marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2014-02-16 08:02 pm
marycatelli) wrote2014-02-16 08:02 pm
Entry tags:
Good Vs. Evil: The Great Divide
Back from Boskone -- where I found that wearing Order of the Stick T-shirt was a good way to get people to comment on what you wear -- and ready to discuss panels.
This was about the pure evil and the pure good found in fantasy and sometimes in SF. Particularly the older works.
Hmm. I noticed at the time but did not get a chance to say, being the audience, that fantasy started to take over from SF, and that may have been because the readers like that pure good and evil. The panelists -- all of whom were predominately SF -- were lamenting its purity, though one did argue with another than it only simplifies it, which may or may not be over-simplifying it. They wanted more moral grays.
Evil as a deliberate choice. (I put in, later, that willful ignorance can be a factor.) Much certainty no one ever chose to do evil
Whether this is all Christaintiy -- did the Norse gods, or Greek gods have anything like this? I was able to put in two cents there: depends on when in Greek history. Sure, in Homeric Greece, all sorts of amoral gods, and Telemachus takes on a shipmate who tells him he's a murderer. Then, in classical Greece, much more morals; in an actual trial, a man defending himself on charges of murder that he took a sea voyage and arrived safely. Which is why Plato thought the myths should be censored.
This was about the pure evil and the pure good found in fantasy and sometimes in SF. Particularly the older works.
Hmm. I noticed at the time but did not get a chance to say, being the audience, that fantasy started to take over from SF, and that may have been because the readers like that pure good and evil. The panelists -- all of whom were predominately SF -- were lamenting its purity, though one did argue with another than it only simplifies it, which may or may not be over-simplifying it. They wanted more moral grays.
Evil as a deliberate choice. (I put in, later, that willful ignorance can be a factor.) Much certainty no one ever chose to do evil
Whether this is all Christaintiy -- did the Norse gods, or Greek gods have anything like this? I was able to put in two cents there: depends on when in Greek history. Sure, in Homeric Greece, all sorts of amoral gods, and Telemachus takes on a shipmate who tells him he's a murderer. Then, in classical Greece, much more morals; in an actual trial, a man defending himself on charges of murder that he took a sea voyage and arrived safely. Which is why Plato thought the myths should be censored.