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kaigouBeen contemplating some of the books I've read over the past year (okay, while reshelving books was pondering which to keep and reread down the road, and which to ditch). I've realized there's more than a trend -- maybe strong enough to be a consistent pattern? -- in which books entertain me repeatedly.
Lots of bad guys. Lots and lots of bad guys.
I don't mean simply "legions of bad guys arrayed against us," either. There's a fair number of urban fantasy works (and traditional fantasy, for that matter) in which the bad guys are made that much stronger than the hero and that much harder to overcome... solely through sheer numbers. Or, a variation on that theme, all the bad guys seem to be coming from disparate corners and then, eventually, the author/protag pulls back the curtain to find the one guy who's jerking everyone's strings. Knock him down, and they all fall down.
Not exactly what I meant, and although most of those stories are ones I've finished for other reasons (that is, that the bad guy issue hasn't been enough to stop me dead in the water), they're hardly satisfactory in the sense of being, uh, meaty. The individual bad guys may be, well, individual but on a motivational level -- where it really matters to me (and often where I assess personality regardless of what the author tells me) -- they're all the same. They're all in cahoots. They're all cohorts in crime, and the same crime.
I suppose you can achieve this by having characters -- good side or bad side -- who are predominantly morally ambiguous. Except on some level I think that's a cop-out, to show us 'good sides' of a 'bad guy' (or vice versa) as though this will muddy the waters in terms of who's really the antagonist. If, as a reader, you set aside all the scenes in which the author's sole purpose was (in hindsight) really just to confuse you a tiny bit about who's really Good and who's really Bad, what are you left with, and how many opposing motivations do you have on the table? Just one? Then effectively the story only has one bad guy.
Or maybe I should say: a story in which the major obstacle for the protagonist can, at some point, be considered as encapsulated or personified completely by a single character... is a story with too few bad guys.
This is actually one of the reasons (among many) that I adore Raymond Chandler. Reading his works makes me think of the old line from Pogo: "You may not be guilty of this crime, but you are definitely not innocent." In Chandler's stories, every single person walking across the stage is a Bad Guy on some level, because all have motivations that work as obstacles to the protagonist -- even when their short-term motivation, immediate goals, are best served by working with the protagonist. At no point does Marlowe (Chandler's main protagonist) forget that every person is potentially suspect, although I could hardly expect fantasy-genre characters not working within a mystery framework to go around suspecting everyone... it's still a good thing to remember from an author's point of view.
That is, when the author approaches a scene with the point-of-view character as having clear and beneficial motivations -- and I specify beneficial because even Bad Guys are going to see their actions as beneficial, even if their parameters are limited to personal benefit (instead of, say, "save the world" benefit)... All other characters, if treated as obstacles, become bad guys albeit however temporary (even for just the duration of one scene). There are no true and absolute allies, because even one's allies do have their own goals, and therefore in turn -- following from the premise -- there can be no true and absolute enemy as a multi-headed but one-goal creature. That is, even when Bad Guy is talking to other Bad Guys, they're all reflecting the tension of potential (or even kinetic) obstacles.
Perhaps this is why I don't mind (and actually prefer) stories in which it's "two unlikely people have to form a partnership" but only if the actual "unlikely" element is carried through the story. I mean, sure, we've all read stories (think hard and I'm sure you'll come up with a title or two) in which two protagonists are supposed to be at loggerheads. Maybe they quibble, maybe they argue about results, but looking over the titles sitting on my shelves, very few such 'unlikely partnerships' really have loggerheads where it counts: the final goal (or alternately, agreement on how best to reach that goal). Compromise is one thing, but I'm talking about the superficial disagreement that's supposed to stand in for actual, honest, character-based motivational differences.
It's sort of like reading a book that seems like a fast-paced story until you realize the cross-character conflict on the Good Side really amounts to arguing over whether Makita blue is blue or turquoise. It's a conflict that doesn't affect, at all, how well the drill works; it's quasi-conflict standing in for conflict. Then again, maybe those authors are just worried that allowing such conflict between allies would run several risks. One, an ally being too much of an obstacle (for whatever damn good reason) could swing the ally over to the Bad Guy camp solely from the number of obstacles the character's presented. Two, if you have two characters boneheaded and stubborn enough to be unable to come together in some manner, some authors would rather dance around a potentially juicy conflict (it seems to me) and avoid/evade the point where at least one of the characters has to fish or cut bait.
Especially in traditional fantasy where there's often a 'group' or 'merry band' element, the idea of allies up and saying, "this sucks, you're going about this all wrong, my ethics won't let me continue like this," blah blah blah... That's when the character must either follow-through and walk out that door, or stand down (and risk losing reader respect for drawing a line in the sand and then washing it away). So rather than face that, some authors appear to stick to superficial differences and ignore the underlying motivations or principles.
[Hell, where are the stories in which two characters who are not apparent obstacles to each other -- who in fact get along just great, thanks -- are still fundamentally opposed in terms of their motivations? What about that? What kind of tension does it create when the otherwise goodness of a relationship might make a character reluctant to walk away despite the overwhelming existence of a radical difference in goals and methods?]
I say 'morally ambiguous' is a cop-out but I mean in the sense of it being a tool in an author's arsenal. It seems pretty rare, frankly, to find an author with the chutzpah (or simple gut-honesty) to recognize that none of us are ambiguous in a moral sense as we think of ourselves. If you think of your moral standing, be it upright or lying down, you'll probably find that you've got a solid sense of what's right and wrong, even if you find that this sense is diametrically opposed to those around you. That doesn't change the fact that for you, there is no ambiguity. That's what I meant by 'clear' along with 'beneficial' in the sense of a character's motivations and the resulting appearance of obstructing.
Most of what authors (if you read the implications in the narrative, I mean, because it's not like I have that many chances to collar authors and say, HEY WHAT YOU MEAN, so the text is the pure limit) seem to think are 'morally ambiguous' moments are really just the author attempting to cast either suspicion of a character's true Goodness, or create uncertainty as to a character's pure Badness. I'd argue that instead, while letting we readers proclaim happily that we like these so-called 'morally ambiguous' characters, it would serve some (if not many) authors better to stop thinking of the characters as morally ambiguous in and of themselves. Err, how to say... well, bluntly: see the characters as unambiguous per the concept that 'all characters/people act based on assumptions and expectations that certain actions will prove to be beneficial'.
Which is to say: all the little minions and peons of a Bad Guy are not necessarily -- in real life, or in fiction -- going to wholeheartedly go along with the Big Bad except as it proves to be beneficial to the individual. Yeah, so an author doesn't have to tell me that Henchman #5 is only doing this because the money is desperately needed for pay for his daughter's expensive physical therapy, or that Minion #7 is convinced that he'll get a house and a new car out of the deal. But if the author knows why each and every bad guy is, well, bad -- okay, why each and every obstacle is obstructing the protagonist -- then the narrative won't have that sly, too-self-aware, pointedness of an author who hopes you get "postmodern moral ambiguity and other such heavy kinda stuff" out of "bad guy who stops to rescue kitten from tree."
For that matter, knowing that a character is not ambiguous would, like in Chandler's novels, allow the reader the delicious sense of an unreliable narrator. So the protagonist sees the bad guy rescuing a kitten, and concludes anyone who cares for animals isn't all bad (whatever the definition of 'bad' may be), but if the author is aware the bad guy is doing it only to gain something for himself, then this will show in the narrative. Maybe the bad guy is hoping to impress a young child who happens to be the Big Boss' youngest son, and thus gain points with the family -- again, benefit to himself, and cripes, 'beneficial to the character on a personal level' is not an immoral course, nor does it mean a selfish or cold character or person.
Even those who choose to perform acts A and B of random kindness are, in some way, doing so because of a specific, if inarticulate or unstudied, desire towards a beneficial result. It could be that rescuing kittens makes a person feel good about him/herself -- that's still a personal benefit: to feel good. It could be that the character's religion says "protect all helpless creatures," and the character's personal benefit then is gaining one more point towards cashing in on eternal bliss after death. Is that selfish, to determine that getting involved or committing to an action or choosing a path based on what one gains? I don't think so. I think it's just the way humans work, and far worse a crime than being selfish (IMO) is being dishonest with one's self... and if there's any situation where a god-like being should, perhaps even must, recognize just-being-human behaviors as fundamentally neutral, it's for an author with his/her characters.
I guess I could sum up that paragraph by saying: an author doesn't need to tell me someone is morally ambiguous. Yeah, there's show, and there's tell, but beyond that, how an author feels about a character comes out in the narrative, in the descriptions, in the dialogue, in the conflicts allowed to that character and the obstacles presented. If an author sees all characters as neutral, I guess that's when I get to decide for myself, as a reader, which character's self-benefit behaviors most closely match my own (and this may even be part of the impetus for some of us, sometimes, finding we empathize more with an author-labeled Bad Guy than we do with the alleged Good Guy).
Oh, and one last thing I just thought about thanks to seeing one of the titles on the shelf (not saying which, so consider for yourself if you've read a similar setup): even those characters whose actions are purposefully self-destructive are, on some basic level, choosing those actions because the results are beneficial to the character in some way. Maybe I should clarify that I don't mean 'beneficial' in the purely "it's good for me!" sense so much as the simpler "it gets me what I want" sense. A character who drinks himself into a stupor every night is doing so because -- just like for real-world persons -- there is, somewhere in there, a beneficial result from the action. Maybe it's the reassurance that the person remains as screwed-up as he's always been, or maybe it's the benefit of turning off one's awareness and/or conscience for a short period of time, or maybe it's the benefit of using the screw-up as a reason to go around begging at the girlfriend's for cash, time, attention. The author who portrays the kid slicing up his wrist as -- and within the kid's point-of-view, at that! -- negative, destructive, or unattractive is an author who's ignoring that for the character, this action is hardly ambiguous and in fact does contain some kind of benefit, however dubious in long-term value.
There is no such thing as a free lunch; there is no such thing as an action performed without expectation of a result. It's just that some expected results (and the attendant standards of what constitutes 'a good thing') are different from the reader's -- and an author who judges the character as 'morally ambiguous', and further hints at this in the story's unraveling -- is an author who prefers cardboard over flesh and bone.
Enough for now. Must sleep. In the meantime, thoughts? (Or are you all still pondering how to get a full-grown man into the trunk of a Gremlin?)
Lots of bad guys. Lots and lots of bad guys.
I don't mean simply "legions of bad guys arrayed against us," either. There's a fair number of urban fantasy works (and traditional fantasy, for that matter) in which the bad guys are made that much stronger than the hero and that much harder to overcome... solely through sheer numbers. Or, a variation on that theme, all the bad guys seem to be coming from disparate corners and then, eventually, the author/protag pulls back the curtain to find the one guy who's jerking everyone's strings. Knock him down, and they all fall down.
Not exactly what I meant, and although most of those stories are ones I've finished for other reasons (that is, that the bad guy issue hasn't been enough to stop me dead in the water), they're hardly satisfactory in the sense of being, uh, meaty. The individual bad guys may be, well, individual but on a motivational level -- where it really matters to me (and often where I assess personality regardless of what the author tells me) -- they're all the same. They're all in cahoots. They're all cohorts in crime, and the same crime.
I suppose you can achieve this by having characters -- good side or bad side -- who are predominantly morally ambiguous. Except on some level I think that's a cop-out, to show us 'good sides' of a 'bad guy' (or vice versa) as though this will muddy the waters in terms of who's really the antagonist. If, as a reader, you set aside all the scenes in which the author's sole purpose was (in hindsight) really just to confuse you a tiny bit about who's really Good and who's really Bad, what are you left with, and how many opposing motivations do you have on the table? Just one? Then effectively the story only has one bad guy.
Or maybe I should say: a story in which the major obstacle for the protagonist can, at some point, be considered as encapsulated or personified completely by a single character... is a story with too few bad guys.
This is actually one of the reasons (among many) that I adore Raymond Chandler. Reading his works makes me think of the old line from Pogo: "You may not be guilty of this crime, but you are definitely not innocent." In Chandler's stories, every single person walking across the stage is a Bad Guy on some level, because all have motivations that work as obstacles to the protagonist -- even when their short-term motivation, immediate goals, are best served by working with the protagonist. At no point does Marlowe (Chandler's main protagonist) forget that every person is potentially suspect, although I could hardly expect fantasy-genre characters not working within a mystery framework to go around suspecting everyone... it's still a good thing to remember from an author's point of view.
That is, when the author approaches a scene with the point-of-view character as having clear and beneficial motivations -- and I specify beneficial because even Bad Guys are going to see their actions as beneficial, even if their parameters are limited to personal benefit (instead of, say, "save the world" benefit)... All other characters, if treated as obstacles, become bad guys albeit however temporary (even for just the duration of one scene). There are no true and absolute allies, because even one's allies do have their own goals, and therefore in turn -- following from the premise -- there can be no true and absolute enemy as a multi-headed but one-goal creature. That is, even when Bad Guy is talking to other Bad Guys, they're all reflecting the tension of potential (or even kinetic) obstacles.
Perhaps this is why I don't mind (and actually prefer) stories in which it's "two unlikely people have to form a partnership" but only if the actual "unlikely" element is carried through the story. I mean, sure, we've all read stories (think hard and I'm sure you'll come up with a title or two) in which two protagonists are supposed to be at loggerheads. Maybe they quibble, maybe they argue about results, but looking over the titles sitting on my shelves, very few such 'unlikely partnerships' really have loggerheads where it counts: the final goal (or alternately, agreement on how best to reach that goal). Compromise is one thing, but I'm talking about the superficial disagreement that's supposed to stand in for actual, honest, character-based motivational differences.
It's sort of like reading a book that seems like a fast-paced story until you realize the cross-character conflict on the Good Side really amounts to arguing over whether Makita blue is blue or turquoise. It's a conflict that doesn't affect, at all, how well the drill works; it's quasi-conflict standing in for conflict. Then again, maybe those authors are just worried that allowing such conflict between allies would run several risks. One, an ally being too much of an obstacle (for whatever damn good reason) could swing the ally over to the Bad Guy camp solely from the number of obstacles the character's presented. Two, if you have two characters boneheaded and stubborn enough to be unable to come together in some manner, some authors would rather dance around a potentially juicy conflict (it seems to me) and avoid/evade the point where at least one of the characters has to fish or cut bait.
Especially in traditional fantasy where there's often a 'group' or 'merry band' element, the idea of allies up and saying, "this sucks, you're going about this all wrong, my ethics won't let me continue like this," blah blah blah... That's when the character must either follow-through and walk out that door, or stand down (and risk losing reader respect for drawing a line in the sand and then washing it away). So rather than face that, some authors appear to stick to superficial differences and ignore the underlying motivations or principles.
[Hell, where are the stories in which two characters who are not apparent obstacles to each other -- who in fact get along just great, thanks -- are still fundamentally opposed in terms of their motivations? What about that? What kind of tension does it create when the otherwise goodness of a relationship might make a character reluctant to walk away despite the overwhelming existence of a radical difference in goals and methods?]
I say 'morally ambiguous' is a cop-out but I mean in the sense of it being a tool in an author's arsenal. It seems pretty rare, frankly, to find an author with the chutzpah (or simple gut-honesty) to recognize that none of us are ambiguous in a moral sense as we think of ourselves. If you think of your moral standing, be it upright or lying down, you'll probably find that you've got a solid sense of what's right and wrong, even if you find that this sense is diametrically opposed to those around you. That doesn't change the fact that for you, there is no ambiguity. That's what I meant by 'clear' along with 'beneficial' in the sense of a character's motivations and the resulting appearance of obstructing.
Most of what authors (if you read the implications in the narrative, I mean, because it's not like I have that many chances to collar authors and say, HEY WHAT YOU MEAN, so the text is the pure limit) seem to think are 'morally ambiguous' moments are really just the author attempting to cast either suspicion of a character's true Goodness, or create uncertainty as to a character's pure Badness. I'd argue that instead, while letting we readers proclaim happily that we like these so-called 'morally ambiguous' characters, it would serve some (if not many) authors better to stop thinking of the characters as morally ambiguous in and of themselves. Err, how to say... well, bluntly: see the characters as unambiguous per the concept that 'all characters/people act based on assumptions and expectations that certain actions will prove to be beneficial'.
Which is to say: all the little minions and peons of a Bad Guy are not necessarily -- in real life, or in fiction -- going to wholeheartedly go along with the Big Bad except as it proves to be beneficial to the individual. Yeah, so an author doesn't have to tell me that Henchman #5 is only doing this because the money is desperately needed for pay for his daughter's expensive physical therapy, or that Minion #7 is convinced that he'll get a house and a new car out of the deal. But if the author knows why each and every bad guy is, well, bad -- okay, why each and every obstacle is obstructing the protagonist -- then the narrative won't have that sly, too-self-aware, pointedness of an author who hopes you get "postmodern moral ambiguity and other such heavy kinda stuff" out of "bad guy who stops to rescue kitten from tree."
For that matter, knowing that a character is not ambiguous would, like in Chandler's novels, allow the reader the delicious sense of an unreliable narrator. So the protagonist sees the bad guy rescuing a kitten, and concludes anyone who cares for animals isn't all bad (whatever the definition of 'bad' may be), but if the author is aware the bad guy is doing it only to gain something for himself, then this will show in the narrative. Maybe the bad guy is hoping to impress a young child who happens to be the Big Boss' youngest son, and thus gain points with the family -- again, benefit to himself, and cripes, 'beneficial to the character on a personal level' is not an immoral course, nor does it mean a selfish or cold character or person.
Even those who choose to perform acts A and B of random kindness are, in some way, doing so because of a specific, if inarticulate or unstudied, desire towards a beneficial result. It could be that rescuing kittens makes a person feel good about him/herself -- that's still a personal benefit: to feel good. It could be that the character's religion says "protect all helpless creatures," and the character's personal benefit then is gaining one more point towards cashing in on eternal bliss after death. Is that selfish, to determine that getting involved or committing to an action or choosing a path based on what one gains? I don't think so. I think it's just the way humans work, and far worse a crime than being selfish (IMO) is being dishonest with one's self... and if there's any situation where a god-like being should, perhaps even must, recognize just-being-human behaviors as fundamentally neutral, it's for an author with his/her characters.
I guess I could sum up that paragraph by saying: an author doesn't need to tell me someone is morally ambiguous. Yeah, there's show, and there's tell, but beyond that, how an author feels about a character comes out in the narrative, in the descriptions, in the dialogue, in the conflicts allowed to that character and the obstacles presented. If an author sees all characters as neutral, I guess that's when I get to decide for myself, as a reader, which character's self-benefit behaviors most closely match my own (and this may even be part of the impetus for some of us, sometimes, finding we empathize more with an author-labeled Bad Guy than we do with the alleged Good Guy).
Oh, and one last thing I just thought about thanks to seeing one of the titles on the shelf (not saying which, so consider for yourself if you've read a similar setup): even those characters whose actions are purposefully self-destructive are, on some basic level, choosing those actions because the results are beneficial to the character in some way. Maybe I should clarify that I don't mean 'beneficial' in the purely "it's good for me!" sense so much as the simpler "it gets me what I want" sense. A character who drinks himself into a stupor every night is doing so because -- just like for real-world persons -- there is, somewhere in there, a beneficial result from the action. Maybe it's the reassurance that the person remains as screwed-up as he's always been, or maybe it's the benefit of turning off one's awareness and/or conscience for a short period of time, or maybe it's the benefit of using the screw-up as a reason to go around begging at the girlfriend's for cash, time, attention. The author who portrays the kid slicing up his wrist as -- and within the kid's point-of-view, at that! -- negative, destructive, or unattractive is an author who's ignoring that for the character, this action is hardly ambiguous and in fact does contain some kind of benefit, however dubious in long-term value.
There is no such thing as a free lunch; there is no such thing as an action performed without expectation of a result. It's just that some expected results (and the attendant standards of what constitutes 'a good thing') are different from the reader's -- and an author who judges the character as 'morally ambiguous', and further hints at this in the story's unraveling -- is an author who prefers cardboard over flesh and bone.
Enough for now. Must sleep. In the meantime, thoughts? (Or are you all still pondering how to get a full-grown man into the trunk of a Gremlin?)