Posted on January 06, 2018, 01:01:34 AM by Jubal
Dark Versus Light: Morals, Nature, Sci-Fi And Fantasy
Dark Versus Light: Morals, Nature, Sci-Fi And Fantasy
by Jubal
by Jubal
Some days, morality is simple. But how often?
The primary countervailing current to this is to “grey down” all morality, with the Warhammer universes among other presenting worlds that had almost as negative a view of protagonists as antagonists. Increasingly, we saw worlds where elves were arrogant, humans fallible and corrupt, and dwarfs avaricious and grudge-bearing. “Grimdark” stood against “High” fantasy, partially separated by setting but mostly by the accuracy of moral compasses. Nowadays, it is common to see literature that abandons moral clarity altogether (Game of Thrones arguably sits in this category), or games with multiple endings that reflect the varying possibilities of the characters’ moral choices (e.g. Bioshock).
Both in SFF fiction and in games, though, there’s a tendency to rock back towards “categorising” morals. It’s easy to see why: when explaining whole new worlds, and doubly so when you need the world to be able to react to a player’s actions, you need to somehow embed those actions into a pretty fundamental and calculated framework of how the world works. Even for writers exploring grim and unpleasant settings, the tendency to want to give entire factions, rather than just individuals, a certain philosophy or moral character is one that inherently tends to lead to the creation of worlds with natural morality – that is to say, ones where the fabric of reality has a moral stance embedded into it.
In Warhammer, the primal force of Chaos is presented as an ultimate evil, driven by Lovecraftian-evil deities; in Star Wars, the Force is split into light and dark. These naturalised, ingrained moralities allow a sense of “good” and “evil” that maintains the fundamental paradigm of a Tolkienesque or dualist worldview without that needing to reside in any particular character. In Star Wars, what little we see of the Galactic Republic is less than positive, and the moralities of different characters are often established by linking them to a certain side, all of which is enveloped by its anti-Jedi or pro-Jedi worldview. The Light acts as a strong moral proxy such that the writers often do not need to demonstrate particular moral actions to enforce it – the only key points are when a character “falls” from one side to the other, much like for a D&D Paladin.
In Warhammer 40,000, the natural morality creates an even more bizarre situation; the Imperium of Man are to all intents and purposes a galactic fascist superstate, constantly obliterating innocent sentient beings, bombing entire worlds of their own people into oblivion, and being lorded over by chapters of genetically engineered super-soldiers who are a law unto themselves and will happily fight against the regular army. The fact that this setting maintains a “moral compass” is solely due to the fact that Chaos is presented as a primal evil – in other words, the force of evil has been naturalised into the world to the extent that good and evil are judged merely as sides of a struggle, and classic moral tells like “exterminating billions of people might be considered possibly a little bit evil” are no longer relevant.
Natural moralities are thus a powerful tool for writers in creating worlds of grand conflict but mutable morals compared to our own. They can also represent a problem, however –when it comes to balance. Natural forces tend to balance out, or have ideals of balance associated with them. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, fire balances water, earth balances air, and so on and so forth. Naturalising your moral forces risks difficult implications. Are they inherently balanced? Should they be? If your “light and darkness” forces are averaged to dusk, does this bring harmony (as all is in balance) or mean accepting that half the world is evil? This is perhaps the point that most undercuts systems with natural morality. Whether or not it’s possible or balanced to make the world “all light”, it may well be morally right for the characters in a setting to fight for that anyway. If balance means accepting evil and oppression, if it means selling the good and innocent to the night, then for a genuinely morally good character that will always be too high a price to pay.
In short, I think we as writers and creators need to be careful about “naturalising” our moralities in games and writings and setting design. I'm very much a fan of the idea that blatantly immoral actions should have consequences for the characters we create, but these are better produced and make better stories when dealt with on a case-by-case basis than weighing up into the long term balance of a character's soul (helping 99 old ladies across the road doesn't then give you enough "points" to get away with pushing the hundreth into the path of a truck, etc). As major world religions have discovered in the past, a point-scoring moral system ends up feeling contrived or even gamed after a certain point.
We should also, just as importantly, recognise what we're doing with our moralities - especially with naturalised morals, which are proportionally more dangerous as they can lead to a "but I'm on the good team" syndrome in which characters undertake objectively evil actions under the cover of "being a good guy". This, played right, can be an extremely clever storytelling tool, but all too often it is played unironically and players are left without an appreciation of the fact that the things happening in front of them are straight-up evil. If you want to reinforce the idea that X is actually not evil/a valid choice, or you're setting up for a "hey look that was evil" twist, great, but being self-aware about the moral compasses you're ingraining into your worlds is vital. If we don't have that awareness, eventually players/readers/viewers will start seeing the gaps between the story we want to tell and the events that take place within it, breaking the immersion we seek to create.
We create fantasy settings, in part, to tell people something about the world and their place in it. It is down to us as creators to decide how our worlds react to moral stimuli, and decide whether to show them a world that is bleak or bright, muddled or clear - whether our protagonists must accept their reality or not. It is, ironically, taking this careful moral control on the part of the creator that gives those we create for a genuine feeling of character freedom, and of living in a world where, natural or not, good or evil, it is the direct results of the choices of characters that, as a constellation not a tally-sheet, form the people that they become.
17 comments | Write Comment