bluedalahorse | (Reply)

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Yeah, moral absolutism is definitely a phrase we can use! I think I’ve heard some people talk about moral purity or purity culture, but I think people hear the word “purity” and end up having Strong Feelings about it and it inflames the discussion more instead of getting anywhere. It’s frustrating.

As it happens, I’m currently in an MFA program in writing for children and young adults, and this whole issue of like… character morality, and how people respond to it, has played a big role in my graduate research. I’ve made the argument that teens need messy and imperfect characters in their fiction, and that this is important because teens know the world is complex and will increasingly call bullshit on worldbuilding or characters who are too morally clean.

Incidentally, my research has encouraged me to think not just about how to write complex villains who still do bad stuff, but also about what steps the narrative takes to “punish” a villain or antagonist and bring the reader catharsis. I’ve also thought about the other end of the spectrum, and how we can reinvent the redemption arc for our current time period.

In a way I’m in an opposite place than you, because I think a lot of my fanfic writing focuses on two morally dubious teenagers (one being much more morally dubious than the other, but both of them being incredibly complex, and neither of them being 100% villains because the show is not a show with polarized heroes and villains) and how to pull them out of the mess that they’re in. So I guess I’m more on the “redemption arc” side of things, which means pushing against the current of my fandom, a bit.

The thing is, it’s not so much that my fandom wants to write my faves as villains, it’s that they want to write them as flattened in some way. Whether that means “redeeming” one character by ignoring her complexity and infantilizing her and having her ignore her own needs, or “villainizing” the other by making him just such an obvious villain he might be twirling a black cloak in an 1800s melodrama, tying helpless maidens to train tracks. So I think you and I are aligned in that we just want to write characters for their complexity, and dive deep into their motivations and such. I get the impression that people in my fandom find flattening characters as somehow… emotionally safer or something… but ugh. It’s so boring actually!

I love the sound of that sibling story. Always a great way to see parallel narratives!

Ugh, One True Ships and echo chambers. I’ve always been too much of a multishipper for that! And writing a classic Harlequin romance sounds like fun.

I think one thing I wish from fandom today is like… just an acknowledgement that we all have different sources of fun. For some people that might be writing evil characters. For some of us that’s writing our favorite tropes, but some of us are mostly here to turn tropes upside down. There can be lots of different ways of enjoying oneself in writing and I wish the nature of fandom discourse didn’t always have so many people (or at least myself) on the defensive about what I like.