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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DamnedChoir" data-source="post: 4051135" data-attributes="member: 56141">And to further the discussion of 'grim n gritty' when you step into any historical situation with institutions that challenge or don't coincide with our current moral values, you can generally do it two ways:1. It's wrong, bad, and only evil people do it, only good people are victim to it, etc. This is the most common way to do almost anything in comic books, movies, games, etc, about the past. The hero of said story is always ultra-progressive and believes in equality and good righteous modern values ahead of his time, while the villain, of course, is evil and does these things only because he's selfish and really should no better. Perhaps the empire is evil, and corrupt, perhaps the world is just brutish and barbaric, but either way you're clearly using our current moral values to judge the situation and it can make a very good morality play if done correctly. If done poorly, you end up with a world where there really isn't much interesting conflict going on and the only real struggle is finding out who the bad guys are and then defeating them.2. There's a lot of moral gray. The people who perpetuate the institution are neither necessarily very evil or very cruel. They might have conflicting feelings, they might just be used to things the way they are, or they might not really be able to question the values of the society they're in. (Like most people are today.) Neither, of course, are the victims necessarily angelic, good, or even really battling to break free of their oppression. You could have lots of awful, terrible people yes...but there's just as good a chance you might meet someone who supports the institution for a seemingly noble reason, or would do whatever they could to prevent people from abusing it. You can run into people who /like/ being 'oppressed' others who don't like it, and some who are simply going along with things because they know no other way to live...and might be upset if you liberated them.On the one hand you tend to create a world of fat white men in togas, chasing around screaming, nubile slave girls through their lavishly appointed villas...but if you're doing things grim-n-gritty and moral gray then you end up with complex characters and motivations that aren't always easily brought into line with how we'd like to think of the world working. We must not forget that most of our greatest historical heroes held values that we'd probably consider offensive at best to our modern judgments.Sometimes I think it's a good thing for people to be able to step out of their own shoes and step into someone else's, and sometimes it's just good to be able to see different points of view that can challenge your own world view. Sometimes situations are just too complex, and aren't problems that can just be solved with a single set of strokes, these are the sorts of situtations that can really make you think.</blockquote>

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