accumulates as).
- hacknat 9y ago
  I definitely didn’t mean that in a statist way, as in enforced morality. I just meant that societies that don’t use kinship bonds inevitably use something else to maintain cohesion in society, religion has been used, founding myths (American republicanism, etc), and now it seems there’s a backlash against it all. My only point was that maintaining social cohesion in a pluralist society is no mean feat. As a side note, short of making sure everyone gets a strong foundation in philosophy, I don’t see how you can maintain an agreed upon set of values in a pluralist society without some sort of myth. You call it “accepting things that aren’t true”, but myth goes beyond truth, IMO. Most values are untestable hypotheses, so they don’t really fall into a modern definition of knowledge or truth, at least as I learned them in my undergrad science courses. Humans are wired to think in narrative terms so inevitably the process of transmitting values across generations is going to generate some distracting cruft that is patently absurd, but that doesn’t mean the attempt at transmitting values is absurd.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago

natecavanaugh 9y ago

I have to disagree with the assumptions here that there are no ancient good guy/bad guy narratives. David vs Goliath. Samson and the Philistines. Jesus against Death in Revelation. And that's just the Bible. People's stories going through history follow all sorts of narratives, some that are hero/villain, some that are proverbial, some where some virtue is being exemplified by one or more people, and some evil exemplified by people or elemental forces and nature. There's nothing modern about it, it's just that you can make anything seem hazier or more opaque or you reduce it to a binary, depending on just how much you want to over analyze it.

badestrand 9y ago
I don't know the other stories well and Christianity is a big good-bad theme in itself with its hell and heaven but in David versus Goliath the giant never was the bad guy. He was just fighting for the other side and David killed him, that's it as far as I know.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  I think that's a fair point. But otherwise, David is very much a "good guy" in virtually all of his stories. King David's famous "Slice the baby in half, so that both 'mothers' can have half of it" is clearly a fight of good vs evil. The Evil mother doesn't care for the child, while the good mother cares deeply for the child. And that's how King David solved one child-custody problem... (not actually killing the baby, but by judging the reactions of the two 'mothers' to the potential act). ----------- The story of "Sodom and Gomorrah" is implicitly about evil. The town faces divine punishment because 10 good people couldn't be found. Its perhaps not "good guy vs bad guy", bit the concepts of "bad guy" are definitely explored.
  - hacknat 9y ago
    David wasn’t the king who proposed to slice the baby in half it was Solomon, and the whole point of that story is to illustrate how wise Solomon is not to belabor some point about an evil mother.

ccleve 9y ago

It's a fine essay, right up to this point: "The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one." What utter drivel. The moral face-off between good and evil is core to a great many religions, most notably Christianity. Concepts of right and wrong, and the clash between them, has formed the core of many strains of philosophical, religious, cultural and literary thought for 2,500 years, at least. Such thought, particularly Christian thought, has influenced the literature of Western Europe for many centuries. It's hard to find a writer who was not at least aware of God-vs-the-devil story lines. Sorry, professor, but western civilization has existed for much longer than you imagine. Not everything is political, ok?

taeric 9y ago
What are the "God versus the devil" storylines you are referencing? Seems most of those are much more modern in origin.
- sjsbsh 9y ago
  Well the temptations of Christ for one. The various demons Christ casts away. The Passion has references to the Evil Spirit entering Judas. The Nicean Creed mentions the harrowing of hell (can’t get more God vs. Devil than first asserting Christ is God. Then he dies and goes to Hell for our salvation. Then he arises from the dead to join the Father). And that’s sticking to material almost 100% of Christianity agrees on. If I’d limited myself to the Apostolic churches (Orthodox/Catholic) I could add from their rich history (they don’t agree w/ sola scritura)
- humanrebar 9y ago
  The temptation of Christ. Revelations. The Garden of Eden. Job. There are plenty of teachings about how demons are evil and dangerous as well. 1 and 2 Peter, for instance.
  - taeric 9y ago
    Garden of Eden? At no point is that good versus evil, is it? They disobey and are cast out. Job? Everything done to him is with God's will. If anything, this would sway the other way. Good literally willed the killing of his family, and he accepts that. More to the point, where are the bad guys? There is a general sense of good, but evil is less present than "not good."

dexwiz 9y ago

In a Song of Ice and Fire there are no good guys or bad guys. Each side has moral quandaries and a drive to survive. The only “Evil” characters are sadists, and there are quite a few. That is part of the reason the books are so engrossing. People have lamented the Game of Thrones show has gone down hill after passing the books. I argue that is because the narrative has shifted to a war against the White Walkers, a clearly malevolent force. Instead of a mutlifaceted story about amoral factions, it’s become Lord of the Rings. The story lost its spark and rejoined the common good versus evil narrative.

qznc 9y ago
Yes, there are plenty of gray characters in Game of Thrones, but has Jon Snow done anything evil? Has Ramsay done anything good? Afaik the show follows the general story line as planned by Martin.
- hacknat 9y ago
  One of my biggest beefs with the Game of Thrones “there are no bad guys” assertion is the Wights. Seems to me they are George Martins Orcs.
  - qznc 9y ago
    I do not consider the Wights (or zombies in general) as evil since they do not have a free will. They are more like a force of nature like a stampede or a forest fire. The will behind the Wights are the white walkers and if they are evil is still open.
akvadrako 9y ago
If the writers are any good, the white walkers will also turn out not to be clearly bad.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  They are kind of described as out-of-control biological weapons the Children of the Forest used against the First Men. So it's possible they are more like a weapon of mass destruction (zombie virus) unleashed for complex reasons (war, survival) and less like a people.

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dvt 9y ago

This article is embarrassingly wrong. In every single interpretation of the monomyth, we have a hero that strives to be victorious over some form of evil -- often times at great cost. But Ms. Nichols is being disingenuous by cherry-picking The Iliad (which is politically complex) -- why not Beowulf, or The Odyssey -- where we have very clear cases of antagonists and protagonists. Also, the argument that moral face-offs are "a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism" is so unequivocally wrong, if you said it, you'd be laughed out of an undergraduate English class. Morally relativist and historically revisionist BS.

hacknat 9y ago
In Beowulf the antagonist is a monster, she at least gives a corollary in the Arthur legendarium. Also, who is portrayed as being evil in the Odyssey? The only two examples I can think of are the suitors and Polyphemus, but the text refers to Odysseus being cunning against these foes rather than “morally justified”. Odysseus even plays the suitors game, because in that culture their behavior is justified. Honestly I think Odysseus is one of the most morally ambiguous characters in all of literature, he’s practically the first anti-hero, to use him as a counter example seems like a huge stretch to me.
- dvt 9y ago
  Wait, are you seriously saying that Grendel and his mother have no moral valence in the context of Beowulf? As far as the Odyssey is concerned, Athena (Odysseus' patroness and mentor) is literally the god of wisdom and justice. If that's not at least some indication that what he's doing is justified, I don't know what is.
  - hacknat 9y ago
    I think you’ve made a straw man of her argument. She didn’t claim there was no morality in the ancient world or no moral perspective in the folklore, just that there are no good guy/bad guy tropes. I have yet to see you give a textual example, at least in the Odyssey, that contradicts her.

tzs 9y ago

A few years ago I grabbed a free ebook of Grimm stories from Project Gutenberg for light bedtime reading. There are several there, based on different translations and containing different subsets of the stories. This one seems to be the most complete: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314 I was surprised by how many of the stories fell under one of these templates: • Main character in story is cruel and dishonest. This brings him wealth, power, love, and/or happiness. • Main character in story is victimized by someone cruel and dishonest. Responds by finding someone weak and/or stupid that he can victimize in order to boost his wealth or position back to what they were originally. It was very hard in most of the stories to find anyone who could be described as what we would call a "good guy".

maxerickson 9y ago
In the first tale the king is a minor character but seems to be a "good guy". The protagonist does do something nasty and go on to live happily ever after with the victim though.

mjw1007 9y ago

I think people telling stories like Star Wars choose to make the antagonists Capital-E-Evil because modern audiences are much less happy to root for people who are fighting a war if they aren't shown that the war is thoroughly justifiable. A few hundred years ago you could happily put a character in a saga and have them go off on viking raids and kill any number of people whose only crime is living near the coast, and still put them forward as morally admirable. Nowadays if you want to have your protagonists shooting at their enemies or hitting them with sharp bits of metal you basically have to choose between a good-vs-evil narrative or having only anti-heroes rather than plain heroes (and both choices are now common). So I think this bit is pretty much backwards: « Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. » What modern Good-vs-Evil narratives are collectively yelling at us is the idea that _only_ outright visible evil justifies making war.

taeric 9y ago
The interesting thing, to me, is that the original Star Wars stick out to me as not being pointedly good guy versus bad guy. There is villainy, but the main arch that sticks out is not Luke versus the villain, but Luke versus the way of the villain. He does not defeat the emperor and the "not Jedi." Instead, he finds the Jedi path and acts as an example that redeems his father. I'd go so far as to say he even rejected the jedi teachings in the original story. They were teaching that Vader had to be defeated by him. And that his attachment to his friends was a bad thing. He manages to win, despite not following the directions of his teachers. Yoda literally disappeared right after telling him he has to confront and defeat Vader. Something Luke throws away his saber while doing.
- kbenson 9y ago
  Are you perhaps forgetting the part in the first movie where they blow up a planet full of people as a demonstration? Luke's story arc may not focus on that exclusively, but it does focus on it some, and he's not the only major character. Each has their own arc, but the backdrop is always "let's overthrow these horrible evil people."

Animats 9y ago

This is an American filmic convention. Maybe it's a holdover from the Hays Code, which explicitly mandated a good guy/bad guy structure by regulation.[1] Japanese anime and Russian literature do not follow it. [1] https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPictureProductionCode.pdf https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPic...

skywhopper 9y ago

Darth Vader was not the one who wanted to blow up a planet. In fact, he dismissed the idea of such a weapon as futile and silly. The followup movies in the original trilogy added layers to the question of good and evil, and the most recent film in the series explicitly questioned the entire premise. So maybe opening with Star Wars is not the best example.

humanrebar 9y ago
> ...the most recent film in the series explicitly questioned the entire premise. Did it? The bad guys are still blowing up planets and murdering the people who love them.
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dnautics 9y ago

The increasing prevalence good guy bad guy dichotomy is probably driven by the conatraint of the shorter forms. There's a great videoessay on why star trek movies are awful (all of them except I and IV have a villain, and only II pulled it off well) while the series deep space nine pulled off an incredibly complex villain by virtue that they had 7 years to develop his story arc. Even Darth Vader, the example from the OP essay got complexity as the franchise spanned decades.

humanrebar 9y ago
Good point. Good TV, shows like Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, and Mad Men use their longer format to take their time and develop more complex characters.

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krylon 9y ago

Huh. Once upon a time, as a young boy, I had dreams of becoming a writer. A couple of years ago I actually started writing what might have become a novel. But I remember that back then, it changed the way I watched movies and TV programs. And I started having on an almost regular basis these epiphanies of things about writing that people can learn in college in the USA. I do not remember what movie, series, scene or character triggered that one, but the "biggest" one I got was that in real life, Good and Evil exist only as approximations. Asymptotically, if you will. (Almost) Nobody is purely good or evil. And even the people we consider evil, tend to see themselves as good. And they consider us evil. Sorry to pull a Godwin in the first round, but consider a prime example if ever there was one: Even Hitler did think of himself as basically good. He ordered unspeakable atrocities, but from his point of view, it all served the greater Good and was therefore justified. The question of how somebody could arrive at such a fucked up value system will probably never be answered to anyone's satisfaction. Or Captain Ahab. He has a twisted moral compass, but again, from his point of view, he is doing "the right thing"(tm). Or Major Weissmann, Dominus Blicero. And often enough it is just egotism, "I want to be super-duper rich", or "I want to rule the ENTIRE world!" And what a crap job that would be! Does nobody ever think of that? No wonder terrible villains fail to conquer the planet, they are idiots. But to get a villain with depth - or at least the illusion of it - we need somebody who has another goal than just petty materialistic things or power over people. OH!! Watchmen!!! So that particular epiphany taught me that a good (meaning "halfway believable") "villain" never does anything "evil" for its own sake, but from their own perspective, the villain does what needs to be done, terrible as it may be, because it serves a higher purpose, whatever that may be. Although I wonder about Judge Holden, he was an awesome antagonist, but I think he would have considered "good" and "evil" irrelevant. Anton Chigurh, too. He is possibly the closest anyone has come to creating a character that is pure evil. Then again, neither of these two has depth.

lkrubner 9y ago

When I was a kid, one thing I loved about Japanese manga was that the bad guy was often somewhat admirable. I couldn't stand the USA tradition of exaggerated and simplistic evil bad guys. I couldn't stand the lack of nuance in 99% of anything produced by Disney. But Japanese manga often had antagonists who had purposes and motives that were at least understandable, and sometimes as morally justified as the protagonists. In the cartoon show Starblazers, the villain of the first season end most shows by sending compliments to the brave crew of the Argonaught, because their courage and cleverness allows them to continue forward despite all the odds. If I ever had children, I'd want to expose them to that kind sportsmanship, rather than the good-versus-evil attitude of most USA created children's shows.

bagacrap 9y ago

Why is it a bad thing if the moral is usually that goodness triumphs? Seems better than arbitrary person triumphs. Also, Macbeth is a story about one bad act dooming Lord and Lady Macbeth. So when is this shift meant to have taken place? In the Bible, the main guy goes around healing and feeding the sick and turning the other cheek. His life starts and ends with power hungry figures trying to kill him. Let's keep working backwards. Wasn't the Minotaur a pretty evil guy? Just sits there eating virgins until a hero selflessly, bravely, and cleverly manages to slay him. I'm not convinced.

bornonline1 9y ago
You see, your whole worldview is based on good vs bad. Not with true nature's of people. What's true is that we want to survive, we want cheap convenience , we want it our way. You delusion yourself and your friends with good and bad to justify horrible actions. True Honesty is more admirable even if you cause great harm, because we are just animals who have advanced tools.
tboyd47 9y ago
I think the point the author is trying to make is that there may be a connection between the "moral physics" (as she puts it) in modern folktales and the genocidal nature of war in the modern world. It seems like the intent of these stories is to nurture a sense of innate moral superiority in the audience, often for explicitly political purposes, as she mentions with the Robin Hood story. The protagonists in these stories never go to war except against people who are true villains and have no morals at all, so it's as if war draws a line between good and evil so clearly that it justifies wiping your enemies off of the face of the earth completely. If the point of telling a story is to create a shared experience like a football game, where the audience roots for a certain side to win, then yes, it's better for the "good guys" to win. But why is that the point of stories? If we look at ancient folktales, it becomes harder and harder to root for the good guys, if there even are any. If there is a moral battle, it's between two individuals, not an army of good and an army of evil, like in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. It's a pretty broad, sweeping claim to make, but I think she brought enough historical examples to make a strong case. We can't go back in time and ask the ancients themselves.