Questionable Grey Morality in Speculative Fiction

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

https://mythcreants.com/blog/how-our-stories-abandon-morality-for-gray-colored-lenses/

I've been thinking about this a lot. I don't know if I agree with all of their case studies, but there's something to be said about muddied waters and forcing a moral ambiguity where it doesn't fit.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Re: Star Trek Discovery:

This is clearly what happened in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. The showrunner told the media that the Klingons would be a complex and nuanced people, but in the show, they attack the Federation without provocation, torture their prisoners, and even eat their fallen enemies. Unsurprisingly, Captain Lorca wants to develop new weapons to fight the Klingons off. Even though the Federation is merely defending itself, and losing, the show depicts weapon development like it’s unethical. This parallels the treatment of the main character, Michael, who everyone insists is responsible for starting the war, when a plain viewing of the premiere shows that her efforts had no effect.

[GreyICE]

The single most famous World War 2 book ever written is a novel named Catch 22. It's so famous that the name has entered the English language as a descriptive phrase. And one of the most famous WW2 movies is Saving Private Ryan, another movie that criticized the allies conduct during WW2. So if they can't think of any media that portrayed the war in a morally grey light. Well. You know you're going to be in for a ride when we start there.

War is a morally grey business. Mass murder doesn't get to be morally clean, not ever. You are killing other human beings, in great numbers. It might be justified. It might be a better outcome than losing the fight and letting the Nazis (or the South, or whoever) win. It might be that killing is the only option you're left with. But it doesn't get to be morally clean. You did evil to prevent a greater evil, and that's morally grey.

The Krill episode in the Orville is the perfect example of that. They killed a ship full of people. Yes, the people were going to kill a colony. Yes, they actually took great risk to save the children. Yes, they were in a situation where all they can do is kill the entire crew of the ship, to save the lives of everyone on the colony. But do they think they will be thanked for that? Or do they think the dead, the children without parents, will be used to show how horrible their enemy is?

McFarlane was clearly taking a shot at Star Trek there. Way, way too often in Star Trek they do the right thing and it benefits them - they save people and those saved people resolve the problem. Here, Mercer did the right thing. And it didn't benefit the "Federation". It didn't resolve the conflict. It didn't change anything. In fact, it might have been more beneficial to the "Federation" to let the children die, let the woman die, and not send back any propaganda at all, not send back any stories of the deaths. He saved the children, to no benefit, no gain, at great personal risk, and received no reward or recognition. The end line makes it clear how morally unambiguous his action was. To do the right thing because it's the right thing, for no benefit, no reward, and no recognition, because it's the right thing to do? That's the most morally unambiguous an action could be. And Mercer's action didn't stop the war, and won't stop the war.

If you ever stop after an action you believe is morally correct and then get mad and go "hey! Where's my reward!" then maybe you're not doing the right thing for the right reasons.


As for the rest... *sigh*. Well, Vampire media is often trash, that's true. Give them that. There's no moral ambiguity to "do we let the mass murderers live so they can kill again, forever." It's just not a very ambiguous situation. But after that, shit, it goes off the deep end.

Discovery:

This is clearly what happened in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. The showrunner told the media that the Klingons would be a complex and nuanced people, but in the show, they attack the Federation without provocation, torture their prisoners, and even eat their fallen enemies. Unsurprisingly, Captain Lorca wants to develop new weapons to fight the Klingons off. Even though the Federation is merely defending itself, and losing, the show depicts weapon development like it’s unethical. This parallels the treatment of the main character, Michael, who everyone insists is responsible for starting the war, when a plain viewing of the premiere shows that her efforts had no effect.

Oh okay, so being attacked justifies all weapons use? Libya attacks the US, we have nukes, we can what? Nuke a city? Two? Maybe just some army bases? We get to use any weapon we want because we're attacked?

War is morally grey. Weapons research is morally grey. That's a fact. If you think you're in a righteous war, one where you're all good and the enemy is all evil, open a fucking history text book and look at the history of every group that insisted they were going to go fight a righteous war as a moral good, and that their enemies were evil.

Another story that provides justification for oppression is the movie Bright. In it, the Orcs are an oppressed group that are obvious stand-ins for Black people. However, the movie clarifies that, long ago, the Orcs used to work for the forces of evil, and that history is used as a reason to oppress them. In the real world, white supremacists do use narratives to justify oppression, but those narratives are absolutely false. Black people did not do anything to provoke white people; we just colonized their lands and enslaved them because we could. Oppression requires no logic other than hatred and selfishness.

I don't even like Bright. It was bad. But this is beyond bad, this travels to a special sort of stupid. They act like the problem with White Nationalism is that they're wrong about history. Yes, that's the issue with White Nationalism, that they're wrong about history!

Hey, what if they weren't? Imperial Japan was the actual fucking worst. Genocide, torture, rape camps, human experimentation, you name it they did it. They were so awful that the Nazi Ambassador to Japan asked them to tone down the mass murder after seeing their war efforts (which they proudly showed him). The Nazi Ambassador. And he was like "okay, wait, woah, what's going on here?"

So if I'm historically accurate in my knowledge of the actions of Imperial Japan is it okay for me to be racist against Japanese people? Is that it? Do I get to be racist because I'm right about history? Or maybe the problem with racism isn't historical fucking accuracy!


This is some stuff people think in their teens and early 20s. I know, I was there. That you'll fight the good fight in the white cloak, unsullied, against the evil. But it's not so. Your hands will get dirty. The people you work with will have dirty hands. No one is morally white, there's no such thing as "morally perfect". It's a childish view of the world. You can work for a good cause, you can even fight for one, but there isn't such a thing as clean hands. You're not all good, and your opponent isn't all evil. You're just trying to do the right thing, and you hold out an olive branch if they turn themselves around and try to do the same.

[CharlesPhipps]

Actually, you guys missed the problem of BRIGHT. Orcs aren't just blacks. They're black Jews.

The "2000 years ago, some orcs did something bad and thus we can hate on them forever" is a direct reference to blood libel for the death of Jesus.

You know, despite the fact Jesus is a Jew. Even this element is underlined with the fact that the leader of the Resistance against the Dark Lord was an orc. The fact the Dark Lord and his inner circle was a bunch of elves also doesn't change the fact that the elves are the Master Race that everyone bends over backward to accommodate.

Which is a parallel to the fact Jesus was executed by the Romans and the Romans persecuted the Jews thereafter.

Mind you, I think it's weird that the movie unambigiously states, "The justifications people have for racism are monstrous and stupid" only to have the response to be, "Justifications for racism are inappropriate to show here as there are none!"

[GreyICE]

Actually, you guys missed the problem of BRIGHT. Orcs aren't just blacks. They're black Jews.

The "2000 years ago, some orcs did something bad and thus we can hate on them forever" is a direct reference to blood libel for the death of Jesus.

You know, despite the fact Jesus is a Jew. Even this element is underlined with the fact that the leader of the Resistance against the Dark Lord was an orc. The fact the Dark Lord and his inner circle was a bunch of elves also doesn't change the fact that the elves are the Master Race that everyone bends over backward to accommodate.

Which is a parallel to the fact Jesus was executed by the Romans and the Romans persecuted the Jews thereafter.

Mind you, I think it's weird that the movie unambigiously states, "The justifications people have for racism are monstrous and stupid" only to have the response to be, "Justifications for racism are inappropriate to show here as there are none!"

Um. I think you are overthinking this movie far, far more than anyone writing it did. "The Dark Lord" is an oblique reference to Lord of the Rings, not a 17 step parable about Judaism.

[CharlesPhipps]

Um. I think you are overthinking this movie far, far more than anyone writing it did. "The Dark Lord" is an oblique reference to Lord of the Rings, not a 17 step parable about Judaism.

To be fair, I mostly picked up on this because the writer said the orcs were stand-ins for Jews.

[Zargon]

This is really the basic problem with the whole idea of a "gray middle" : Most of the time it does not exist. Sometimes, but not all the time.

And the problem is where a bad writer, a lazy writer or simply one that does not care they apply the Gray to everything. And it's very common with people writing Sci Fi or Fantasy fiction for movies and specifically TV. Most writers hate the Sci Fi/Fantasy stuff and at best see it as dumb stuff for kids. They want to write "real life" meaningful fiction, and of course "change the world with their amazing words". Though in a lot of cases they simply have to write it, as they do need the job. So they slap together a Gray mess of a story, take their pay and move on.

My favorite example is the Sad Bully, and it's so bad now that you just about see it automatically when every you see a Bully in fiction: It's "not" the Bully's fault, they have a "hard bad life" and "forces" them to be an inhuman monster of a Bully....Poor Bully. As if just having a bad hard life excuses anything you do including theft and vile violence.

[Thebestoftherest]

I think that the problem is that in BRIGHT, I don't think anyone would care about the dark lord 2000 years later, and I doubt a racist would care enough about history to pay attention to history.