Misused: Protagonist Centered Morality

Well, reading the examples, i noted the following things:

• A lot of the examples are not of the "everything behaves and thinks" variety.

• Some examples describe single acts, not the entire story.

• Some examples describe acts not portrayed as wrong when any character in the story realized it, not only the protagonists.

Can you give some specific example of misuse?

Okay:

• In The Lord of the Rings, killing a diplomat during negotiations is apparently okay if you're a protagonist. To be fair, the Fellowship had already told the Mouth of Sauron they weren't there to negotiate, so he probably should've figured they were going to move on to Aggressive Negotiations. When Aragon killed him, he had already moved on to taunts and psychological warfare. By any reasonable metric, negotiations were over. By Tolkien's treatment of the same scene, the heroes drive off Sauron's diplomat just by staring at him.

• On the other hand, if anyone other than Superman was hovering outside Lois's house spying on her with X-Ray vision, it probably wouldn't considered acceptable behavior.

• David Brin's infamous Star Wars articles (not the first part, but has links to the other parts) mention this as one criticism of Vader's redemption.

• In the Good ending of Swan Song, Takuma is forgiven and left unpunished for rape, murder, torture, necrophilia, you name it. In the normal ending he is the sole reason for the death of all the earthquake survivors.

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Katara and to a lesser extent Aang break the laws of the Northern Water Tribe in teaching Katara combat waterbending and are portrayed as largely, if not entirely right to do so, with the objectors (mainly Pakku) being portrayed as backwards assholes who needed to be taught a lesson. While it is true that the laws in question were fairly unreasonable, that really shouldn't give them carte blanche to ignore them. Laws aren't something you can cherrypick to suit your needs (I'll have the waterbending with a side order of magic fish god. Hold the Straw Misogyny.) Similarly, Katara attacking Pakku when he refused to fight her was portrayed as a You Go Girl moment. Again, while Pakku was being a huge jerk about it, Katara had no real call to assault him.

Those seem to fit. Those are things which are generally considered bad, but the narrative supports them because the protagonist is doing them.

In the case of the Avatar example,at least, i am 100% sure that the it is not because a protagonist realized it. A lot of episodes in the first season portrays the protagonist as being wrong(the episode in question is one of the last episodes of the first season)- and in one of the episodes of the first season portraying it as wrong , Aang himself was in the other side of the "follow old rules and traditions" fence.

edited 20th Jun '12 9:40:36 AM by MagBas

So you are saying some examples are cases where the protagonist is not supported by the narrative? Those should be removed, but I suspect most of them require familiarity with the work to understand the problem.

Not supported in all the occasions- in the bits in question, they are supported- and in some cases, as the Avatar example(at least in the "unnecessary rules and traditions" bit), the series is consistent in their moral position , independent if the character in question is a protagonist or not. EDIT: to turn it more clear- if the protagonist defends a Family-Unfriendly Aesop and is proven right by the story it not means said Family-Unfriendly Aesop was proven right only because the protagonist preached it- and in some cases, it clearly is not the case.

edited 23rd Jun '12 8:32:34 PM by MagBas

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