Morality in a fictional setting

[dr_whom]

It drives me up the wall when people say things like "But let's not project our own sense of justice and morality onto the world of Game of Thrones" when analyzing or defending characters' questionable actions.

Why the sam hill shouldn't we?

Game of Thrones was written with us as the intended audience. George R.R. Martin has clearly deliberately made the idea of justice a major theme of the story and thought about it a great deal as it relates to the characters' choices. (Whether the producers and writers of the TV show have done the same is less obvious, but they're still working with his source material.) The world of Game of Thrones' whole reason for existence is so that we can project our own sense of justice and morality onto it.

Comments

[tilivenn.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear! I think there is some value in thinking about how a fictional setting might affect characters' understandings of morality, but when that just becomes some kind of excuse for not thinking at all, or pretending that fiction just emerges from the aether and isn't created by real people living today, ugh.

[zdenka]

Well, it seems to me there are different issues here which are being conflated. "Are the character's actions wrong?" and "Should the character know that he's doing something wrong?" and "Is the character a bad person for doing this thing?" and "Is someone less culpable for doing [X] if everyone around him does [X] and his society takes it for granted?" Those are all potentially interesting questions which could be debated.

If you want to analyze the morality of the characters' actions, then it makes sense to use real-world standards. But people will often go from "This character did bad things" to "this character is a(n irredeemably) bad person" (whether rightly or wrongly), or perhaps it's the character's defenders who are jumping to the conclusion that anyone criticising their favorite's actions is declaring them a bad person with no redeeming social value. So, the social context of the fictional world is probably not relevant when talking about the morality of actions in an abstract sense, but if you're trying to decide how much to blame the character for what he did and whether it makes him a bad person, it does make sense to consider that context.

[tilivenn.livejournal.com]

I think the issue is, one often sees fiction in which various things that we consider Wrong Actions in the real world are considered okay by the fictional culture, or vice versa, and people sometimes want to take that fictional culture on its own terms without thinking about why the author wrote it that way. Like, if Author X's books all just so happen to be about a made-up fantasy world where all kinds of things are different from ours, and a person's natural aptitude for magic is indicated by the color of their skin, with lighter skin = better magic, you can't just say "well, discriminating based on skin color for certain jobs in that world is perfectly reasonable" without thinking, huh, why did someone write a story in which that's the case? Yeah, within the sphere of that fictional universe, not hiring someone for a magic-based job because they're too dark would be a reasonable decision and not necessarily unjust, but that doesn't mean the book's not racist, or that people who are disgusted by the racism of the characters are wrong. The characters aren't real people; they were made the way they are by their author. Just because they make sense in-setting doesn't mean the setting itself is above critique.

[zdenka]

Just because they make sense in-setting doesn't mean the setting itself is above critique.

I agree, and I wasn't meaning to imply otherwise. Those are also valid things to consider.

[dr_whom]

Oh totally. What I'm mainly reacting to is the use of "let's not project" as essentially a cop-out to avoid critically thinking about the moral questions raised (intentionally or unintentionally) by the text. What brought this to mind for me recently was not so much "the character's defenders jumping to the conclusion that anyone criticising their favorite's actions is declaring them a bad person", as you put it, but rather more like a character's defenders reflexively excusing their favorite's actions, and then using "well you can't judge him by our morality" to try to shut down people who find the character's behavior morally questionable.

One of the things I like a lot about Game of Thrones (well, A Song of Ice and Fire, anyway) in particular is how much of an effort it makes, and how good a job it does, of both allowing the reader to evaluate the morality of the characters' behavior in an abstract sense and understanding how the social context of the fictional world contributes to the characters' behavior and their judgment of right and wrong.

[picklepikkl.livejournal.com]

I don't watch Game of Thrones, nor have I read the books, so I can't speak on the application to that setting/those characters specifically, but your closing sentence made me think of something Rich Burlew said two years ago:

"But beyond that, no fiction is meaningful if its lessons cannot be applied to the world that we, real actual humans, live in. If you are going to dismiss any themes or subtext present in any fantasy story as simply not applying to our world because that world has dragons and ours doesn't, then you have largely missed the point of literature as a whole, and are likely rather poorer for it. Fantasy literature is ONLY worthwhile for what it can tell us about the real world; everything else is petty escapism. So if I can make even one person think about how we treat people of other races (or religions, or creeds, or what have you) by using the analogy of Redcloak, then it will have been time well spent on my part."

(The source (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?232652-Redcloak-s-failed-characterization-and-what-it-means-for-the-comic-as-a-whole/page5&p=12718655#post12718655) is a really excellent thread where Burlew lays out a lot of his artistic goals and beliefs about fucked up fantasy racism. Sure, different settings might have different metaphysics that distort local morality (e.g. the king might actually be necessary to make the crops grow), but those metaphysics spring from the minds of humans with their own beliefs and agendas, as tilivenn mentioned, and writing for an audience known to them. Goblins are made up, people writing goblins are real.)

Beyond that, I want to +1 everything lignota said.

[q10.livejournal.com]

Could those of us who are seriously not following this franchise / setting maybe be filled in on what context people are saying this in?

Like, obviously it's complicated, but saints are boring. Books that loudly call attention to everything non-saintly a character does are preachy and boring. Books that do this by the standards of a culture different from the culture of the setting also have serious suspension-of-disbelief difficulties.

Of course, we're supposed to evaluate this shit through the lens of our own morality, because that's what makes it compelling, but I feel like, in other contexts, one does often see this bleeding into ‘this book is problematic because it portrays a problematic society and sympathetically portrays people who are products of that society’. And that is sometimes a pretty sensible reaction, given certain additional background facts, but in other situations there's a lot of very legitimate social commentary to be done by portraying problematic societies, and a good way to get a lens on a society, real or fictional, is to present its members in terms of their own perspective, showing how basically sympathetic people turn out in a particular social context.

I like a good utopia as much as the next sentient, but that's not all there is to creating fictional societies.

[theevilgenius.livejournal.com]

People sometimes are like "well what X person did is okay because of his society!!!" particularly with respect to gender stuff in the world of ASoIaF. But I agree with Aaron--I think GRRM in his fictional universe tries to highlight via hyperbole some truly problematic elements about our own culture (misogyny for example is a huge theme in the books), while also questioning some modern standards for morality by placing them in a different context (an example here would be the fact that the heroes are a family that at first loses everything because they're so obsessed with honor that they overlook pragmatism and, sometimes, the moral value of utilitarian thinking).

Spoilers ahoy, but I'll be vague: There is a scene near the end of book 5 where a woman is thoroughly humiliated in a sexualized power play. It's very clear, at least to me, that by the rules of that fictional universe she kind of deserved it, but by the rules of our real universe you are supposed to really, truly feel for her because there are such strong echoes between what she is suffering, in a hyperbolic way, and what woman suffer on a small scale every day in the real world. You can't understand the emotional impact of that scene fully without bringing a real life morality lens into it.

[dr_whom]

It's worth noting, actually, even more so, that it's not just that "by the rules of that fictional universe she kind of deserved it"—by our standards as well, she's a thoroughly horrible person in any number of ways. But the story also lets us see some of the forces that made her turn out that way, and sympathize with her as someone who had to experience what she experienced, even while loathing the person that it turned her into.

Another one of the themes of the overall story is the hollowness of revenge—there are at least like two or three situations in the story, maybe more, where the reader is tempted to say "oh man, I sure hope Bad Guy X gets what's coming to them for that!"… and then they do and it's not thrilling or cathartic; it's just brutal and sad.

[dr_whom]

Indeed, "this book is problematic because it portrays a problematic society and sympathetically portrays people who are products of that society" is a very common class of criticism of A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, which I also don't agree with—it usually goes along the lines of "this story is full of sexualized violence and other gross things; even the characters who we're supposed to sympathize with are guilty of it; clearly we're supposed to enjoy it as part of the fun of the narrative; if Martin could write a story set in a world with dragons and zombies he could write a story set in a world without constant oppressive violence and misogyny but chose not to". It seems clear from the text, though, as theevilgenius says, that one of the goals of the narrative is to demonstrate how pervasively dehumanizing and poisonous institutionalized violence and misogyny is. But I can allow that there may be an element of something like Truffaut's Law ("You can't make a truly anti-war movie") playing a role here because to some degree just portraying such a society in a compelling story, and getting us to inhabit the minds of the sympathetic characters who live within it, can make us sympathize with the ethos the story is trying to attack.

The context in which "let's not project our own sense of justice and morality" came up that prompted this rant was that a usually-sympathetic protagonist character murders his ex-lover, a lowborn prostitute, when he escapes from prison after she falsely testifies against him. Should we like the character less after that? Should we think that he has turned a corner morally, even if we still sympathize with him? Saying, well, it makes sense in the context of that society, and not exploring how we-the-reader evaluate it, is basically to dodge the questions the story is asking us to ask.