I am afraid, svalbard, that I was rude to you the last time I posted. You haven't said so, but I apologize just the same.
But I get impatient when people dismiss it all as a matter of taste, or something that doesn't/won't affect us at all unless we choose to read it. And when I am impatient, I am not always as polite as I should be.
Here is what annoys me. So many readers and writers (not you, specifically, and maybe not you at all) are so inconsistent. On the one hand they'll say, it is important to write about these things, it would be untrue to the period if we didn't write about them (does the period care?), we must never lose sight of the terrible things that people will do. On the other hand they'll say, it's just a book, if you don't like it don't read it. So is it important when people write about these things (and if it is important, than why?) or is it really just about what people like to read?
Also, people will say, writers shouldn't censor themselves. They should write from the gut. No one should criticize something they haven't read. But this doesn't, apparently, apply to books that "sugar-coat" things. If a writer's gut says to write about characters who do heroic things instead of concentrating on all the horrors, then their gut is seemingly wrong. And plenty of the people who say that it is wrong to criticize "grimdark" if you don't read it (convenient for the writers if you have to go out and buy all of these books, or borrow them from the library in order to criticize the trend) will blithely go on to condemn fantasies they've never read because of all those noble plowboys who go out to save the world. Apparently, every book that depicts actual good guys defeating actual bad guys starts with a boy on a farm. I haven't noticed that myself, but maybe I'm not reading the right (or the wrong) books.
And then there are the readers who act self-righteous about reading the dark stuff. Like they have faced the truth and the world is a better place because of it. Life is hard, life is mean, all the world over and all through history people have done vicious and terrible things. We need to know that.
So I would like to say to these people (and possibly none of them are taking part in this conversation, but in case they are lurking and reading this) now that you know it, what the f--- are you going to do about it? Are you going to volunteer for a rape hotline? Will you lobby your congressman or member of parliament to introduce a bill about rape in the military? Are you going to pressure your local authorities to be more vigorous in their attempts to shut down sex-trafficking involving minors? Maybe you will; maybe you have. But most readers are just going to kick back, drink another beer (or whatever) and pick up the next book by their favorite writer.
It used to be, when writers wrote about the inhumane things that people do to each other, it would fire readers -- some readers at least -- with indignation. They'd demand that the poor laws be changed and the workhouses closed; they'd see that schools were reformed and young boys were no longer roasted over fires by the older ones; they'd make laws against meat companies turning their workers into sausages. But who ever decided to go out and change the world because they read a dark fantasy? Maybe they have. I've never heard of it, but I don't know everything. (Tolkien, on the other hand, actually did fire people with purpose. Save the planet. Stand up for justice. Don't let the buy guys win. OK, so mostly people didn't do anything, or if they did it was just to join a commune and smoke a few joints, maybe take part in a protest -- but the impulse was there. And some of them did join the peace corps and open clinics and work for legal aid.)
When the rapists and torturers are the main characters, and the (not nearly as bad as that, but still he hurts a lot of innocent people) bad guy is someone you come to love -- because you finally learn his backstory and understand why he became that way -- doesn't that set the bar for decent, humane, honorable, compassionate, ethical behavior pretty low? Do readers think, these books haven't influenced me to go out and rape anybody, so I'm a good person? Is not-having-committed-any-atrocities the new "good"? I'm merely asking this for information. If we think, that's the way the world is, that's the way it's always been, then isn't that an excuse for not doing anything about it? I think it's so complacent. I think it's an invitation to laziness. And I think it's also self-deceiving, because by reading these books, no one is actually facing up to what the world is like. It's all dressed up with fantasy trappings; it's not like the real world at all. If we want to know about the real world, then why don't we read about it, instead of about imaginary kingdoms in imaginary worlds?
What is wrong with reading and writing about a society that is better than ours, or at least better than ours was? We're more humane than we were five hundred years ago, so it is possible to build a society on something other than rape and pillage (even if there are parts of the world even now where wars and famines and extremism have caused society to deteriorate to that level). People are also capable of compassion, of sacrifice, of moral courage -- if they weren't, we wouldn't be here. The human race would have exterminated itself back in the Bronze Age (if not earlier). And let's not pretend that everything is relative, that morality is a social construct. There are some things that really are bad and some things that really are good. Some things are relative and some things are absolutes, and let's not mix them up, even though our complex motivations may mix them up in practice.
But where would be the conflict? I can hear (wholly imaginary and rhetorical) people asking. There are plenty of things that characters could struggle with. Natural disasters. Dragons and monsters (if you're going to have characters riding around on them in the "realistic" books, then why not make them a major threat?). Malevolent supernatural entities. (Of course that's coming a bit close to the battle between good and evil, isn't it? But it does provide characters with something to test themselves against.)
If we don't want to write about worlds where nobody is raping anybody or threatening to rape anybody, why can't we at least make our protagonists better than that? Can't they be struggling to maintain (not to attain, but to maintain) their fundamental decency in a chaotic world. Why is that "politically correct" instead of just the way some people are sometimes? I don't say that protagonists have to be perfect, but can't they provide us with a little something to aspire to? Can't they do that without getting their heads chopped off in the first book?
Why is it so hard to think up a story, a story that the writer wants to write (surely we all have more than one story in us trying to get out?) where it is possible to frighten readers, move readers, make readers cry, without using the easy, commonplace fantasy shockers like rape?
This has taken a long time to write, and probably seventeen people have posted since I began, and they've already said some of this, or said things that will make them think I am directing this specifically at them, when I didn't get a chance yet to read their posts at all.
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This debate has being conducted(by internet standards) in a civilized manner.
