As a firm supporter of the ideia that not all stories need to be morality tales and not all main charachters need to be likeable and that we do have a lot of classics and myths proving it, I still find really funny how a small part of writingbr acts as if every modern story IS a morality tale and as if every classic wasn't.
For instance I saw someone using Dickens and specifically Scrooge to reinterate both points and what? A lot of Dickens stories (I have not read all his books so I'm not going to say all) were morality tales. But more importantly while Scrooge starts as an unlikeable main characther his whole characther exists to become better and learn a lesson, he is still made to be a characther the audiences empathise, root for and who learns lessons the audience should also learn. We should aspire to became the Scrooge of the end of the book.
I doubt very much that A Christmas Story would be a classic if instead Scrooge decided it was too late for him anyway and remained unchanged. In fact I can even prove it. Because BBC, being BBC, has an edgy dark adaptation of a Christmas Story where Scrooge doesn't change, the series doesn't end happily. And no one remembers it. Not only that but I never found anyone that liked it.
And fictional characther can and were awfull in classic stories but Scrooge is a bad example of that.
