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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

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."
  - taeric 9y ago
    How did what I say preclude that? There is a villain. But the story started to shine when it was about Luke's journey. Not a confrontation between him and a villain. Indeed, he loses his confrontations in the next two movies. Vader beats him, and then the emperor was killing him.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      The first movie ends with them blowing up the big bad superweapon. The trilogy ends with the death of the leader of the bad guys and blowing up their replacement superweapon. You may have identified with a particular characters arc and interpreted it in a specific way, but I think it's fairly clear the movie itself and the main story it tells (with multiple main characters) is clearly a good vs evil story.
      - taeric 9y ago
        Again, I didn't contradict that. I merely commented that the strength and interesting part of the story was elsewhere. Apologies if it read like I was denying the rest of the story. I do feel it would be stronger without those elements, but I do not deny they are there.
        kbenson 9y ago
        That's fair, it just sounded like you were entirely discounting the main story when describing what it is and not just your what you found interesting. Star wars is pretty in-your-face about this with the main plot though, so I wanted to know where you were coming from. :)
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Are you perhaps forgetting the part in the first movie where they blow up a planet full of people as a demonstration? Well, some country did nuke two cities full of people (which on Earth terms is the same as blowing up a planet). And they still can paint themselves as the good guys that did what they had to do to end the war (and save lives from traditional warfare/etc). Humans have lots of ways of justifying all kinds of bad shit.
- dmoy 9y ago
  On the other hand, the bad guys were murderous tyrannical dictators for whom any failure was one- or two-strike death penalty, hell bent on ruling the entire Galaxy by blowing up inhabited planets... and one of them only switched sides while literally watching his son being tortured to death. The other side had cute robots and spunky pro-democracy rebels. Even if Luke forgoes literal teaching, at basically no point does he do anything really morally reprehensible (except unwittingly taking a few steps towards incest).
  - leetcrew 9y ago
    > at basically no point does he do anything really morally reprehensible not explicitly, no, but just consider the scale of the two death stars and how many people must have been on board at the time of their destruction. we can assume that it was military personnel only on the first one and therefore "fair game", but hundreds of thousands if not millions of people still died by Luke's hand. the second death star had not yet finished construction at the time of the battle, so there were almost certainly construction workers still on board, and many of them may have been civilians. this time it was not directly Luke that killed them, but he seems to support his friends wholeheartedly in their plan. I'm not trying to argue that the rebellion is actually the evil side here, but when you look past the surface it is hardly black and white.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      None of that is presented though... people cheer, teddy bear aliens cheer, and have a fireworks display. The enemy is literally a mass of faceless clones in the sway of an evil wizard cough err, Jedi. The bad guys are twisted by the power they serve, to the point of physical decay. Heroes become force ghosts. You can think about the implications of anything, but it wasn’t in the narrative.
Mithaldu 9y ago
> 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). Or you need story-telling that capitalizes on information deficit differences. A good kind of story arc i've seen recently is having the protagonist do things in what looks like a basic good/evil conflict, then learn that the situation was different than it looked like (ranging from "the 'evil guys' were misguided but good-at-heart" to "protagonist was wrong and unwittingly fucking everything up"), then focus on how that aftermath is handled as the actual primary story. And depending on how much "screen time" you have available, you can also keep expanding this and go through various twists and turns and kinds of information deficits without ever having to delve into actual thought-less "they're good/evil" stuff as you zoom out in scope.
- krylon 9y ago
  > A good kind of story arc i've seen recently That sounds intruiging, indeed. May I ask for some example(s)?
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    I don't have very good memory, so sadly i can give only two examples. A shorter one is Little Witch Academia. A longer one (it'll take a month at least to get to the impactful parts) is the main story quest line of Final Fantasy 14. I think Steins;Gate also went in that direction, and out of these three would be the most HN-mainstream-compatible i expect.
    - krylon 9y ago
      Thank you! Blueberry, the movie, was very good in that department. At the end, the "good" guy does vanquish the "bad" guy (at least I think that is what happened), but it turns out that the "good" guy is far less pure good than the audience has been led to think, and likewise the "bad" guy might be ruthless, but he had an understandable reason to do what he did.
caseysoftware 9y ago
It's fun recasting Star Wars as a fight between a duly-elected government and a bunch of misfits led by a clueless teenager, a smuggler, and a "princess" with daddy issues who becomes an exotic dancer for a crime boss who she later murders. #empire4life
- waterhouse 9y ago
  Articles of this sort: http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2540 http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2540 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/the-destruction-of-alderaan-was-completely-justified/?utm_term=.39c9c45559f7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/t...
coldtea 9y ago
I think it's the inverse. Good-vs-evil narratives are not some progression, rather the inverse. Whereas ancient peoples and older eras saw war as a necessary evil in some cases, and could see the enemy as regular people that they just had to fight (even down to the Iliad, the most heroic figure, Hector, is on the enemy side), the Good-vs-Evil narrative doesn't come to prevent war (except in dire circumstances), but to refuse the enemy its humanity and justify total war. Good-vs-evil was used to justify the pillaging and goring of the colonial era, to the Nazi's extinction of the Jews, and so on. That's the route of modern diplomatic terminology ("axis of evil" and so on), and behind the dehumanizing of the enemy. And even civilian casualties don't matter much when you're fighting "evil" (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, modern Middle East, etc). Another such trick is to promote (with articles, movies, etc) the "inner conflict" of your side (how they fear they're fighting an unjust war, the pain they get from the killings they had to do, PTSI, etc), thus humanize them more into good guys, while still painting the other side as caricatures. This faux-critique of war is an excellent way to say "we might do bad, but we're ultimately the good guys, the ones who actually do question what we do".
- mjw1007 9y ago
  I think the main change over the last hundred years or so is that most people will no longer accept "we should go to war because war is in itself glorious and we will win", or "to be a warrior is the ideal way for a man to live a flourishing life." I agree entirely that if a country's leaders manage to persuade their people that they should go to war against their neighbour because they are Evil then the result is likely to be worse than if they just have a war because they think that marching an army in to take over a couple of counties is a legitimate thing to do. But nonetheless I think that getting the latter generally seen as illegitimate is Progress with a capital P.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    We've transferred the motivation from war to political strife. "I should hate other voters because they have it coming, history is on my side, and we will win!" Generally, there's less physical violence, so I guess it's an improvement on those merits. Assuming this doesn't end in Civil War II.
danmaz74 9y ago
In many ancient societies - and not few contemporary ones - tribalism was thoroughly accepted, as were tribal wars. I would say that having to justify the morality of a war, however many lies this brings about, is still a step forward.
watwut 9y ago
I think it is opposite. I read old tales (north european, German, French and easter european) and all had much less good-vs-evil-good-always-win kind of morality then contemporary one. Even three musketeers were transformed into good-vs-bad in our culture and they were not like that in original. They also tended to care waaay more about ordinary person whereas current interpretation treats non heroes non rules as cannon fodders.
cperciva 9y ago
I think the format matters. Old folk stories would be told by a village elder to a handful of children, and if the children had questions -- Why did he do that? Is he a bad person? -- the storyteller could provide the necessary explanation at the time. Modern folk stories are created in publishing houses and movie studios and broadcast to hundreds of millions, with no opportunity for the reader or watcher to ask the storyteller for elaboration. So the stories have to be clear from the start; if there's no way to resolve ambiguity, you need to avoid having it to begin with.

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."
- taeric 9y ago
  How did what I say preclude that? There is a villain. But the story started to shine when it was about Luke's journey. Not a confrontation between him and a villain. Indeed, he loses his confrontations in the next two movies. Vader beats him, and then the emperor was killing him.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    The first movie ends with them blowing up the big bad superweapon. The trilogy ends with the death of the leader of the bad guys and blowing up their replacement superweapon. You may have identified with a particular characters arc and interpreted it in a specific way, but I think it's fairly clear the movie itself and the main story it tells (with multiple main characters) is clearly a good vs evil story.
    - taeric 9y ago
      Again, I didn't contradict that. I merely commented that the strength and interesting part of the story was elsewhere. Apologies if it read like I was denying the rest of the story. I do feel it would be stronger without those elements, but I do not deny they are there.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        That's fair, it just sounded like you were entirely discounting the main story when describing what it is and not just your what you found interesting. Star wars is pretty in-your-face about this with the main plot though, so I wanted to know where you were coming from. :)
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Are you perhaps forgetting the part in the first movie where they blow up a planet full of people as a demonstration? Well, some country did nuke two cities full of people (which on Earth terms is the same as blowing up a planet). And they still can paint themselves as the good guys that did what they had to do to end the war (and save lives from traditional warfare/etc). Humans have lots of ways of justifying all kinds of bad shit.
dmoy 9y ago
On the other hand, the bad guys were murderous tyrannical dictators for whom any failure was one- or two-strike death penalty, hell bent on ruling the entire Galaxy by blowing up inhabited planets... and one of them only switched sides while literally watching his son being tortured to death. The other side had cute robots and spunky pro-democracy rebels. Even if Luke forgoes literal teaching, at basically no point does he do anything really morally reprehensible (except unwittingly taking a few steps towards incest).
- leetcrew 9y ago
  > at basically no point does he do anything really morally reprehensible not explicitly, no, but just consider the scale of the two death stars and how many people must have been on board at the time of their destruction. we can assume that it was military personnel only on the first one and therefore "fair game", but hundreds of thousands if not millions of people still died by Luke's hand. the second death star had not yet finished construction at the time of the battle, so there were almost certainly construction workers still on board, and many of them may have been civilians. this time it was not directly Luke that killed them, but he seems to support his friends wholeheartedly in their plan. I'm not trying to argue that the rebellion is actually the evil side here, but when you look past the surface it is hardly black and white.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    None of that is presented though... people cheer, teddy bear aliens cheer, and have a fireworks display. The enemy is literally a mass of faceless clones in the sway of an evil wizard cough err, Jedi. The bad guys are twisted by the power they serve, to the point of physical decay. Heroes become force ghosts. You can think about the implications of anything, but it wasn’t in the narrative.

Mithaldu 9y ago

> 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). Or you need story-telling that capitalizes on information deficit differences. A good kind of story arc i've seen recently is having the protagonist do things in what looks like a basic good/evil conflict, then learn that the situation was different than it looked like (ranging from "the 'evil guys' were misguided but good-at-heart" to "protagonist was wrong and unwittingly fucking everything up"), then focus on how that aftermath is handled as the actual primary story. And depending on how much "screen time" you have available, you can also keep expanding this and go through various twists and turns and kinds of information deficits without ever having to delve into actual thought-less "they're good/evil" stuff as you zoom out in scope.

krylon 9y ago
> A good kind of story arc i've seen recently That sounds intruiging, indeed. May I ask for some example(s)?
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  I don't have very good memory, so sadly i can give only two examples. A shorter one is Little Witch Academia. A longer one (it'll take a month at least to get to the impactful parts) is the main story quest line of Final Fantasy 14. I think Steins;Gate also went in that direction, and out of these three would be the most HN-mainstream-compatible i expect.
  - krylon 9y ago
    Thank you! Blueberry, the movie, was very good in that department. At the end, the "good" guy does vanquish the "bad" guy (at least I think that is what happened), but it turns out that the "good" guy is far less pure good than the audience has been led to think, and likewise the "bad" guy might be ruthless, but he had an understandable reason to do what he did.

caseysoftware 9y ago

It's fun recasting Star Wars as a fight between a duly-elected government and a bunch of misfits led by a clueless teenager, a smuggler, and a "princess" with daddy issues who becomes an exotic dancer for a crime boss who she later murders. #empire4life

waterhouse 9y ago
Articles of this sort: http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2540 http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2540 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/the-destruction-of-alderaan-was-completely-justified/?utm_term=.39c9c45559f7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/t...

coldtea 9y ago

I think it's the inverse. Good-vs-evil narratives are not some progression, rather the inverse. Whereas ancient peoples and older eras saw war as a necessary evil in some cases, and could see the enemy as regular people that they just had to fight (even down to the Iliad, the most heroic figure, Hector, is on the enemy side), the Good-vs-Evil narrative doesn't come to prevent war (except in dire circumstances), but to refuse the enemy its humanity and justify total war. Good-vs-evil was used to justify the pillaging and goring of the colonial era, to the Nazi's extinction of the Jews, and so on. That's the route of modern diplomatic terminology ("axis of evil" and so on), and behind the dehumanizing of the enemy. And even civilian casualties don't matter much when you're fighting "evil" (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, modern Middle East, etc). Another such trick is to promote (with articles, movies, etc) the "inner conflict" of your side (how they fear they're fighting an unjust war, the pain they get from the killings they had to do, PTSI, etc), thus humanize them more into good guys, while still painting the other side as caricatures. This faux-critique of war is an excellent way to say "we might do bad, but we're ultimately the good guys, the ones who actually do question what we do".

mjw1007 9y ago
I think the main change over the last hundred years or so is that most people will no longer accept "we should go to war because war is in itself glorious and we will win", or "to be a warrior is the ideal way for a man to live a flourishing life." I agree entirely that if a country's leaders manage to persuade their people that they should go to war against their neighbour because they are Evil then the result is likely to be worse than if they just have a war because they think that marching an army in to take over a couple of counties is a legitimate thing to do. But nonetheless I think that getting the latter generally seen as illegitimate is Progress with a capital P.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  We've transferred the motivation from war to political strife. "I should hate other voters because they have it coming, history is on my side, and we will win!" Generally, there's less physical violence, so I guess it's an improvement on those merits. Assuming this doesn't end in Civil War II.

danmaz74 9y ago

In many ancient societies - and not few contemporary ones - tribalism was thoroughly accepted, as were tribal wars. I would say that having to justify the morality of a war, however many lies this brings about, is still a step forward.

watwut 9y ago

I think it is opposite. I read old tales (north european, German, French and easter european) and all had much less good-vs-evil-good-always-win kind of morality then contemporary one. Even three musketeers were transformed into good-vs-bad in our culture and they were not like that in original. They also tended to care waaay more about ordinary person whereas current interpretation treats non heroes non rules as cannon fodders.

cperciva 9y ago

I think the format matters. Old folk stories would be told by a village elder to a handful of children, and if the children had questions -- Why did he do that? Is he a bad person? -- the storyteller could provide the necessary explanation at the time. Modern folk stories are created in publishing houses and movie studios and broadcast to hundreds of millions, with no opportunity for the reader or watcher to ask the storyteller for elaboration. So the stories have to be clear from the start; if there's no way to resolve ambiguity, you need to avoid having it to begin with.