Writing: Thematic cheating · 11:51pm Jun 8th, 2014
Can a book be well-written, but bad?
Hell, yes. In many ways.
A book has to be well written on many different levels to be a good book. Here are some of the levels at which a book must be well written:
- Mechanics: It must have good spelling and grammar.
- Craftsmanship: The characters, plot, pacing, setting, etc., should be competently constructed.
- Theme: It must say something good rather than something bad or just wrong. Sometimes people will call such a book "well-written, but bad." They might say that of Atlas Shrugged.
But there's one more level that hardly gets any attention, that even "great" books bungle frequently:
- Honesty: It must make its argument without cheating.
What's that about an argument? Well, one useful aspect of Dramatica theory is the idea that every dramatic novel is an argument. There are all sorts of exceptions, especially for short stories, comedy, and action novels. But there's a large class of dramatic novels that have themes that argue that one thing is wrong and another thing is right. (The argument isn't always obvious. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" makes an argument about the value of faith, and of relationships over things.)
Atlas Shrugged
The argument in Atlas Shrugged was obvious: Libertarianism and free markets are morally superior to two-party democracy and socialism. You can disagree with the theme, but the novel didn't cheat. It showed socialism having a bad outcome, and libertarianism having a good outcome. That good outcome might not be believable, but it was all out in the open. There was no sleight-of-hand used to make one thing give a good outcome and then attribute that outcome to something else.
MLP FiM season 4 finale
In my post "Fantasy as deontology" I explained why I thought the season four finale was cheating. The argument it made was that it is better to follow the rules of friendship than to rationally weigh the costs and benefits of your action to your friends. It cheated because the magical rules of Equestria intervened to make Twilight Sparkle's choice (to temporarily free her friends rather than try to save Equestria from eternal despotism) work out for the better.
You could say, "But this is Equestria! Equestrian magic really works that way!" In which case the show isn't teaching kids lessons about friendship in the real world, but about friendship in a fantasy world in which friendship works differently.
As I said in that post on fantasy, it's a defining quality of fantasy that writers will take an argument that X is right, and instead of arguing that X is right in certain circumstances, will argue that X is always right. So they think of a worst-case situation where X is absolutely, positively wrong, and then cheat to make it turn out right. We'll see this pattern again in LotR and Star Wars.
Lord of the Rings
There's a similar episode of thematic cheating in Lord of the Rings, which we already argued about, where Middle Earth is spared because Frodo saved Gollum. This is supposed to be an argument. Yet these circumstances surrounding the way in which Gollum accidentally saved Middle Earth are so unlikely that we can safely say they will never happen again. The only way in which it is an honest argument is a few interpreted as saying that the universe is built in such a way as to reward "virtuous" behavior. (For a counter-argument, see: Earth.)
Star Wars
"Star Wars" makes an argument about trusting your feelings rather than, say, a rifle scope, a targeting computer, or any other authority based on science and logic. So Lucas made the stormtroopers, who use rifle scopes instead of the force, the worst shots in the known universe. The final conclusive argument is that (spoiler!) Luke uses the Force instead of his ship's computer to target the vent on the Death Star, and it works.
You could say that Star Wars is making an argument about how the world should be, rather than about how it is. But I think that's too stupid for more words. Making an moral argument about what kind of physics the world should have is stupid. No; people take the Force seriously, as symbolic of the oneness of all being, or the Aleph, or the Buddha nature, or Qi, or human nature, or something.
But if you're making a symbol, you've got to have a reasonably-simple map between the real world and your symbol. The situations where trusting your feelings in your fantasy world works must in some way resemble those where trusting your feelings in reality works.
Now, maybe there are situations in life where you should trust your feelings rather than logic. Choosing a profession. Getting married. Eating the five-scoop double-death-by-chocolate sundae at Friendly's. But if there is one time in the world when this is wrong, one time in your life to trust a computer instead of your feelings, it when you have one chance to fire a projectile at a target 2 meters wide while flying past it at several times the speed of sound.
(That final battle scene in Star Wars is copied, from start to finish, from a World War II movie, The Dam Busters. It's a true story in which the dam (Death Star) was destroyed by astonishing bravery combined with science and trust in logic. It's a great movie that disappeared from sight because somebody had the brilliant idea to name the British air force unit's black dog "Nigger".)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess wrote later, I think in Playboy, that the argument in A Clockwork Orange is that it's morally better for people to be evil of their own free will than to be socialized by the government. The government tried to use behaviorist psychology to condition Alex not to enjoy raping and killing people. In the end, the government failed, but then Alex grew out of this behavior, because it was just a case of boys being boys. (This final "growing out of it" chapter was deleted from the American edition.) The lesson is that attempts to socialize people using science (a) don't work, and (b) aren't necessary, because people are basically good, except when they're teenagers.
There's already some cheating here, because Burgess declared by authorial fiat that conditioning couldn't work. But that wasn't enough for him. He had to make the attempt to use conditioning morally repulsive.
So first, he made the government a repressive dictatorship. Repressive dictatorships are bad; therefore, using science to reduce crime is bad.
(This is only half-cheating. You could argue that the problem with using science to encourage certain behaviors is that it's the sort of thing that appeals to repressive dictatorships. But in that case, the story should have been about using science to discourage people from social unrest, as in Brave New World, not to discourage them from raping and killing.)
But that still wasn't enough for him. So he gave Alex one sympathetic trait: Alex loves the music of Beethoven. Then he made the behaviorist psychologists do their conditioning while playing the music of Beethoven in the background. That didn't even make sense; pairing the images of violence that they were trying to condition him against with the music of Beethoven would make him enjoy violence more, rather than less, according to their theories. But when they succeeded in temporarily making Alex dislike both raping and Beethoven, Burgess then shouted, "You see! They made him hate Beethoven (and raping)! They're BAD!"
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
As I wrote in a previous blog, this story's argument is that we are helpless against morally-rationalized mob persecution. A small town college administrator must hide the facts about his life because American society is too prejudiced to be trusted with the truth. He falsified his life story, which would ordinarily be considered immoral; but he was justified, because he would have been persecuted unjustly for the truth. Near the end of his life, though, he is instead persecuted unjustly on a charge that would have been dismissed people have known the truth about him.
But, the consequences of this persecution, even in the scenario that the writer invented to show how bad it was, just aren't that bad. The guy resigns from his job, and is looked down on by a bunch of people whom he's better off without anyway.
So Roth added a subplot: The 75-year-old administrator is dating a 35-year-old woman. He has to hide this from the town, too, because people under 75 don't approve of 75-year-olds having sex.
But this wasn't bad enough either. So Roth added a crazy Vietnam vet ex-husband of the woman, who kills the main character. So now we see that the tragic outcome of all this prejudice and intolerance was the innocent main character's death. OR WAS IT?
No. It wasn't. The main character's death was caused by a stereotyped psychotic Vietnam vet, which was sneakily bundled together with all of the lesser persecutions by the townsfolk. The incident which had the greatest dramatic effect, which is supposed to be a part of the theme of persecution, is not an incidence of persecution at all. It subtly, dishonestly says that small-minded persecution will kill you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The plot of Gatsby is: Gatsby falls in love with Daisy, but isn't rich enough to marry her. He goes off to seek his fortune, becomes fabulously wealthy, and returns, but Daisy is married. So every night he stares at the light of her house from across the bay. Then he dies, having everything, and nothing.
At first I thought that this story cheated because Gatsby's death appears to be due to a freak case of mistaken identity. But Azar Nafisi, in Reading Lolita in Tehran, p. 131, says that Gatsby's death is his own fault, indirectly, for loving foolishly, because it is Daisy who, in her usual reckless and careless way, runs down and kills Myrtle and then lets Gatsby take the blame for it. So this story doesn't cheat.
Voltaire, Candide
Candide is a counter argument against the Enlightenment theological/philosophical claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The plot of Candide is as follows: Bad things happen to good people. The good people look to the Lord for help. Worse things happen to the good people. Repeat.
This would ordinarily be seen as cheating. Voltaire wanted to argue that God does not, in fact, protect good people from bad things, and that one can easily imagine worlds in which things turned out better than in this one. So one could argue that he just made those bad things happen, and that they wouldn't have in real life.
But they did. Voltaire, being a rather clever fellow, realized his argument would be invalid unless he described bad things that had actually happened to (presumably) good, or at least not particularly bad, people. So he based some of the incidents in Candide on true stories of the Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years' War. He tried not to cheat, at least not as much as he could have. (Though the end of Jordan179's long long comment is correct.)
How is this any different from any of the others, though? The situation was clearly absurd, and we actually have empirical, real-world evidence that Rand's philosophy doesn't actually work in real life; when the use tried to create a very libertarian country early on, it failed, and they had to create a much more centralized, consolidated power for the US to actually function.
Isn't there being a good outcome cheating in the first place, because that isn't how the world really works?
I dunno about that. Bilbo had no reason to kill Gollum, nor did he have reason to suspect that the One Ring was anything of great import when he found it; it was a ring that made him invisible. The fact that it was the single most dangerous magical item in all of Middle Earth did not even occur to him.
Him sparing Gollum was an entirely reasonable thing to do; there was no particular reason for him to murder him, and he may have put himself in danger by doing so.
Indeed, it is an oversimplification to say that it was all that one event; indeed, they repeatedly showed him kindness, and the books showed that it was actually working, and what really ended it was that Sam treated him harshly, even when he was starting to repent and become a better person, driving him back into badness. It wasn't just Bilbo; Frodo also was very kind to him despite him not deserving it.
It is true that Gollum accidentally saved Middle Earth, but he had been purposefully helping them previously and had shown signs of recovering from being who and what he was. And indeed, the idea that showing mercy to others can work out in your favor later on when they become better people as a result actually does work to some extent in the real world; indeed, if you look at Earth, you see that World War II in Europe was caused by everyone screwing over Germany at the end of World War I. When the Germans were showed more kindness after the second World War, despite being vastly worse during it, they became a much nicer place; the same is true of Japan. It is true that we broke them before we fixed them, but they're much better countries for the mercy we showed them, and are now our allies.
Harry Potter
Argument: Death isn't so bad.
Evidence: Harry sacrifices himself to destroy one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, and everything turns out all right in the end.
Cheating: Harry doesn't actually die. He lives, he kills Voldemort, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Without cheating: Harry dies and Neville destroys the last Horcrux, which is good. But then Voldemort takes over the world again, which is bad. And neither Dumbledore nor Harry is around to stop him this time, which is even worse.
It comes down to that "plausibility" argument from one of the critics of "The Giver".
Whether this is obtained through cheating, ideological fallacy, outright lying, mere lack of logic, wishfull thinking, or ignorance, one thing is true: Most readers care more about the narrative which frames an argument than the argument itself or how it is presented.
2188612 One of you is confusing Frodo and Bilbo. Cuz both Frodo and Bilbo spared Gollum.
Bilbo when he stole the ring and decided to jump over Gollum rather than stab him in the back.
Frodo, on the other hand, had the opportunity to kill Gollum in Two Towers, after Gollum had assaulted he and Sam already, and shown himself to be dangerous. I believe this is what Bad Horse is talking about.
But it makes for a great libretto--including the only aria in praise of syphilis:
Men worship Venus everywhere
As may be plainly seen:
The decorations which I bear
Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre
And gained in service of our fair
And universal Queen!
2188612
I'm not sure "more kindness" is quite the same way I'd put it. We did rebuild Germany following World War II, but we also occupied it for roughly forever and encouraged the formation of a culture that's scared to death of its own nationalism. And, for that matter, there's also the factor of a serious external threat—the Soviet Union—that meant that Germany really had to get on board with our agenda.
Most of this is true for Japan as well.
2188612
I think (and he may certainly correct me here) that Bad Horse's point is that Atlas Shrugged's outcomes flow logically and naturally from the way the story works. It's something of a non sequitur to say that Rand was wrong. Of course she might be wrong, but Bad Horse isn't talking about intrinsic implausibility, he's talking about arbitrary interference in the details of the fictional world to push a certain viewpoint without actually demonstrating it.
2188612
As 2188680 said, you're thinking of Bilbo.
True. But IIRC correctly, they eventually arrived at a point where Gollum turned on Frodo & tried to kill him, and they had no way to stop him from doing it again, and the entire world's fate was in the balance, and they let him go. At least, that's how others remember the story. I only bring it up because people have brought it up to me in that way, as a story about the virtues of mercy.
The idea wouldn't even be on the table if it didn't work out sometimes. But Tolkien artificially constructed a situation in which mercy to one undeserving person was judged to outweigh a serious threat to the lives of everyone in the entire world, and of everyone to come.
2188702 I can believe that Rand thought her libertarian paradise would work. Her model might be wrong, but it's not, at least, absurdly improbable.
I can't believe, however, that Tolkien thought that all expressions of mercy were likely to result in accidentally saving the world, except in a world with a merciful God such as Tolkien believed in. If you're already a Catholic, and so is everyone reading your book, then, okay, it's a fair argument. But smuggling in the Catholic God as an unstated postulate is at best faulty logic.
2188702
I'm not sure I agree. BH is saying that in a good story, a story's plot is consistent with its author's argument; moreover, the plot must be plausible. An author is "cheating" when they use an implausible plot to justify their argument.
So Tolkien cheats to justify deontology by having Gollum save Middle Earth when he should not be expected to by the rules of that setting. And Rowling cheats to justify embracing death by having Harry save his world when he should not be expected to by the rules of that setting.
Is Rand cheating to justify Objectivism when she makes her libertarians successful? Well, the setting of Atlas Shrugged is supposed to be reality, so whether Rand is cheating or not depends on one's perception of the plausibility of libertarianism as a successful economic strategy.
2188640
I dunno if Voldemort would have won there; without his horcruxes, he would have been vulnerable to being killed, and at the end, in the final battle, he was facing a bunch of very angry wizards, and not all of his Death Eaters were perfectly loyal to him.
2188702
But it isn't arbitrary; we've established in MLP, repeatedly, that the magic of friendship (and love) are more powerful than any other kind of magic in the universe. It is intrinsic to the construction of the universe.
Ayn Rand's story is told in a not-real world as well.
2188769
Right right, my bad. Fixed the post.
Thing was, though, they took pity on Gollum because he was pathetic, and because he kind of destroyed himself already; yeah, he didn't deserve it, but them giving him mercy was shown to be working until he felt betrayed by them.
He actually joined the party IIRC by attacking them, and they subdued him but didn't kill him, and felt sorry for him so made him swear an oath to help them. He then lead them for quite a ways until they were captured, and he felt betrayed when Frodo helped Faramir capture him (because Faramir would have murdered him outright otherwise). He later betrayed them to Shelob, but felt bad about it and almost backed out of doing it before Sam was mean to him again.
They did spare him again towards the end after another attack from him on Mount Doom, but they felt that he was too pathetic to actually do anything to them. And they were actually right; Frodo got up the mountain long before Gollum did, and if he had just chucked in the ring on the spot, it would have been over and sparing Gollum wouldn't have mattered at all.
Sure, one could argue that the ending was contrived, but on the other hand, it was Gollum's own lust for the ring which destroyed him in the end.
2188805
Voldemort did not rely on his Horcruxes during his previous reign (barring that one unfortunate incident with a prophesied infant), not even when he fought Dumbledore, the greatest wizard of his time and possessor of the Elder Wand. His mortal status would not likely have made a difference in this reimagined Battle of Hogwarts, especially if he became the master of the Elder Wand by killing Harry.
Voldemort would have taken over Hogwarts, securing his hold over the wizarding world (having already taken over the Ministry of Magic), and then made more Horcruxes ASAP. He might even have been smarter about it this time and turned a spacecraft into a Horcrux before launching it beyond the reach of his few remaining opposers. Harry Potter would have ended
with a very Dark Lordon a very dark note had Rowling not made Harry survive that Killing Curse in the Forbidden Forest.One problem with claiming that a story is making an argument badly is that you first have to convince people that the argument you read was the one intended. Otherwise, it's easy for people to claim that you misread or misunderstood a story. You could claim that having readers misunderstand a story suggests that the story was badly written, but a story is not a proof, every lemma isn't necessary going to be correct, and a story could easily reach unintended audiences.
I think you misread the argument in Star Wars. The Force is part of the world's fantasy, its premise, and is therefore not the conclusion of any useful argument it might be making. I think the argument Lucas was going for was that good people are inherently good (and maybe that bad people are inherently bad). Anakin was good, and so he could not help but do the right thing in the end.
I think you misunderstood the LoTR argument for the same reason, but I haven't taken the time to figure out what its actual argument might be. Same for the FiM S4 ending, though I have taken the time to think about that one.
I do not accept the premise that every story is an argument.
Some stories are simply sound and fury, signifying nothing. They exist to entertain, to provide simple wish fulfillment, and it is ridiculous to read meaning or message into them.
I certainly think this of Star Wars - it means nothing. Nothing at all. The Force is bullshit, the space drives are bullshit, everything is magic, everything is fluff and caricature purely for fun. If Star Wars has any argument at all, it is this: Old Time Adventure Movie Serials Were Hella Cool To George Lucas' Generation. And I think that if we grant this to be an argument, hundreds of billions of dollars of success support it robustly.
The argument in The Lord Of The Rings is not about Gollum, nor cosmic reward. The only argument in The Lord Of The Rings is, at best, 'Friendship Is Awesome'. That's it. That is the only meaning in the entire thing. Tolkien wanted to create the lost mythology of ancient England, because whatever was believed was lost to Roman occupation. During this effort, his best-ever-friend-of-all-time, C.S. Lewis managed to slowly convert him from atheism to a vague form of something-close-to-Anglicanism. This is the same friend that talked him into publishing his novels at all. In deference to his best friend, he added Christianized bits to his originally pagan mythology - thus the Valar, and the whole 'angelic' aspect to his cosmology, and finally, to the side issue of sparing Gollum being rewarded. That was a minor thing, and a red herring in terms of what small meaning exists in the stories.
Frodo was Tolkien, and Sam was Lewis, and the only meaning was a reference to how Lewis supported Tolkien emotionally during several bad times in his life. That... is the 'argument'.
Basically, while some of your arguments make sense, they do not apply to these two works above; your premise that literature is an argument simply isn't always true. Sometimes, hell, a lot of the time, a story exists only to offer a cheap thrill, or just for the hell of it. Star Wars doesn't have anything to say: Lucas himself is clear on that point. It exists to be 'cool'. That's it. The Lord Of The Rings exists because one language scholar wondered what a pre-Roman mythology might look like for the British Isles... and then he got sidetracked by his friendship with a raving Anglican.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... and sometimes a work of literature is just something to pass the empty time between birth and a pointless death in a meaningless universe.
Then again, I suppose trying to read imagined 'arguments' into entertainment is... a way to pass the empty time... so... that works too, I guess.
2188840
The main problem with the Elder Wand is that the only people we ever really heard about using it were all ridiculously powerful wizards anyway, which makes me wonder just how awesome it really was. Dumbledore did beat someone who was using the Elder Wand against him, after all. How useful was it, really?
Also, I'm not sure that launching a horcrux into space would be wise; it seems like something that would seem like a good idea at the time, but horcruxes weren't really designed to be something which had to deal with distances at which the speed of light is an appreciable issue. Launching a part of your soul out into space might cause all sorts of really weird, bad things to happen to you when it starts getting too far away.
2188953
Authors have beliefs. Those beliefs are encoded in their stories whether or not they were added intentionally. This blog post refers only to a certain class of stories, ones that seem to argue for some ideal. Those ideals are things that authors seem to honestly believe for reasons at least partially explained by the story. This blog post is a stab at trying to find those ideals and reasons, and a stab at using them to try to understand why some stories feel more solidly constructed than others.
The logic the book uses to argue for capitalism and attack socialism is impeccable. Rand's philosophy has flaws, but primarily in ontology -- she assumes that human reason is flawless, when in fact it has both biological limitations and characteristic modes of failure. When it comes to identifying the link between motivation and outcomes -- she's spont-on. But then she saw it happen in the early Soviet Union.
Where the book failed, I think, was that it reduced it down to a very small scale -- in the end it came down to a few guys rescuing one guy from a few other guys. With John Galt holding both the key to the philosohpical argument and the key to the technology which alone could have kept the socialist dictatorship cranking along a few years longer, Rand could do that, but it didn't seem entirely plausible.
In other words, the story would have been more reasonable if the novel were on a bigger scale -- which means also -- if it were longer!
Twilight's Kingdom
What's more, the show doesn't completely explain why "Equestrian magic really works that way." It's not, of course, a complete cheat (which is why the Season Four finale isn't a great flaming crock of horse excretory product) in that clues have been laid down all during this episode that the Elements of Harmony really do work like this -- that the Bearers embody them and provided that they do not break the Harmony can use them in time of need.
But Twilight, as far as I can tell, was simply acting on faith and instinct, against or simply without direct reference to what her reason was telling her. She took a chance and it panned out. However, it can be argued that this was not entirely irrational on her part, because she herself embodies an Element and hence her strong hunches or feelings on the matter may actually be a subconscious understanding of her Element.
There is, of course, a sense in which "friendship is magic" even in reality. "Friendship" is the incorporation of someone else into repeated positive-sum exchanges, and doing so results both in expected and unexpected benefits. It is the long-term "Nice" choice in the Prisoner's Dilemma. However, the benefits of this are not infinite: there are sacrifices too great to make for one's friends. Normally.
Interestingly, Twilight's Kingdom could have also benefited from being a bit longer -- from having more exposition and a clearer explanation as to how Tirek and Discord were rounding up all those Ponies. I could fill in most of the logical gaps watching it, but it still felt about rushed.
The flip side of this, though, is that too much concern for one's friends is an exploitable weakness. Look at the way, for instance, that Iran manipulated the Carter Administration in the Hostage Crisis of 1979-81 -- the crisis would have been over within weeks had Carter stated that American honor, rather than the lives of the hostages, was paramount. And nobody would have tried that tactic against us
It has occurred to me, both from the Season Four finale and from other episodes, that this may be an Equestrian cultural weakness, which her enemies might exploit.
Indeed. The point they miss is that advantageous long-term strategies display their advantages on the average, not in every case. Sometimes choosing the "right" strategy will lead to a bad outcome, sometimes the "wrong" strategy to a good outcome. To take Fluttershy's Night Out, she might have actually met Mr. Right in that bar and benefited from sleeping with him the night she met him. Less probable than what happens, but sometimes one is fortunate.
I would argue that even in the real world, virtuous conduct is usually a better strategy, because it is a longer-term one and the human tendency is usually to think too short-term rather than too long-term. But it's an average, not an every-time sort of thing.
Two present-day science fiction and fantasy writers who handle this well are Harry Turtledove and S. M. Stirling. They often show characters in very stressful situations (expeditions, wars etc.) and sometimes the characters do well by doing right -- and sometimes they just get unlucky and die. These are two writers not afraid to kill off sympathetic characters. And sometimes, outright bastards get lucky and do well too -- which is actually more painful to portray in fiction than the good dying young, because it's harder to romanticize.
I would point out, though, that a general policy of mercy to one's not entirely undeserving foes (and Gandalf may have known Smeagol or at least his culture from before his corruption, so it may have been more a matter of an old friend) often yields unexpected benefits due to the "magic of positive-sum exchanges." That of course was not Tolkien's point -- he was almost explicitly arguing that Divine Destiny arranges to reward the virtuous. Which I'm guessing isn't how it works in reality!
Though, mind you, if there is a psionic power which really exists in that universe which works that way, then that is a fact which of which one should take account. But yes, I agree with you that drawing moral conclusions from wholly imaginary laws of physics is dangerous, or stupid.
What this does accurately portray is that sometimes our subconscious reasoning (hunches) are quicker and more accurate than our conscious calculations. Unfortunately, Star Wars picked an example where this is quite untrue in reality -- computer-controlled targeting systems even in the 1970's were better at targeting than relying on human hunches, and this has become increasingly the case as computer technology has progressed.
This bothers me because it has led us to some serious reasoning flaws in the real-life deployment of anti-missile systems (often derisively termed "Star Wars") -- most of the critics and supporters of such systems have no idea how the geometry, physics, strategies and tactics of high-speed intercepts work, and they don't want to learn. They'd rather "trust their feelings," and their answers are usually not only wrong, but laughably wrong for that reason.
Oh, and BTW -- I've seen it more than once, and The Dam Busters was a great movie. It was also remarkably faithful to the actual history which inspired it.
Wow ... I never actually read this book or saw the movie, but the reasoning there is so faulty I don't know where to begin. It (1) ignores the deterrent, preventative and retributive purposes of justice, (2) wrongly identifies rape and murder as perfectly normal adolescent behavior, and (3) assumes that conditioning cannot produce good results (personally, I think the sort of conditioning they were using based on what I've heard of the story would have good results, mostly because it would be highly "deterrent, preventative and retributive" -- Alex's old friends seeing what happened to Alex would have gone far out of their way not to get caught doing crimes like he did!)
Any adolescent, living in a normal civilian society, who considers rape and murder to be good jolly fun, is psychopathic to sociopathic, and will probably grow up to be a psychopathic to sociopathic adult. Society's job in such cases is to identify them and keep them in prison pretty much forever, so that they don't do any more damage. There's nothing much more one can do with them -- such a person can't really be "reformed" -- at best they'll discover safer ways to harm other people (which sometimes is enough).
This may not have been as well known when Burgess was writing, though, as is today.
Right. It's like writing a story about racism in the Old South, having the main character be persecuted for being black, but survive this persecution -- and then die due to slipping in the bathroom and breaking his neck. This says nothing about whether racism was fatal to blacks in the Old South. Unless the argument is that blacks had slipperier bathroom floors due to racism, that is.
What's more, his "long-term plan" was inherently flawed in that the woman he loved was essentially unworthy. One could more reasonably draw the conclusion "be careful whom you love" as "wealth is pointless." Or that there are classes of things -- love and life, for example -- which wealth can't reliably secure for oneself -- which is admittedly true.
Voltaire, Candide
I would say that Voltaire at least semi-cheats in that he has the bad things happen over and over again to the same three characters. What's more, many of these bad things permanently scar them, to the point where they can't even enjoy the semi-happy ending they've earned by the end of the book all that much.
Real life would probably kill any people who suffered as much as Candide, Pangloss and Cunegonde. The novel tortures them -- they suffer rapes, hangings, eviscerations, piracy, and all sorts of abuse again and again, each time almost being killed, and usually with sadistic Hope Spots. Admittedly, this is meant as a deliberate Deconstruction of the more common sort of picaresque romance in which they would have narrowly escaped these horrible events in order to have their virtues rewarded at the end.
2188612
Which counts as genuine tragedy, because Sam was cruel to Smeagol not because of Sam's viciousness, but because of his (virtuous) desire to protect his dear friend Frodo from harm. The novel also makes the (subtle) point that Smeagol and Deagol were similar to Frodo and Sam, save that the earlier pair encountered something too strong for them right away, and both of them failed the moral test.
Star Trek does this kind of cheating all the time and it really bugs me sometimes. Voyager is particularly bad.
Frequently it sets up a moral conundrum where in a sane universe the characters would either have to comopromise their usual moral guidelines for the greater good or have tragedy happen and then out of nowhere, some deus ex machina arrives that lets them have their cake and eat it, too, usually via technobabble. This is then assumed to indicate that they were right not to compromise all along, rather than that they are stupidly lucky and nearly got many people killed.
2188959
If nothing else, when you're killed, does your new wraith self form at your body or at your horcrux. If the latter, I'd really think launching one into space to be a bad idea.
Computers have been better than people at managing en-route air traffic and avoiding mid-air collisions for decades, but we still have humans do it. One mistake made by a computer is considered unacceptable. Know how many mistakes major enough to require paperwork human air traffic controllers make each year? Over ten thousand.
2189393
That's a good point. We tend to greatly distrust computers because they lack our moral sense and self-referential sapient thought, but we forget that morality and sapience are not all that relevant to highly-mathematical and routine computation.
2189233 Oh, yeah. Dr. Who is also guilty of that.
Never, NEVER DELETE THIS BLOG POST!!!!
2189613
True. Doctor Who relies too much on deus ex machina technobabble even when it isn't making morality statements, though. Not all the time, of course, some of their better resolutions are brilliantly set up ahead of time (I'm fond of the 'stall the enemy until the artificial gravity field, which was plot relevant earlier, fails due to the power drain, which was brought up as plot relevant earlier, and leads to them falling into the temporal rift, which we've been setting up as plot relevant all season' resolution for example-- less fond of some other chunks of that episode, though).
It's like many writers can't grasp "well it all worked out" doesn't mean you made the right decision.
2190082
I think they can't, or don't want to. It takes a particularly analytical mind to grasp that success does not always mean that it was deserved by one's wisdom, nor failure earned by one's folly. Or why a story that ends with "But suddenly, when all seemed lost, the heroes won by an absurd coincidence" is hardly satisfying.
2188959
I agree that the Elder Wand may not be that powerful and that Horcux-launching may not be foolproof. These are good points that you raise. That said, should I take your lack of major objections as agreement that Voldemort would have won the Battle of Hogwarts without the Chosen One to stop him?
2189263
When his Killing Curse rebounded, Voldemort "was ripped from [his] body, [he] was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost... but still, [he] was alive". He then fled to Albania. When Harry killed Quirrell, whom Voldemort was possessing, Voldemort's soul fled the dying body. Horcrux-launching sounds plausible, at least.
We know for a literal fact that the world in LOTR is structured to make good outcomes come from virtuous decisions because when Eru sings the world into being and Morgoth tries to corrupt the song, Eru just weaves that into a more perfect harmony. Any potentially evil or foolish act can only ultimately serve the cause of justice and good outcomes, so any good-hearted act also serves justice and good outcomes, presumably in a more direct way.
Is that "cheating"? Maybe, insofar as any deontological argument cheats when it appeals to divine intervention. But the premise is right there in the Silmarillion.
2190310
Honestly, at that point, he was facing down the sword of griffindor (a magical artifact of unknown power) and a large number of angry wizards, not to mention the fact that the loyalty of several of his Death Eaters was wavering; in the confusion of the battle, a killing curse to the back might well have happened, or he would have been killed by Neville instead, or another Hogwarts professor might have gotten him. It is hard to say, really; he was supposedly a great wizard, and could face down Dumbledore, but on the other hand, that doesn't make him invincible any more than Dumbledore was, and he could be taken by surprise or tricked just like anyone else.
Indeed, given the general history of the Elder Wand, it is likely that he would have gotten backstabbed sooner or later regardless.
As a reader I only see this as an issue when it causes internal contradictions (which might include unrealistic events in areas where the scenario is supposed to be realistic).
For example, in the case of Star Wars, I don't really see a problem with Luke using the force instead of his targeting computer, given that the movie had already invested time showing that the force can grant its user a perception advantage unmatched by technology with a capacity to act on it by moving with prescience-grade reflexes (such as using a bladed weapon to parry and reflect lasers), and on top of that the depicted targeting system was mainly a visual assistance.
Whether the internal rules of the work are bad or misleading is, for me, more related to theme, and not really a case of "cheating".
2191311 I'm not talking about internal consistency. I'm talking about thematic consistency. A theme refers back to the real world. A thematic inconsistency means mapping the story back into the real world creates inconsistencies.
As some mentioned in the comments to that post, the reason it still works as a friendship lesson for the real world is that the target audience for MLP is comparatively unlikely to ever find themselves in a situation where they have to choose between helping friends and saving the entire rest of the world, so there will be very few situations under which charging headlong into battle will be the more morally-responsible option than carving out and protecting your own little chunk of the world, being there for those you care about. These kids aren't going to be fighting the Tireks of the world, they're going to be fighting the Diamond Tiaras and Sunset Shimmers.
So, why show Twilight choosing friendship over power when she's battling Tirek? The answer to that is simple: To the target audience of MLP, fighting the Diamond Tiaras and Sunset Shimmers of the world feels like fighting the Tireks. It will feel like they're fighting for the fate of the world; they won't have the perspective to "rationally calculate the costs and benefit to their friends." So, if the show had had Twilight be willing to sacrifice her friends just to blast Tirek, the audience would think, "Well, given that no one in the world has ever suffered the way my current schoolyard nemesis is inflicting pain upon me, anyone I have to hurt or alienate in order to trample them is justified for the greater good."
2191594
By that standard, Atlas Shrugged is a flagrant cheater, since it blatantly misrepresents the way the world works, the way humans behave and the capabilities of the almighty Free Market.™
Then tell them a story about Diamond Tiara and Sunset Shimmer, not about Tirek.
It's a common and dangerous habit for adults to lie to kids because they think that the lie, after being filtered through the supposed stupidity of the child, will be closer to the truth than the truth would have been.
bad horse
no
not everything needs to have an argument(though you can find one in everything is you look hard enough) and saying that they must have one, and then saying something is bad because the argument you see is bad or poorly executed, is a logical fallacy.
Hell, meet a handful of other arguments one could take from LotR if we didn't want the one you chose:
One should always stand by his friends and allies: see Gimli, Aragorn and Legolas, Pippin and Merry, and Frodo and Sam. This point receives a strong argument in the moment of Boromir's death, as he dies, not because he is outnumbered, but because he is alone, and he is alone because he tried to 'betray' Frodo.
One should know when to leave, and escape those who would be as a lodestone: The fellowship makes great progress early on, but the weight of Frodo's burden quickly becomes too much for the party, culminating in the betrayal of Boromir. As a result, Frodo leaves the companions, and heads out on his own, taking only Sam, his loyal friend, with him.
Wow, those points both make really good arguments, and could be seen as being completely honest!
But wait, they mean opposite things, don't they?
This is the problem with literary theory. It often assumes you can take a single event(Gollum dying in the volcano, Frodo leaving the fellowship, etc) and from it judge the tone of the book, when certain themes and ideas only come up from certain sections- indeed, I am bored by a story that clearly tells the story of a single 'moral' tale, because humans are complicated creatures, and we're hardly going to only be able to find one moral in something. You've fallen into the trap of assuming you know what the author was trying to accomplish with his writing, when even professors of literary theory often get this wrong(I recall an anecdote about a writer sitting in on a class about one of his own books. He failed the course, because his interpretation was 'all wrong').
Some people write to tell a moral or teach a lesson, and their works should be judged as such: Lord of the Flies should be judged by how it portrays its message, and by the contents of its message. Lord of the Rings, however, exists to tell a story, and thus must be judged by the qualities of its story(Which, admittedly, involves a cadre of messages- I never said literature was simple).
Or shall we discuss how 'mortality report' is about the potential benefits of shirking your duties and giving them to someone else, and how it cheats in this message by ending before we see the outcome?
2193566
Which is why I said not every book is an argument.
But many are.
The Lord of the Rings is big, and contains many, many such thematic arguments. I didn't say the book was bad. I said that one argument was cheating, and it was.
No. I try to figure out what a book says. The author may or may not have understood what it said. I may have come up with a different but equally-valid interpretation. Or I may be wrong.
Analyzing books is like writing books: You're going to make a lot of mistakes, and you're never going to get anything completely right. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
Do you mind if I say a little bit about the whole sparing Gollum bit? I agree that it's probably 'cheating', but I feel like it's a bit more interesting than it's being portrayed as. (though, honestly, I've yet to read a book that doesn't 'cheat' in making its thematic point - - at the very least by arranging things such that its philosophy will be proven correct)
Somehow, I get the sense that the whole Gollum plot has entered our culture as a sort of celebration of sweeping sentimentalism and grand visions of mercy and redemption. In fact, though, the whole thing plays out according to small, unpredictable, interpersonal sentiments. Bilbo doesn't spare Gollum's life out of a commitment to good or redemption or harm-not-doing, but because Gollum seemed pathetic to him, and he couldn't bring himself to do it. Frodo's relationship with Gollum is a bit more complicated, but it really isn't characterized by sweeping morality. He pities Gollum as well (once he sees him). He doesn't want to disappoint Gandalf. He may see something of himself in Gollum (as a former ring-bearer). He is, in any event, like Bilbo, just basically not a killer.
And, in point of fact, Gollum is not redeemed, and saves the world through clumsiness and happenstance. Tolkien could have written that any way he wanted, and I think he chose to do it that way for a reason. Specifically, I think that the theme of the Gollum plot is enunciated by Gandalf (author surrogate and dispenser of wisdom extraordinaire): "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
In other words, you don't know what's gonna happen so maybe don't kill people. I dunno. I just like the kind of . . . pettiness of it. Nobody involved in the whole Gollum debacle has a particularly good reason for doing anything they do, but it all sorta works out. I think that's supposed to be the point.
2194986 It's certainly dramatic. I think it's Gandalf's speech, though, that really sends it over the top. It's self-contradictory, too: The real reason for not killing given is that it isn't up to us to give people what they deserve--which is entirely on a different plane from whether or not it will work out for the better. That's another aspect of the cheating--saying that we shouldn't care what the consequences are, but then having them work out the way we wanted.
2188953 That's an unexpected response, coming from the admin of The Conversion Bureau group.
Plenty of stories don't have deliberate themes or arguments, and some don't even have accidental themes. Genre fiction can have standard arguments that are so rote they hardly count, like the "true love can reform a rogue" argument in romance novels. Tom Clancy's stories are very thin on themes and arguments. Those types of stories aren't usually celebrated as great stories (unless they're comedies, but a thematic comedy like Catch-22 will still usually beat them).
I think Lucas' intent is not relevant to Star Wars, because he deliberately chose to use the Hero's Journey as his model. That means he chose to use a form that requires themes and a moral argument. It doesn't require him to have been sincere about it for the work to have those properties, any more than the architect of a cathedral needs faith.
The Lord of the Rings is an extreme case of an author filling his work to the brim with lots of thematic arguments, and often being explicit about it by having Gandalf or some wise old ruler giving us a speech about the thematic implications. IMHO most imitations fail because their authors are just trying to entertain, rather than trying to proselytize, so they lack that gravitas.
2194074
If that is what you were trying to say, then I apologize, as I misinterpreted the initial writing.
Since litterally anything I write from here will likely become a justification or excuse for that mistake, I'll leave it here, and express my hopes that we can have positive discourse like this in the future, hmm?
(Side note- yeah, you're right. That argument, if you're looking at if it was 'cheating', would have to be. All the aid that Gollum gives them is by happenstance, and he almost causes their failure repeatedly)
2192457
Well, as George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Parables are not lies because they describe events that have never happened."
(ETA: no, I'm not espousing Batman-esque "hurt people for the greater good" views here, I just think this is analogy-policing)
2195369
Don't tell me you believe all the lies and slander. I write stories - entertaining, emotional stories - it's hateful trolls who invent some complicated agenda and apply it to them. If anything, my big point for the last two and a half years is that stories are just fun... and that no writer should be bullied or terrorized for telling stories.
I seriously fear a lot of people here cannot tell fiction from reality. And that is a very scary thing.
2196784 I'm not talking about lies and slander, but what you wrote on the group page about what constitutes a Conversion Bureau story, which a conversion bureau admin called the group's "mission statement".
You have a mission statement for your fic group. Another word for that is "agenda".
IMHO, you've been explicit, in your stories, in creating your group, in moderating it, and in your posts and comment, about saying that TCB stories have, at their core, the ideas that humans are deeply flawed, that one can imagine them being perfected (as symbolized by ponies), and that being perfected might seem scary and difficult. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. If someone were to write a TCB story where, let's say, human flaws were in fact caused by evil green kryptonite that is not present in Equestria, that story would be cheating at making TCB's core argument.
2197128
Hmm. You make valid points. I concede!
2197388
You can't do that! This is the internet!
2198248
Oh. I forgot.
Um... let's see now... Hitler! IM RITE AN U R STOOPID! and... more Hitler, I guess?
Did I do okay?
2199097 No, no, you can't jump straight to Hitler without even trading personal insults!
Look, don't take this personally, but maybe you should visit 4chan for a bit, then come back and try again.
2199406
I can't insult you now - you like Python!
You bloody raging, toffynosed queen.