By KEVIN KAUMANS
How was Fall break everyone? Did you enjoy it? I enjoyed it, though I am still a little sick from this cold plaguing me. Because of this, I figured I would write something simple for this week’s main article.
One of the most common cliches we see in fiction is the conflict of good versus evil. Morality against immorality if you will. Nowadays, our fiction has more of a gray area, with anti-heroes, anti-villains, etc.
However, a lot of earlier fiction likes to paint a clear picture of black and white, with no colors in between. You know what I’m referring to; angels versus demons, good Christian values versus moral decay, pure good heroes versus the tyrannical dark lord.
Why is this exactly? Well, I obviously wasn’t born hundreds of years ago, but I think after all these years of studying literary history, I can come up with a good guess. Now, I am no Ph D student, so I encourage you to ask some of the English Professors here at Northwestern for their opinion on this topic as well if you are still intrigued after reading this article.
It is no secret that we used to live in much more conservative times, back when it was difficult to separate the difference between church and state simply because the main religion of a country played such a big role in the people’s everyday lives; From their
culture, to what they ate, to what they drank to even what they wrote about. Trust me, if you traveled back in time to the 1800s, you are not going to find any romance novels as graphic as “50 Shades of Grey”.
Now, I am not going to lie to you and say every single author from the old days was a prude who re-framed from using any violence or sex in their literature whatsoever.
On the contrary, for as long as humans have been telling stories, there have been writers from every century pushing the boundaries of societal norms. But even then, authors often had to choose their words carefully if they wanted to avoid censorship or even imprisonment.
Because of this, it was probably much safer for writers to write stories with characters that were either pure good or pure evil. After all, you wouldn’t want to write a story about a hero whose values go against the status quo and get labeled a heretic, would you? Besides, in terms of quantity over quality, it is a lot easier to write a story with no complex themes or ideas, much quicker to write too.
As a little bonus to boot, the audience seemed to love these types of stories. Is that not why we still know the names of famous Greek heroes from a thousand years ago? Even in the 21st century, we still are getting movies, shows, books and even video games about these men. It is the same reason we love action movies with no real plot or complex themes: It is a form of escapism from the overwhelming dread of the real world.
Not everything needs a complicated plot or themes that take decades of scholarly research to decipher. Sometimes, all an audience wants is to lean back and turn their brain off. There is no shame in making media like that if it keeps you fulfilled in life.
All I am trying to say is that good and evil are not always simple definitions. A character can do bad things but have pure intentions behind them. The vice versa can also be true. I always have been interested in the psychology behind why people take the paths in life they do. Maybe they had a rough childhood, or perhaps they experienced some trauma once they reached adulthood.
The best characters in fiction, at least in my opinion, are ones who motives are neither fully good or fully malicious in their motives. When you have a person in your stories that is not one-dimensional, it allows your audience to read in between the lines and come to their own conclusions about what to take away from what you intended.
You can even go a step further with this; you can have a character who may seem one-note at first, but as the story goes on, the reader slowly begins to learn more about them and start to realize that they are actually more complex than at a first glance.
There might even be a part in your story you can include where the main characters find out that the organization they thought to be evil are actually the good guys, and the people they are fighting against are the true evil.