Syna, great post!
Or maybe people just think it'd be exciting? When something's lacking in people's lives and it takes the apocalypse to fill that void...that's a little creepy.
It's something like that, I think. Lord J's post lead me to think that in addition to the reasons he mentioned, and a general association of Darkness and Grimness with Realism and Authenticity (which drives me crazy, by the way), we just see few opportunities for heroic acts.
That bothers me, too, and I’ve had years to think about why. It’s not simply the ignorance of mistaking one thing for another, or the cynicism that comes from perceiving unpleasant realities (or their fictional pretenders) as somehow realer than the rest. Common to most of these dark and gritty depictions of fantasy worlds is the desecration of beautiful things, or the bald-faced assertion that they were never truly beautiful in the first place and were more properly an abomination that only the fires of doom could purify.
Humanity struggles with a genuine desire for greatness amid the constant frustration of that desire. Some people just have no inkling of what greatness really is and keep looking for it in all the wrong places. Others have had a hard row to hoe and can no longer lift their heads to the horizon. Still others are their own worst enemies but perceive themselves as victims of an unjust society, thwarting their own personal growth. Whatever the cause, this embitters people and impels them to resent the very greatness they desire.
One of the reasons I find myself attracted to many fictional villains is that, when you remove the pettiness, the vanity, and the cruelty, you get the very people who are exemplars of a better society: ambitious dreamers who want to change the way the world works. Combine such characters with the philosophy of a just and wise storyteller, and you get bona fide role models.
We vilify the desire for greatness. We call it a bad thing, and preach a vague sort of “return to the basics” as the goal to look toward. It’s everywhere, even in stories I like, such as the mention of a grid-based road structure as imposing itself upon the free-flowing curves of nature. Perhaps grid-style roads are not a good avatar for “greatness” (indeed I would not expend myself to argue otherwise), but the point illustrates the thoroughness with which we subscribe to the concept that our civilization has somehow turned evil.
There’s a lot to justly hate. The regularity of our culture and our economy stifles expression. Mainstream culture offers no gateway to the promised land. Office towers may become symbols of oppression if you look at them and see nothing but soul-sucking cubicles and plutocratic business practices. Freeways, in all their smog-belching, sprawl-seeding, endlessly congested glory, may come to represent the depravities of drudgery and degradation rather than be heralded as the vast networks of empowering mobility which they also, and perhaps more properly, are. We would not have suburban sprawl without freeways, and suburbs create issues all their own.
I’ve said before that we live in a golden age now. It’s true, for those who are privileged (and most Americans are). What’s missing is not that our machines are dirty or our populations overgrown—such flaws in the gearbox are otherwise easily repaired—but that most people are not shown how to appreciate the world. Yet the golden age is not merely a state of mind, and the material quality of life most of us enjoy is jarring to those who find, in the void created by the expulsion of hardships which material comfort brings, a contradiction between their possession of pleasures and dissatisfaction of psyche.
The conflation of grit with realism, of darkness with authenticity, is a symptom of all this. Very little of it is the honest appreciation that comes from the complexity of minor chords and multidimensional metropolises. And, as a storyteller, simply insinuating that the present world is better than people give it credit for is not going to persuade anybody. What we need to do, as storytellers and citizens, is help people fix their own problems. Society’s problems are comparatively a cakewalk. A society filled with strong-minded people who are ready to tackle injustice and overcome adversity is a society vastly healthier than one where the people are materially well but intellectually starved.
If you ask me, the contrast between light and dark, elegance and grit, happiness and conflict...is overblown. At a sufficiently advanced level of comprehension, the two converge and there is no distinction between them.
We live in a comfortable, rich world, as you say, and it's just incredible to me that people will come up with that many excuses to write something grim! Especially when trying something different from the norm, and getting your work published, is such a difficult task for modern-day writers.
I think it was always so, but that today the interconnectedness with which we live highlights our lack of uniqueness. Also, the increased literacy rate and the factors of globalization have at once compelled more people to read and write even as the market presses for ever more similar and familiar stories. Fortunately the Internet empowers niches, and I think our generation will undergo a change of mindset when it comes to unfavorable comparisons of small-time publishers with the big-label commercial publishing houses. No one should aspire to write for the mainstream unless they want to engage people on the level of the mainstream. If you sell a thousand copies of your book, at four bucks a pop, through an e-publisher and third-party e-vendors like Amazon, that’s four thousand dollars—three thousand after taxes—and enough money to paint a picture of self-sufficiency with the proper balance of writing for one’s native audience and writing to other audiences or doing different work entirely.
The reason, of course, is the one you give: people are not fulfilled, they don't know how to be fulfilled (and they are predisposed to whining). To say nothing of the fact our evolution hasn't caught up with the technological demands of our society yet.
Aye. I am interested in looking at ways we can socially engineer a better crop of humans, both through modifying our social institutions and even our fundamental organization of society, and through genetic engineering of the fundamental human condition, combined with humanitarian abortion, to eliminate a wide swath of disease, disability, and what I suppose we can call recidivism—the people whose genetics simply are not compatible with civilized life in its broadest form.
Again, such ideas when they are presented at all by most storytellers are vilified. After all, “Hitler” was all for eugenics, right? That means we shouldn’t meddle with “nature”! (Never mind that pacemaker you have...) And Stalin reorganized society to his heart’s content, killing millions of course when the individuals didn’t fit in with the big picture. That means we should leave people to live however they like!
Today it is implicit in our popular culture that grandiose attempts to reorganize society or reshape the core human experience are misguided at best, evil more often, and inevitably destructive. It’s a narrow manifestation of a much broader American anti-intellectualism. What have science and government brought us, other than lies and suffering? Right? That’s what most people think.
Most of what we are doing wrong when it comes to raising kids and setting expectations for kids and adults is pretty simple. People have shitty parents, inadequate schools, Goofus-style celebrity role models, and the poisonous influx of religious brainwashing.
Indeed, when I stop and consider that many of the people who would presumably be involved in massive social reform of scientific wizardry come from such backgrounds, I almost want to concede that they have written a self-fulfilling prophecy and cannot be trusted to steward the programs we need. Fortunately, I have met or learned of so many good and decent people in the world that my trust in our speciary self-sustainability is exuberantly girded.
And honestly, a lot of smart, aware people I know are genuinely terrified: http://www.utne.com/Environment/Truth-Hurts-Conversation-Altered-World-Systemic-Failures.aspx Most of the time I am inclined to chalk it up to a love of conspiracy and general paranoia, but that's not quite fair. There's a heartstopping amount information out there, and much of it is negative-- one can, fairly easily, be well-read and inquisitive and be exposed largely to articles and analysis that is generally negative, and dismiss the positive information one finds as manipulative or unrealistic.
My discovery is that conventional notions of “smart” are unreliable, to say nothing of conventional notions of “aware.” If anti-intellectualism is a bane, the intelligentsia itself is little better. We don’t have any major establishments that I know of where true human excellence is a prerequisite. Great individuals appear in all walks of life, or most walks anyhow, but do not yet seem to have a great citadel of Illumination that beckons to the rest of us. Perhaps the pursuit of utopia is simply outside most people’s ability, and let’s not forget that, for as advanced as our society is, we are also still a very primitive society, new to many of our liberties and technologies, and have a great deal of growing to do in building better social institutions.
Also, most people aren't equipped to deal with many of the unnatural stressful particulars imposed upon our society--such as unsatisfying jobs, hydralike social webs, and the attention-sapping barrages of media. On top of everything else, we live in an age where our enemies are hard to touch (existing, variously, as foreign terrorists, huge corporations, or even such abstracts as the environmental pollution caused by our very existence), and our champions are nowhere to be found--often drowned out by the mass media.
I can't add anything to this except to say that it is spot-on, and presents an interesting challenge to those of us who are storytellers.
It certainly does. Would you care to elaborate on your thoughts here?
There's been a lot of analysis on the cultural function of superheroes as heroic myth, but I feel we need to begin talking about heroism in particular outside of the standard tropes of fantasy, sci-fi and superhero stories. It's very hard to figure out how to do this in a compelling way, however. But that's another post altogether, probably best delegated to the writing thread!
I look forward to that conversation!
