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[Neonivek]

Ahhh Isnoical that makes a lot more sense.

I'll be hoping for some Grey and White fiction then

[Il Palazzo]

So I've been looking around the Interwebz for a Biotech internship in London and right there, on a random page of a random job offer site, I see a job offer for a Chief Scientific Adviser for the entirety of UK intelligence services. Just like that.

I suppose the MI5 hires through adverts on Gumtree.

[Flying Dice]

+100 yes to this. I've yet to find a recent-ish made video game or a book which would've had a genuine good and not-stupid character. These "black and gray" people always say that "this is soooo not-banal, compared to a typical black and white stuff", except that they've as far as I can see expunged the "black and white" people from their forms of art. It's ridiculous.

It's not a fiction writing class, it's research writing. You can only be against something if you know that it's happening, and I only know that some of these things are happening because I had to read about them for class.

Hey, here's some extra credit.

[scrdest]

So I've been looking around the Interwebz for a Biotech internship in London and right there, on a random page of a random job offer site, I see a job offer for a Chief Scientific Adviser for the entirety of UK intelligence services. Just like that.

I suppose the MI5 hires through adverts on Gumtree.

I know that CIA recruits by plain ol' applications on their website.

I guess it's better than just taking walk-ins, at any rate.

[Frumple]

Ehh it is just the current trend anyhow.

Though I am kind of tired of the only thing able to scratch that itch is either foreign television or cartoons.

It is like the idea of anyone being good... is considered childish.

Not a current trend at all, heh -- you can blame that almost entirely on classical literature, imo. Death, bigotry, violence, and bad sex is more or less considered the height of our collective creative sphere, and that effect just kinda' flows through other bits of writing.

Is like half the reason I read so much fanfiction, right there. One of the few places in existence you can actually consistently find genuinely cheerful bits of writing.

[Flying Dice]

It's also partly because stories in which everyone is generally good people and nothing really bad happens are boring. Not just in the dramatic sense of conflicts in such settings involving such characters being trivial, easily resolved, and temporary, but also in the critical sense -- it's difficult to impart meaning or convey deep emotion with stories about good people being decent to each other in a peaceful, ordinary setting.

A fluffy slice-of-life story can be a good palate cleanser in the same way that a glass of milk or a little bit of ginger can, but would you want to live your whole life eating nothing but ginger and drinking nothing but milk? That's not to say that there aren't places for genuinely good individuals in fiction, anything but. However, that is always going to be in the context of a generally good character playing off of less than good characters and situations or vice-versa.

On a somewhat related note, "good" cannot exist in a vacuum. It's a meaningless idea on its own in the same way that "cold" is meaningless without heat. Furthermore, there's the issue of nuance: stories about perfectly good, normal people in completely ordinary situations with no real conflict are just as jarring and unrealistic as the polar opposite, because real people and situations are nuanced; to use the old color metaphor nothing and no one is perfectly black and white, nor are they "grey"; everyone and everything is a rainbow, a panoply of different and often contradictory motivations, causes, emotions, and goals.

[majikero]

Youtube is randomly blacking out. Is it broken again?

[Rolan7]

Eh, depends on what you consider "good" and "evil" to be.  I think the most useful definition of "good" is selflessly helping the community, while respecting the social contract.  That doesn't require the existence of evil, in fact the existence of evil makes that type of good riskier and less effective.

I agree that antagonism is necessary for most narratives though, and nuanced characters are more interesting.  It's not that we *need* evil, just that it's in us all to some extent.  But in my opinion, not nearly as much as the good.  A species as slow to mature as humanity would never survive without a primal respect for the social contract, and a measure of altruism.

[Frumple]

Problem is that meaning or deep emotion is usually unilaterally cruddy ones. I'd much rather spend the majority of my life drinking milk and ginger (chocolate milk and something not ginger, anyway, since ginger tastes ruddy terrible to me) than spend most of it gargling feces-draino cocktails. I got tired of the "world is mud" bullshit back when I actually was stuck in classical literature for several years straight (never again).

I'd strongly say there's a lot more room to be explored in regards to upbeat and healthy interactions between characters than most everyone gives credit, though. You don't have to have shitty people being shitty to one another in a shitty situation to impart meaning, and positive emotions can get just as gorram deep as negative ones. Slice of life can be fluffy without being vapid. High literature may tend to disagree with that, but there's a ruddy reason I don't read that well constructed drek anymore.

[scrdest]

Eh, depends on what you consider "good" and "evil" to be.  I think the most useful definition of "good" is selflessly helping the community, while respecting the social contract.  That doesn't require the existence of evil, in fact the existence of evil makes that type of good riskier and less effective.

I agree that antagonism is necessary for most narratives though, and nuanced characters are more interesting.  It's not that we *need* evil, just that it's in us all to some extent.  But in my opinion, not nearly as much as the good.  A species as slow to mature as humanity would never survive without a primal respect for the social contract, and a measure of altruism.

That definition is entirely useless to the context. We're talking about *stories*, and a definition of evil in that context is provisional - a villain is simply the source of conflict in regards to the character we sympathize with.

Either extreme is boring - if there isn't enough contrast, there isn't a viable story. If a story seems Black vs. Black (or Grey vs. Grey, in some contexts), nobody gives a shit about the conflict, because whoever wins, world still sucks and you have no particular reason to care which it is. If it gravitates to White vs. White, there *is* no conflict.

If, conversely, there is too much contrast, the story seems juvenile - not in the pretentious 'ermagherd, 3simple5me' sense, but pure Black vs. White is contrived by its very nature - while a character that is pure good isn't that unbelievable, pure evil ones pretty much have to have motives that are absurd, evil-for-evil's-sake kind of deal.

Good storytelling is just finding a spot on the scale where the reader has enough of both.

[Radio Controlled]

Black vs black can be very fun, because you can just revel in the carnage. Like, in a 40K example, I'm an imperium fanboy, but seeing some chaos marines and orks fight it out, or some tyranids and necron getting their genocidal groove on against each other, is always good fun.

[EnigmaticHat]

Implying that imperials vs anyone isn't black vs black.

[scriver]

but would you want to live your whole life [...] drinking nothing but milk?

Being Swedish, I don't understand the question.

This is one if those "bear shit in the woods" type statements, right?

[Radio Controlled]

Implying that imperials vs anyone isn't black vs black.

Hey, they might be genocidal fanatics like the rest of them, bur they're our genocidal fanatics dammit!

[TempAcc]

So, apparently a california state attorney aide is being accused of being part of a 3000 year masonic cabal or something.