We live in an age where people are supposedly loathe to morally judge others. Or maybe we live in an age where folks feel others shouldn't morally judge, but they themselves will have no problem with it. As a result, we are seeing stories that are more and more bland in terms of moral conflict, or go off on wild tangents and then say that anyone who judges them is a bad person. This is eating at the writing world.
Stories are supposed to be moral tales that provide a judgment on the state of the world, or at least the characters that inhabit it. Tales throughout history, from A Christmas Carol to The Three Musketeers to Harry Potter, all offer a clean moral judgment on what is going on. Readers see that there is a wrong happening, and they root for characters to figure it out and solve it. This is at the heart of the reading and storytelling experience.
It seems we've come into an age where writing a tale based on traditionally held moral values has become taboo. This is nonsense. These things are traditional precisely because they've stood the test of time. Loyalty, honesty, courage...these are things we see so rarely in the real world that we pay for people to tell us stories that include them. To me, the only reason to say that we shouldn't tell stories with moral components is because we're worried about our own morals, or about others saying our moral tales aren't up to snuff. This has got to stop.
Putting our work out there will get us judged. That's what happens in the public sphere, whether we want it to or not. It's a natural reaction when folks encounter something, and it really doesn't matter what that something is. As Jean Luc Picard once said, if we're going to be damned, then let's be damned for who we really are.
Stories are supposed to be moral tales that provide a judgment on the state of the world, or at least the characters that inhabit it. Tales throughout history, from A Christmas Carol to The Three Musketeers to Harry Potter, all offer a clean moral judgment on what is going on. Readers see that there is a wrong happening, and they root for characters to figure it out and solve it. This is at the heart of the reading and storytelling experience.
It seems we've come into an age where writing a tale based on traditionally held moral values has become taboo. This is nonsense. These things are traditional precisely because they've stood the test of time. Loyalty, honesty, courage...these are things we see so rarely in the real world that we pay for people to tell us stories that include them. To me, the only reason to say that we shouldn't tell stories with moral components is because we're worried about our own morals, or about others saying our moral tales aren't up to snuff. This has got to stop.
Putting our work out there will get us judged. That's what happens in the public sphere, whether we want it to or not. It's a natural reaction when folks encounter something, and it really doesn't matter what that something is. As Jean Luc Picard once said, if we're going to be damned, then let's be damned for who we really are.
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