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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8027757" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Missing the point.Maybe Mercurius will defend his view himself, but he is not putting any kind of nuance in his statement. If it is a fictional story, you cannot judge anything in it by real world morality. That is the end of his sentence usually. We cannot judge it. I'd also like to point out the bolded section, can you point me to a good version of child abuse? Honestly curious because in my mind, you aren't a good person if you abuse a child, by default that is an evil action.And that gets right back into the problem Mercurius's point has. Let us say that you write a hero, a paladin just for giggles. Great guy, pillar of his community, helps old ladies cross the street. Then, after we've followed him around seeing how great he is, a dirty streetkid comes up to beg for some coin. And the guy beats the kid, viciously, teeth go flying. In public. An no one bats an eye. Doesn't that disconnect say something about the world being presented? Isn't that dissonance meaningful to the story being told? But, if I can't bring real-world morality in to judge those actions, then I can saying nothing bad about this paladin. My real world ethics do not apply. I can't say that the story is about child abuse, I can't say that it is about mistreatment of the poor, or how those in power threaten and use that power to make others view them as good. I can say nothing about any of that. To talk about the italicized part, that is never what I have been saying. No one is saying that the depiction of an immoral act makes the material itself immmoral. The depiction of an immoral act, framed and presented to us as a moral action, makes the material immoral. If the author of that paladin story wanted us to come away thinking that the poor should be beaten into submission as is the right of the world, then he would have written a material that is immoral. So, again, it isn't that there is evil in the world, or that evil is simplistic that I have been having a problem with. It is that good has been shown as doing evil, but we are being told the evil they did was actually perfectly fine and good. That is a the problem.So it is alright to offend and kick people, because in the future if you stop people from offending each other, then they will decide you are offensive and stop that?Well, in the future you might be the one being discriminated against, so maybe you should advocate for less discrimination instead of saying that you can't argue for inclusion and compassion. Because, you know, it might be you who is facing that in the future. Times change.Honestly, this fear mongering about the future gets so silly. You know what used to be a cure for toothaches? Cocaine. They gave it to children. Imagine that person using this argument "The government wants us to stop giving our children cocaine for their teeth? You can't argue for that, letting the government control you will just lead to them doing more in the future. Next they will remove peanut butter because kids are allergic to that. Then apples because they are too hard. And eventually everyone will be eating mush." Yes, exactly. That I do not have a problem with at all. I have not read that book, but it doesn't matter, because you hit the nail on the head. The bolded part is fine. The issue is that Mercurius seems to be of the opinion that a reader cannot decide what is good or bad. That you must rely solely on the narrator or the framing, and then accept that whatever happened was good or bad. Good, upstanding soldiers burning a town to the ground and cooking people alive? That isn't a story about war crimes, or good people doing bad things, that is a story of good people doing the right thing, because you were presented with it being the right thing, and this is a fantasy story so we can't bring real world ethics in and say they are wrong. But, the entire point of a story of that is to emphasize the horror of it, to emphasize how terrible and wrong it is. You expect unspeakable acts from bad people, seeing them from good people is jarring and makes you question things. This is also why the theif with a heart of gold is such a recurringly powerful trope. Because they are a bad person who does bad things.... but they are also a kind and compassionate person, so we need to balance that perception, to dig deeper, to ask why.</blockquote>

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