On the one hand, our stories teach us some fucked up morals. On the other hand, they show us how we truly feel when we're not being scrutinized.
Beauty.
When you're being interviewed, what do you say about beauty? Everyone is beautiful. Everyone is beautiful in their own way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is in the heart.
Now what do our stories tell us about beauty? All maidens are fair. All white knights have rugged good looks and a chiseled physique. All wicked people (stepmothers, sisters, queens) are physically ugly, having straggly hair and warts and moles and wrinkles.
So what's the deal? It's ok to call people ugly if they're also ugly on the inside? If it's the inside that counts, why do we even bother describing people's outsides?
A lot of our classic stories have screwed up lessons. The Ugly Duckling. What's the moral of the story? If people call you ugly, make damn sure that you end up gorgeous when you grow up just to show them up? That's an episode of Maury Povich. I hardly consider that something to aspire to.
But still, does this not speak volumes about us? Our stories reveal the things we are not even able to put in words. We like attractive people and we hate uggos. We can even define beautiful people as those with light, perfect skin, long hair (generally blond). Ugly people are pretty much the opposite.
I know that the standard argument is that, no matter how much we depict real life in our writing, we are still making art. And art isn't exactly real. A person's external characteristics are a shorthand explanation of their inner qualities (unless you are telling a story whose specific point is that we shouldn't judge people based on their looks). In that case, you simply make your character look the part. Heck, if you let your external appearances define their inner qualities, you can save a lot of time by not describing those inner qualities. You can even justify it by saying that you are showing instead of telling.
I still think it's a fucked up lesson.
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Fairy tales actually used to depict lessons you'd want your kids to learn.
ReplyDeleteDon't cheat death. Or it'll seriously fuck you in the end.
Don't be greedy. You'll get nothing in return.
Of course, these stories were filled with a lot of violence. Not something you want to give your kid at night so he can go to bed over, so they got changed. Greedy dwarves become hardworking jovial souls and they're just waiting for prince charming to wake up the princess, and all that.
Although we call it fiction so that people don't assume the stories are true, real life still needs t obe accurately depicted. I think the real reason that Firefly was so great was because it was actually one of the hardest science fictions out there. There was no FTL. This isn't out-right said but you can tell its in the background and the writer cared enough to be realistic.
If you detract away from science too much in sci-fi, you get garbage. Much the same way if you were to put the story's setting in L.A. and not know half the city, or the culture.
Real life needs to be depicted somewhat because its how we relate to fiction, which is what keeps us from putting the story down. I read a horror novel where everyone started turning into demons, physically, and stopped reading because the whole demon-turning thing just made no sense to me. Basically why nowadays any zombie movies are due to a biological outbreak and any horror movies are really just some creepy serial killer pretending to be a ghost, and you know, not, actually, a ghost.