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beccatoriaSo, I know that most of my flist don't care about my irrational love of Star Wars and its expanded universe. But MWAHAHAHAHA, it's MY blog, so you all get to listen to me talk about Luke Skywalker's inability to engage his son in a discussion of basic morals.
Firstly I probably out to clarify my position on Star Wars morality. Because if you know anything about the fandom, you probably know about the ongoing debates on whether Star Wars is a pulpy good vs evil absolute morality right and wrong type of story, or whether the EU ought to write it as a more realistic, complex morally ambiguous universe of flawed individuals trying to deal with superhuman abilities and the tendency of power to corrupt.
Personally I think that the argument misses the point because the points aren't entirely exclusive of each other.
I'm not sure I believe it's about good and evil, but Star Wars is certainly about right and wrong. It's about heroes and villains and the choices you make to become either of those things.
I spent most of my life loving moral complexity - things that didn't force an external moral scheme on me. Farscape, The X-Files, New BSG, Chuck Palaniuk novels, Vampire: the Masquerade, angsty anti-heroes up the wazoo, an era that produced the saga of Anakin Skywalker instead of Luke (though caveat: the prequels left me cold). I love it, I lap it up. But I think what I love about it is that I have to make the judgement call about whether what happened was all right or not.
It's not the lack of morals, it's that I have to think about them. Because I'm not expected to approve of the hero just because he's the hero.
But I also think that in some ways it's gotten out of hand. That it's all right for people to act like complete asses as long as they're pretty and look cool and we can all just say it's "morally ambiguous." That irritating common wisdom that if two people have differing opinions, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. Like hell! Sometimes one person's just plain wrong.
And every now and again, a show like Babylon 5 or a universe like Star Wars comes along and reminds me what it's like to love heroes. That good doesn't always equal lame and evil doesn't always equal cool. That it's all right to be earnest and idealistic and hopeful and no one needs to quip sarcastically or screw up and kill people to prove they're human (though sometimes it happens anyway).
That - to steal something![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asta77 wrote in her journal recently about Lee Adama - "Heroes don't murder people." And it's as simple and as moral as that. They just don't. But it's working out how not to murder people in a messy, horrible, confusing universe - that's what provides the interest and the tension.
It's like...it's easier to have a discussion on morals in a universe where they exist and people are encouraged to try to reach for them. It's easier to discuss moral ambiguity - where the grey starts, how you travel through it and stay whole, where you come out of it in the end - if there is an end to it. You have to have a framework of "good" and "bad" before you can discuss what makes things good and bad and how to make those judgement calls and where opinions diverge.
I'm not against shows that take a more relativistic approach, but that's a different experience. A different type of discussion. Not every story has to be about good things and bad things.
But the stories that are about good things and bad things aren't necessarily - as so many assume - promoting a simple distinction between those two concepts. On the contrary, one cannot have a complex relationship between them without those concepts existing strongly within the context of the story.
Am I being clear? I'm trying to promote moral relativism while at the same time promoting heroism and villainy. It's a hard thing to explain.
I suppose, if I had to write it in a sentence, Star Wars is about learning how to make heroic choices in a universe where that isn't always easy and the route isn't always clear.
Luke throws away his lightsaber in the face of certain death and possible enemy victory, against the advice of his teachers, because it's the right thing to do.
So. Having established my position, let's move on to my problem.
As I've said, I'm all for difficult situations where the heroic action isn't clear. But it annoys me no end when needless complications are introduced. When the quest for moral ambiguity - so that the story can fit in better as a parallel for modern politics, or to better appeal to the emo-addicted pop-readership of today - causes a character to behave...weirdly. For instance, the following exchange.
Where either Luke has become so exhausted as to be dead inside (about which more later), or Karen Traviss, who is an excellent author but doesn't seem to play well with others in a collaborative story-effort, is desperately trying to insert an edge of angsty-shocking-Admiral-Cainish-can't-argue-against-evil angst. Which I would be okay with it if weren't such a strawman argument that...well, without an out of universe explaination, I think Luke must have died a little inside.
Anyway, the exchange:
"Dad, was the Empire really a reign of terror?"
"Just a bit . . ."
"I know you and Uncle Han and Aunt Leia had a rough time of it, but what about ordinary people?"
Mara chewed with slow deliberation, her gaze in slight defocus on a point in the mid-distance. "You might want to ask Alderaan. No, wait—it's gone, isn't it? Oops. That's what happened to ordinary people, and I know better than most."
Because you did some of it. Luke faced up to the fact that he couldn't expect Ben to believe a word either of them said to him. They'd both done things that they were telling him he couldn't do now.
"But most people didn't really notice, did they?" Ben seemed to be fixed on course. "Their lives went on as before. Maybe a few people who were political got a midnight visit from a few stormies, but most folks got on with their lives, right?"
"Right," Mara conceded. "But living in fear isn't living at all."
"It's better than dead."
"You think the Empire was okay, Ben?" Luke asked.
"I don't know. It just seems that a handful of people can think they have the duty—the right—to change things for everybody else. It's a big decision, rebellion, isn't it? But most decisions that affect trillions of beings get made by a few people."
Luke and Mara looked at each other discreetly and then at Ben. He'd acquired political curiosity somewhere along the line. Whatever mission Jacen had sent him on—and he had, Luke was certain — it had made the boy think.
And that's it.
Neither of them rebut his statement.
Luke Skywalker can't explain to his own son why Space Nazis are Evil.
Seriously.
WTF?
Firstly let's just point out that it's not true that they've both done things they're telling Ben he can't do now. They're telling him at 14, he shouldn't be part of the secret police. The notion that he's part of a small group deciding the fate of the larger galaxy same as the Rebellion really isn't a similarity that bears comparison as an excuse. So is pretty much any major political group. It's like saying an elected President is the same as a Monarch simply because both are heads of state backed up by ministers, etc. The only way you can even begin to start involving more than that minority is through democratic elections. Democracy being what the Rebellion was fighting for and not what the GAG (sekrit police) is fighting against (in practical terms) as they're clamping down on civil liberties.
But even so, even if you don't agree that democracy is a dividing line in terms of taking the choice to act on behalf of people you'll never meet (whether you're fighting for or against their future ability to determine their own leadership) the point still remains that you'll never get away from the fact that leaders arise and movements are never comprised of the entirety of the people they'll affect. It doesn't make them all as good or bad as each other. It means you have to judge them by what they do and what they try to do.
Luke being in a small group intent on changing galactic politics and Ben being in a small group intent on changing galactic politics doesn't make those groups anything like each other. It doesn't make belonging to either of them morally equal.
It's like saying sneakers and high heels and combat boots are all as socially acceptable in any context because they're all shoes. It's stupid. It's picking one similarity and insisting it makes everything about them similar.
And if Luke's thinking about the fact that at 14, Ben's mother was an Imperial Assassin then damned straight he's telling his son not to follow in her footsteps since they both think that was a godawful thing to have happened to her for most of her youth. That's like saying, "Wow, no wonder we can't try to save our son from having his mind twisted by a manipulative political figure; after all, his mother did it, of COURSE he's going to do it too!" That's just...too stupid for words.
But now let's get to - having debunked Luke's bizarre opinion that he's in no position to talk - what he could have said.
Like, the fact that the terror stems from the fact that 'a few "political" people getting a midnight visit from "stormies",' is subjective and breeds fear that you'll be next. Or that going from "most people didn't notice," to "living in fear is better than being dead!" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
I mean, really, Ben, your characterisation is generally intelligent (and yes, it actually does make sense at this point in the book that he's asking these questions, and yes, he also comes to some very moral conclusions by the end of this book; it's his parents responses that annoy me). You can't defend a government as "not that bad," when you're reduced to claiming that living conditions were "better than death".
Or, you know, his mother could have explained, first hand, the contempt that government had for its populace.
Or, you know, either of them could have pointed out the ludicrously humanocentric attitude of their son and asked him if the Wookiee slaves and every other alien race denied most forms of participation in their own military and governmental structure agreed.
Or, you know, pointed out that sometimes it doesn't matter if the trains run on time because PEOPLE ARE DYING. Even if they're not you. Even if it's not affecting a magical per centage of the population.
To be blunt, and to use a wonderful sentence a friend of mine used, which summed up everything I wanted Luke to say on a visceral, powerful, emotional level:
"Because it corrupted people's souls, Ben."
Because that's as good a description as any for the hollow and slow death that occurs when you have to choose between making yourself a target or willfully ignoring atrocities committed against others.
Because that breaks a heart and wounds a spirit and corrupts a soul. Because that doesn't just play into the Burke quote about evil triumphing when good men do nothing, it also scars the person who makes that choice. Makes them something less than human. Less than a hero. Less than they deserve to be.
But Luke Skywalker is old. And should have died when Del Rey wanted to kill him in Vector Prime, but Lucas told them no, even though he doesn't read any of this stuff anyway.
In some ways it fits with his character now. He's old. He's lived far past his own era. The world has gotten too complicated for him to load up a proton torpedo and destroy a moon-sized space station, or to solve by standing, unarmed, refusing to bow to fear or temptation. Because the galaxy passed by him. Everyone wants him to be Yoda now, but he never will be. He's a farm boy aged into inaction by a fear he'll lead others into recklessness. Without the words or the capacity to tell his son that the Empire was evil because it corrupted the souls of good men, because he's afraid it will sound too simplistic.
My heart breaks for him, a little.
But not as much as it breaks for Ben, who had to find out on his own that the Empire corrupted souls, when its ghost started eating away at his. When he realised, cold and alone and starving and barely fourteen, in sole charge of a cold and lonely and starving little girl, with no hope of rescue, surrounded by whispering Sith spirits and attacked by enemies, that his hero wasn't a hero at all. And that if he followed the moral framework he'd been given to its ultimate conclusion, he'd become a monster.
And because, dammit, Karen Traviss, there's more than enough ambiguity and fear and terror and room for political parallels and awful choices and good men who become bad with the best of intentions, without trying to "provocatively" suggest that the Empire wasn't that bad. You make Luke and Ben and Mara look like idiots and you make me thank god for Aaron Allston.
I won't even get Traviss' converse treatment given to the Mandalorians or the weird sense that because they have a code of filial loyalty and are "salt of the earth" farmers, we should overlook the fact that they're hired killers and mercenaries and somehow find them more honest than the Jedi or the GFFA. Where honest = "good". *headdesk*
Firstly I probably out to clarify my position on Star Wars morality. Because if you know anything about the fandom, you probably know about the ongoing debates on whether Star Wars is a pulpy good vs evil absolute morality right and wrong type of story, or whether the EU ought to write it as a more realistic, complex morally ambiguous universe of flawed individuals trying to deal with superhuman abilities and the tendency of power to corrupt.
Personally I think that the argument misses the point because the points aren't entirely exclusive of each other.
I'm not sure I believe it's about good and evil, but Star Wars is certainly about right and wrong. It's about heroes and villains and the choices you make to become either of those things.
I spent most of my life loving moral complexity - things that didn't force an external moral scheme on me. Farscape, The X-Files, New BSG, Chuck Palaniuk novels, Vampire: the Masquerade, angsty anti-heroes up the wazoo, an era that produced the saga of Anakin Skywalker instead of Luke (though caveat: the prequels left me cold). I love it, I lap it up. But I think what I love about it is that I have to make the judgement call about whether what happened was all right or not.
It's not the lack of morals, it's that I have to think about them. Because I'm not expected to approve of the hero just because he's the hero.
But I also think that in some ways it's gotten out of hand. That it's all right for people to act like complete asses as long as they're pretty and look cool and we can all just say it's "morally ambiguous." That irritating common wisdom that if two people have differing opinions, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. Like hell! Sometimes one person's just plain wrong.
And every now and again, a show like Babylon 5 or a universe like Star Wars comes along and reminds me what it's like to love heroes. That good doesn't always equal lame and evil doesn't always equal cool. That it's all right to be earnest and idealistic and hopeful and no one needs to quip sarcastically or screw up and kill people to prove they're human (though sometimes it happens anyway).
That - to steal something
asta77 wrote in her journal recently about Lee Adama - "Heroes don't murder people." And it's as simple and as moral as that. They just don't. But it's working out how not to murder people in a messy, horrible, confusing universe - that's what provides the interest and the tension. It's like...it's easier to have a discussion on morals in a universe where they exist and people are encouraged to try to reach for them. It's easier to discuss moral ambiguity - where the grey starts, how you travel through it and stay whole, where you come out of it in the end - if there is an end to it. You have to have a framework of "good" and "bad" before you can discuss what makes things good and bad and how to make those judgement calls and where opinions diverge.
I'm not against shows that take a more relativistic approach, but that's a different experience. A different type of discussion. Not every story has to be about good things and bad things.
But the stories that are about good things and bad things aren't necessarily - as so many assume - promoting a simple distinction between those two concepts. On the contrary, one cannot have a complex relationship between them without those concepts existing strongly within the context of the story.
Am I being clear? I'm trying to promote moral relativism while at the same time promoting heroism and villainy. It's a hard thing to explain.
I suppose, if I had to write it in a sentence, Star Wars is about learning how to make heroic choices in a universe where that isn't always easy and the route isn't always clear.
Luke throws away his lightsaber in the face of certain death and possible enemy victory, against the advice of his teachers, because it's the right thing to do.
So. Having established my position, let's move on to my problem.
As I've said, I'm all for difficult situations where the heroic action isn't clear. But it annoys me no end when needless complications are introduced. When the quest for moral ambiguity - so that the story can fit in better as a parallel for modern politics, or to better appeal to the emo-addicted pop-readership of today - causes a character to behave...weirdly. For instance, the following exchange.
Where either Luke has become so exhausted as to be dead inside (about which more later), or Karen Traviss, who is an excellent author but doesn't seem to play well with others in a collaborative story-effort, is desperately trying to insert an edge of angsty-shocking-Admiral-Cainish-can't-argue-against-evil angst. Which I would be okay with it if weren't such a strawman argument that...well, without an out of universe explaination, I think Luke must have died a little inside.
Anyway, the exchange:
"Dad, was the Empire really a reign of terror?"
"Just a bit . . ."
"I know you and Uncle Han and Aunt Leia had a rough time of it, but what about ordinary people?"
Mara chewed with slow deliberation, her gaze in slight defocus on a point in the mid-distance. "You might want to ask Alderaan. No, wait—it's gone, isn't it? Oops. That's what happened to ordinary people, and I know better than most."
Because you did some of it. Luke faced up to the fact that he couldn't expect Ben to believe a word either of them said to him. They'd both done things that they were telling him he couldn't do now.
"But most people didn't really notice, did they?" Ben seemed to be fixed on course. "Their lives went on as before. Maybe a few people who were political got a midnight visit from a few stormies, but most folks got on with their lives, right?"
"Right," Mara conceded. "But living in fear isn't living at all."
"It's better than dead."
"You think the Empire was okay, Ben?" Luke asked.
"I don't know. It just seems that a handful of people can think they have the duty—the right—to change things for everybody else. It's a big decision, rebellion, isn't it? But most decisions that affect trillions of beings get made by a few people."
Luke and Mara looked at each other discreetly and then at Ben. He'd acquired political curiosity somewhere along the line. Whatever mission Jacen had sent him on—and he had, Luke was certain — it had made the boy think.
And that's it.
Neither of them rebut his statement.
Luke Skywalker can't explain to his own son why Space Nazis are Evil.
Seriously.
WTF?
Firstly let's just point out that it's not true that they've both done things they're telling Ben he can't do now. They're telling him at 14, he shouldn't be part of the secret police. The notion that he's part of a small group deciding the fate of the larger galaxy same as the Rebellion really isn't a similarity that bears comparison as an excuse. So is pretty much any major political group. It's like saying an elected President is the same as a Monarch simply because both are heads of state backed up by ministers, etc. The only way you can even begin to start involving more than that minority is through democratic elections. Democracy being what the Rebellion was fighting for and not what the GAG (sekrit police) is fighting against (in practical terms) as they're clamping down on civil liberties.
But even so, even if you don't agree that democracy is a dividing line in terms of taking the choice to act on behalf of people you'll never meet (whether you're fighting for or against their future ability to determine their own leadership) the point still remains that you'll never get away from the fact that leaders arise and movements are never comprised of the entirety of the people they'll affect. It doesn't make them all as good or bad as each other. It means you have to judge them by what they do and what they try to do.
Luke being in a small group intent on changing galactic politics and Ben being in a small group intent on changing galactic politics doesn't make those groups anything like each other. It doesn't make belonging to either of them morally equal.
It's like saying sneakers and high heels and combat boots are all as socially acceptable in any context because they're all shoes. It's stupid. It's picking one similarity and insisting it makes everything about them similar.
And if Luke's thinking about the fact that at 14, Ben's mother was an Imperial Assassin then damned straight he's telling his son not to follow in her footsteps since they both think that was a godawful thing to have happened to her for most of her youth. That's like saying, "Wow, no wonder we can't try to save our son from having his mind twisted by a manipulative political figure; after all, his mother did it, of COURSE he's going to do it too!" That's just...too stupid for words.
But now let's get to - having debunked Luke's bizarre opinion that he's in no position to talk - what he could have said.
Like, the fact that the terror stems from the fact that 'a few "political" people getting a midnight visit from "stormies",' is subjective and breeds fear that you'll be next. Or that going from "most people didn't notice," to "living in fear is better than being dead!" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
I mean, really, Ben, your characterisation is generally intelligent (and yes, it actually does make sense at this point in the book that he's asking these questions, and yes, he also comes to some very moral conclusions by the end of this book; it's his parents responses that annoy me). You can't defend a government as "not that bad," when you're reduced to claiming that living conditions were "better than death".
Or, you know, his mother could have explained, first hand, the contempt that government had for its populace.
Or, you know, either of them could have pointed out the ludicrously humanocentric attitude of their son and asked him if the Wookiee slaves and every other alien race denied most forms of participation in their own military and governmental structure agreed.
Or, you know, pointed out that sometimes it doesn't matter if the trains run on time because PEOPLE ARE DYING. Even if they're not you. Even if it's not affecting a magical per centage of the population.
To be blunt, and to use a wonderful sentence a friend of mine used, which summed up everything I wanted Luke to say on a visceral, powerful, emotional level:
"Because it corrupted people's souls, Ben."
Because that's as good a description as any for the hollow and slow death that occurs when you have to choose between making yourself a target or willfully ignoring atrocities committed against others.
Because that breaks a heart and wounds a spirit and corrupts a soul. Because that doesn't just play into the Burke quote about evil triumphing when good men do nothing, it also scars the person who makes that choice. Makes them something less than human. Less than a hero. Less than they deserve to be.
But Luke Skywalker is old. And should have died when Del Rey wanted to kill him in Vector Prime, but Lucas told them no, even though he doesn't read any of this stuff anyway.
In some ways it fits with his character now. He's old. He's lived far past his own era. The world has gotten too complicated for him to load up a proton torpedo and destroy a moon-sized space station, or to solve by standing, unarmed, refusing to bow to fear or temptation. Because the galaxy passed by him. Everyone wants him to be Yoda now, but he never will be. He's a farm boy aged into inaction by a fear he'll lead others into recklessness. Without the words or the capacity to tell his son that the Empire was evil because it corrupted the souls of good men, because he's afraid it will sound too simplistic.
My heart breaks for him, a little.
But not as much as it breaks for Ben, who had to find out on his own that the Empire corrupted souls, when its ghost started eating away at his. When he realised, cold and alone and starving and barely fourteen, in sole charge of a cold and lonely and starving little girl, with no hope of rescue, surrounded by whispering Sith spirits and attacked by enemies, that his hero wasn't a hero at all. And that if he followed the moral framework he'd been given to its ultimate conclusion, he'd become a monster.
And because, dammit, Karen Traviss, there's more than enough ambiguity and fear and terror and room for political parallels and awful choices and good men who become bad with the best of intentions, without trying to "provocatively" suggest that the Empire wasn't that bad. You make Luke and Ben and Mara look like idiots and you make me thank god for Aaron Allston.
I won't even get Traviss' converse treatment given to the Mandalorians or the weird sense that because they have a code of filial loyalty and are "salt of the earth" farmers, we should overlook the fact that they're hired killers and mercenaries and somehow find them more honest than the Jedi or the GFFA. Where honest = "good". *headdesk*
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Date: 2008-01-15 11:39 am (UTC)Hahaha! You know, there's a very nice re-edit of the Phantom Menace called "Balance of the Force," available to watch on YouTube where they do stuff like cut out the "Yippee!" and dub Jar Jar so he's speaking in alien and give him hilarious lines about how he wishes they could sell the Queen and he save Qui-Gon's life not vice versa. It doesn't redeem it per se, but it's certainly...amusing and impressively done?
In Mara's defence, she's sarcastic and pissed off at this point due to other story pressures and worried and it's actually reasonably in character for her to express that. Han Solo's plenty sarcastic in the OT. But I don't blame you for finding it jarring, especially not in the above snippet.
I am getting rather tired of moral ambiguity being the new black.
I don't know if I'm tired of moral ambiguity because I love that; I think I'm tired of moral ambiguity being so popular it can be very poorly done, but people just accept that it must be deep because its "morally ambiguous". I'm tired of moral ambiguity being the new black meaning that there are an infinite number of cheap knock-offs floating around masquerading as the "real thing"?
There's plenty of genuine moral ambiguity that can be done - and done very well - in a universe like SW.
As to BSG, I'm...generally okay with the Cylon portrayal mainly because - in the same manner as I retain my sanity with SW a lot of the time - I just interpret it in the way I think is most awesome. ;) Okay sure, it leaves me with occasional WTF moments like that whole time Adama decided that he wasn't going to unleash that virus (not that I thought it was pleasant, I just thought his reasons for saying no were...inarticulate and possibly not good enough). But in general I love the humanisation and sympathy invoked towards the cylons because I can't forget they're genocidal maniacs. Gina's story isn't powerful because it shows us as monsters and tries to make us side with the cylons in general. Its message shouldn't be "we're just as bad as them," or even if there's an element of that, it certainly shouldn't be "we did things that are just as bad."
The message is that Cain did horrific things to Gina. Which doesn't change that the cylons did horrible things to Cain. Or justify either. It's about breaking down the validity of cause-and-action excuses - pushing the blame further up the line. And so that's just as valid a thing to say about Cain (she can't blame her treatment of Gina on the cylon attack) as about the cylons (they can't blame their actions on the treatment of the humans.)
But this is about 'Star Wars' and the author of this particular book seemed intent to draw parallels to current U.S. politics and our involvement in world affairs. George Bush didn't nuke Iraq off the map, the Empire blew up a planet. How is there anything grey about that?!?!
I agree. I don't think that the author is in general a poor one, but here she certainly is. Mainly I'm cross because the message of the book actually isn't that the Empire was okay (though I have a sneaking suspicion that the author likes writing them more than the Jedi). It's actually a book all about power corrupting and the badness of police states. It's about Germany in the early thirties and it's about a kid trying to work out whether the slide he's seeing/participating in is a bad thing the way he's always been taught. And he ends up making the right choice, but I'm just... I'm frustrated that in order to glorify that it was a hard decision (which I knew anyway; I understood Ben's frame of reference anyway) she made two characters who could have really helped him realise how his worldview was being twisted, act like total idiots.
If Ben's points hadn't been as poorly expressed, or if Luke had made some good ones in return, I wouldn't have posted. But they were and he didn't and GAH!
Thanks for offering a cybershoulder to cry on.
*wails*