Stories About Bad People

I was originally going to write about children's stories. I think it's messed up how most of the ones in America are all sweet and saccharine, and everything turns out great in the end. I also think it's messed up how we commonly deride classic German fairy tales, for example, because most of them have really awful endings.

But I realized that the key here is not about American versus European, nor is it about children's stories in particular. The real issue is the focus of the story, the quality of the protagonist. Our stories tend to be about good, earnest people who overcome adversity. Their stories tend to be about selfish assholes who end up in a nightmare of their own making.

Our stories also have those bad people in them, but they tend to be antagonists who fall to the wayside, becoming unwashed onlookers when the lovely protagonist reaches the pinnacle.

What I find interesting, though, is that there is such a difference in reception between having a bad person be an antagonist and having them be a protagonist. I'm sure it has to do with our natural tendency to put ourselves in the place of the protagonist. When your story focuses on a good person, then we think of ourselves as that good person and that if we keep being good, we will have similar success. But when your story focuses on a bad person, and awful things happen to them specifically because they were bad, we will make sure not to make the same mistakes (but we also do not assume that we will reach greatness and be lavishly rewarded just because we aren't bad).

We love our dichotomies. A story about a good person must also have a bad person, since you can only be one or the other. But making a story on a bad person tends to change the dichotomy. The other group becomes not-bad-people. And in this vision, where everybody who isn't bad is simply 'not bad' without having to be gloriously good, I think we may find a more realistic (and to me, a more interesting) story.