Unread postby Jolly Joker » 23 Apr 2007, 08:31
Well, Zam, more of an open letter you wrote there, and rather theatralical in my opinion, but that's your style, I suppose.
While it is very personal I'm not going to answer the personal part here. Above all else this is certainly not the place for it.
So without further comment on narrowness of mind or anything else, let's keep it simple. The Bible. Adam and Eve. Good and Evil makes sense only if they had a true coice. Otherwise they were simply not responsible for their doings. Paradise was a grey location - as long as the first choice between black and white metarialized. Then and only then good and evil came across - and the authors of the Bible decided to let them pick what they defined as black.
The people you mention, Ghandi, MLK, they had a choice which makes them what they are: remarkable (and whiter than grey).
The worst contribution of fantasy was the introduction of subhuman (evil)races. Normal Spinrad wrote his Satire The Iron Dream about it, and we all know what the idea of subhuman races has led to in the course of the human history.
People like to be evil an outside force. The Devil is much more easily to comprehend and to deal with as the idea, that good and evil may actually be two sides of the same coin within each human. Whatever the situation, though, all stories see individuals in situations where they have to make decisions. Nowadays the heroes regularly face a lot more than Jesus: the Devil in human (or other) disguises as an adversary and the Cross as a fate looming on the horizon, and somehow they manage to not only get the Devil killed somehow (and beat the devil for good), they manage to evade the Cross as well. Not much room is given to any doubts or to believable motivations, neither on the good nor on the bad side. How different and old-fashioned sound plots where people start out with simple noble purposes written on their flags like defeating some sickness for good and then somehow get lost underway going too far with their means and becoming as evil as the thing they set out to defeat - which is a common theme in more martial conflict situations as well.
Anyway, this is not the place to analyze such things either.
I repeat that good and evil makes sense only if there's a choice. Additionally the choice must be an informed one - even the law concedes that: if a perpetrator can proof that he had no grasp of wrong and right in any given situation he won't be punished in the normals sense.
Add to this the fact that it is rather difficult to come up with definitions of good and evil that will hold true always, in all situations and for all races, and you face a rather complex issue - it's the purpose of a good story to exemplify this, not to simplify it so much so that every connection to reality gets lost somewhere along the way.
In Heroes it's the heroes that represent all this, not the creatures (this was always so) - THEY make all the difference. The races are just that - I mean the undead didn't ask to be so, didn't they? They are not evil, they were created so by magic. The others can be used any which way, and it depends on the heroes (and the map makers) to create good and evil in their stories. The environment allows both. Again, this was always so.
Now I take it that's all nice and well with you, but couldn't they have made an all-nice LOOKING race then with beneficially named and looking creatures to identify with as the "good side"? Inquisitors, War Dancers, evil looking Treants, revenge as a racial, the Rakshasas are not the most benevolent looking creatures either, nor are the Djinns. After all the Demons are some outside source of evil as well, aren't they?
Of course they could have... it wouldn't have changed anything about the facts, though. You could still have had evil Sylvans, Knights and Wizards and noble Dark Elves, even Necromancers, albeit probably not good Demon Lords in any real sense.
They could have, but they didn't. They opted to do what they did and plunge into the darker look a la Warhammer which doesn't offer much in terms of good as well, only pure evil and the fight for survival against it. You may NOT like it, others do, but what *I* really don't like is this lamenting attitude of how much "better" things could have been if they only had done this or that. Apart of the fact that this is what you claim only, it's something highly subjective and, lastly, when it comes to it, irrelevant. If a writer lets one of his or her characters die, readers may be upset, and write lots of angry mails to the autor, but it's his or her story, not theirs. The writer can do it and that's it.
:p[/quote]
So to get back on the flashback thing - no, I admit my deja vu was not linked to that thread. 
