/lit/ - Literature

>>20289702
I honestly haven't been properly introduced to the genre besides parody from other media that I grew up with.
But as someone who grew up with Wild West style stories I imagine they are similar in tone, where the Lawbringer starts off solving a small mystery but the results bring them down a rabbit hole of a much larger and more dangerous mystery that threatens to bring down the world around them.
But I would say that Noir differs from the Western in the sense that morality isn't black and white but a sea of grey, sure there is an ultimate evil at the end of the day but most people are just doing what they can to survive themselves.
I suppose maybe I've answered my own question in that a good Noir story requires characters that you can sympathize with, even if they do fucked up things. The vehicle in which we see these things is the Lawbringer looking to bring down someone at the top that cannot be sympathized with or redeemed, but first they must hunt down this person through a series of clues in order to achieve this.