anyway, the GOT/LOTR discourse.
a recent article captured a point poorly:
this saw a lot of people responding as follows:
this is a weak repetition of a common point in this discourse, which always meets the same response.
I saw a recent interview with GRRM where he said the following:
and cue the same responses:
it's frustrating because nobody trotting out this response seems to understand what the original point is saying.
if someone says 'lotr has absolute evil', responding 'nope, x was just tempted by the ring' is not an answer. we aren't talking about boromir or gollum or whoever. we're talking about the ring itself. about sauron. that's what people mean when they say there is absolute good and bad. you have the embodiment of absolute evil in the room at the time. the fact it impacts other people and corrupts them into its evil is secondary.
first off, please admit that there is absolute evil here, which is what this point are saying. the point is that the bad guy is just bad full stop. this means sauron, not denethor or whoever. this is what they are talking about. you don't get to see inside the head of an orc or haradrin or nazgul or whatever and think these are people with their own motivations. 99% of the bad guys just exist in the plot to be bad guys. you have to accept that.
then you have the good guys, who are broadly good and heroic (where not corrupted by easily identified external evil), and are shown as such because they fight the inherently bad guys so that good can vanquish over evil. that is a certain kind of story. I need you to admit that.
the fact you then establish e.g. characters are by default good but impacted by external absolute evil which corrupts them also does not given much in terms of complexity. if the pure evil villain is just making them more evil by using his external evil powers, that's not a morally grey character. that's not a dilemma, it's a battle. against external evil. just like the ones with the swords.
once you've established the existence of pure evil, it's easy to write what good looks like. a character is good because they stand up to evil. they can be a hero. when you don't have that clear cut bad guy, you have to think about what good looks like, what decisions do they make, how do they treat their enemies etc. that's a very different kind of story. that's what GRRM's on about.