/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21406156]

Is black and white morality a modern day invention in storytelling? Or is gray morality?

[Anonymous No.21406167]

>>21406156
I think of traditional storytelling as very black and white, with grey being a recent invention.
but I'm uneducated

[Anonymous No.21406169]

>>21406156
Really nigga?

[Anonymous No.21406175]

Black and White is hypedmodern now. Case in point, marvel movies. We're basically in Hays Era 2.0 where the "good guy" must win.

[Anonymous No.21406182]

>>21406167
Just imagine something like the Iliad. Who was the bad guy? That's more than two thousand years old. Even something like the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus don't really have "good" and "bad" guys. I'd say black and white morality is fairly recent, and it's getting more and more common. A lot of modern works, especially pleb garbage like Harry Potter and The Hate U Give have absolute black and white moral lessons, where the further back you go that isn't exactly the case.
Even old sumerian, chinese, and indian legends make you scratch your heads. Their heroes were about as bad as the "bad guys."

[Anonymous No.21406242]

>>21406167
Historical mythology could be pretty nuanced at times. The Epic of Gilgamesh & Greek mythology in general are both pretty good examples, in how the gods are portrayed as being somewhat benevolent but also kind of dickish at the same time. Aeneas is probably a good example of a morally questionable ‘hero’ character. Kullervo too if you want to go outside of the Mediterranean.

[Anonymous No.21406248]

>>21406182
>>21406242
Those were still black and white morality morons. They were going off the morals they thought were good at the time. You were allowed to fuck all the bitches you wanted and lie to people. It was seen as good.

[Anonymous No.21406291]

>>21406242
>>21406167
Greek mythology was clear-cut good vs. evil, it's just that what the ancient greeks considered good and evil differs greatly from what we do.
>The gods do whatever they want
>Mortals are bitches that are destined to die
>sometimes mortals get the favor of one or more gods (mostly because they made regular sacrifices) and that makes them better than the rest
>you have to respect strangers that come into your home
>you have the right to murder said strangers if they disrespect you in any way
>strong and beautiful = good
>ugly and weak = bad
You have to legitimately read the stories through some 20th century leftoid critical lense to derrive anything else out of it.
Let me guess, you think Zeus is morally ambiguous bc he's unfaithful to Hera.

[Anonymous No.21406311]

>>21406156
This thread again?

[Anonymous No.21406523]

>>21406291
I think Zeus is morally ambiguous because he killed/imprisoned his father and betrayed and devoured his first wife.

Also death of the author and all that; what was black and white back then reads like grey now, and so it is.

[Anonymous No.21406527]

>>21406156
Movie > TV

[Anonymous No.21406563]

I think fiction has shifted too much towards gray morality, the whole "people are bastards" thing. I actually do think that throughout history you have a lot of shitty behavior, but just as much you have instances of people being noble, kind, good, and just.

So to me, if you really want to write a "realistic" story, you will mingle the two approaches. You need instances of people being shitty, and being cheaters, liars, and petty criminals. But you also need instances of genuine heroism and nobility, and people actually doing the right thing just because it's the right thing, or because of what they believe religiously.

[Anonymous No.21406642]

>>21406156

[Anonymous No.21406648]

>>21406248
>>21406291
But the Iliad is about strong people vs strong people so good vs good, nobody is implying that these people had no conception of positive and negative that would be absurd

[Anonymous No.21407271]

Bump

[Anonymous No.21407314]

>>21406156
I live in a third world country. Grey morality is the privilege of first world countries.

If you don’t understand what I mean by this, please don’t ask me to clarify; you will never understand through your privileged lenses.

[Anonymous No.21407374]

>>21406291
>Let me guess, you think Zeus is morally ambiguous bc he's unfaithful to Hera.

Plato in the Republic would have Homer banned because he teaches poor morals by depicting the gods as acting immorally. Plato was not unique in commenting on the morally poor nature of the Homeric deities among Greco-Romans. It's incorrect to assume they were all into "might makes right", there was a vast array of debate as to what the nature of the gods was and what makes a good or evil life.

[Anonymous No.21407385]

>>21406156
Is Achilles a good guy or a bad guy? Odysseus?

Any answer I could give to those would require a lot of nuance. I think that's enough to determine Grey morality is as old as literature gets.

[Anonymous No.21407393]

>>21407314
Fuck yourself street shitter

[Anonymous No.21407408]

>>21406648
>>21406291
Yeah and I'm fairly sure that there are no books that depict butchering children and raping everyone in sight as "grey." The edgy faggots that say "oh well, morality isn't real anyway" would fucking cringe if they saw someone butchering a child. Their edgy poseur language only works in a faggy novel.
That's a semantic game. If grey morality is defined as nothing at all conceivable being good or bad then insert a beer can into your anuses because no-one except perhaps a retarded psychopath physically incapable of emotion or an edgetard that writes only in abstract terms that he does not emotionally agree with would write some bullshit like that.

[Anonymous No.21407839]

>>21407314
Get fucked, europoor

[Anonymous No.21407942]

>>21406291
Achilles, even in the context of the time, was not a black and white character.

[Anonymous No.21407951]

>>21407942
Same with Herakles

[Anonymous No.21407955]

>>21406156
Black and White is how you tell a story to idiots. Even children's book characters have some nuance.

The fact b&w works in politics so well is telling, and horrifying.

[Anonymous No.21408150]

>>21406182
>pleb garbage harry potter
>harry potter series is in /lit/ top 100
I came here to find guidance

[Anonymous No.21408209]

>>21406156
Black and white dates from Christendom. Troy wasn’t so simple

[Anonymous No.21409527]

>>21407374
This.

[Anonymous No.21409550]

>>21407408
Imagine being a moralnigger. Couldn't be me.

[Anonymous No.21409565]

>>21406156
nowadays is a mix
>morals are relative, but if you're not for us you're against us and clearly evil and anything goes against you

[Anonymous No.21409578]

>>21408209
Which Christians mostly stole from Manichaeism and Mandaeism.

[Anonymous No.21409617]

Reminder that morality as a concept is evil.

[Anonymous No.21409656]

>>21409617
Explain what you mean by "evil" without moralising

[Anonymous No.21409688]

>>21409656
Whatever God forbids.

[Anonymous No.21409694]

>>21406156
are you empliying that good and evil don't exist or that the good is relative?

[Anonymous No.21409720]

>>21406156
you have something like ancient greek literature where there is no clear good and wrong

[Anonymous No.21409733]

>>21409656
Anything that pleases God is good, and anything that doesn't please God is evil.

[Anonymous No.21410646]

>>21409720
It was what they thought was right or wrong.

[Anonymous No.21411507]

>>21406156
black and white stories present a foe whose destruction is wholly good and justified (which is also what makes asoiaf no less black and white than LOTR). it's as old as storytelling itself.

[Anonymous No.21412023]

>>21406156
There's something kind of funny about this "grey morality" trend as I see it. I was into Game of Thrones but I do feel like this isn't all that sophisticated of a feature, and that the morality is not all that grey to begin with. The show is playing off a distinct sense of what is good or bad, with the inclusion of situations that are difficult to judge morally. This speaks to morality being difficult rather than insubstantial - Lord of the Rings already does this with the likes of Gollum, Boromir, and the corrupting force of the ring. It may sound contrarian but I feel like that is a more compelling version of "greyness".

The most forceful and important events of Game of Thrones are the ones that are most decisively "good" or "bad" morally. Bad guys winning, versus brief respites of justice. The show plays off a given sort of moral sensibility, the force and significance of its events are moral in nature. The best you could say is that there's a moral absence as far as the course of nature goes, it stands against the premise that things work out as they ought to (which will strike the modern audience as naive if not patronizing).

The show does have some cosmic moral law to it though - it is a rule that the bad guys must win more, fate and fortune will favor them, if someone is good it means that a rock is more likely to fall out of the sky and kill them. Bad events are contrived and poured in to ensure the "greyness" status and to keep the audience on edge, it needs to pull tragedies out of thin air to shock the audience and keep them on edge.

Anyhow, compare this to the Iliad. There's hardly a whisper about what's right or wrong, fair or unfair (the only remarks resembling this occur in trivial contexts). Who's the villain, Aggaememnon?* He's sick of the war too, he nearly leaves, and while his faults produce the feud with Achilles (in combination with Achilles' faults, which were the greater factor there). Almost none of it is fair to anyone, yet the story revels in all of it. There's some concern about virtues we ought to value, the beauty of reconciliation and honor and such. But for the most part, you will watch your hero do a bad thing and you are meant to cheer for it. If you want to avoid black and white morality, I say you should commit, and go Greek. Grey morality is just black and white morality getting muddled.

*In truth, the villain is Paris. The Iliad has one moral - don't be a punk.

[Anonymous No.21412037]

left something out of >>21412023

>Who's the villain, Aggaememnon?* He's sick of the war too, he nearly leaves, and while his faults produce the feud with Achilles (in combination with Achilles' faults, which were the greater factor there) . . .

Meant to say that Aggaememnon is still a wise and respected King who definitely puts in work in battle. He is favored by Zeus (until someone begs Zeus to screw him) - Greekwise, there's no further moral status than that.

[Anonymous No.21412342]

>>21406248
retard, read /lit/ 101 and don't post until you do.

[Anonymous No.21413010]

>>21412342
No, it'll be a waste of time

[Anonymous No.21413163]

Neither, both have been around forever anon.
Some old stories are grey like the aforementioned Iliad, I'd probably put Gilgamesh here too in a more comical way.
Some old stories are black and white like Beowulf or the Shahnameh. Turns out people have always been capable of depth, imagine that.

[Anonymous No.21413197]

>>21406156
How is LOTR black and white again? Is it because of Sauron? You might realuze that people who supposedly hate b&w morality are very b&w themselves and think it's evil to even engage with certain people. And it's all an absurdity because they don't even believe in objective morality.

[Anonymous No.21413204]

>>21413197
pseud

[Anonymous No.21413216]

>>21413197
>How is LOTR black and white again?
You didn't read the book.

[Anonymous No.21413220]

>>21413204
Not an argument
>>21413216
I did though

[Anonymous No.21413551]

>>21407374
>there was a vast array of debate as to what the nature of the gods was and what makes a good or evil life.
This is the proper light to look at this problem from. All the questions about morality and ultimate right and wrong and what the nature of reality is, is what signifies the ancient greek era, the romans were just fanboys of the greeks, the renaissance was rediscovering the greeks, and the entire chain of western civilization is founded on the sprawling array of answers given through this early period.

>>21406156
OP's very formulation of the question and the assumptions therein can be traced back to an ongoing conversation at least as old as the ancient greeks. Therefore the problem is also at least that old. Probably older, but the material dries out toward the horizon and toward the invention of writing, likely existing instead in oral culture that wasn't preserved.

[Anonymous No.21414086]

>>21413197
There's characters that represent absolute good and absolute evil.

[Anonymous No.21414159]

>>21406156
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil

[Anonymous No.21414180]

>>21406182
>something like the Iliad. Who was the bad guy?
The losers obviously

[Anonymous No.21414191]

>>21406182
>Just imagine something like the Iliad. Who was the bad guy?
Aphrodite, Helen and that fag Paris.

[Anonymous No.21414263]

>>21414086
And neither are main characters.

[Anonymous No.21414325]

Game of Thrones is nowhere near as morally ambiguous as it pretends to be.

[Anonymous No.21414876]

>>21414263
Yes they are.

[Anonymous No.21414939]

>>21406291
>>you have to respect strangers that come into your home
What the Greeks called ξενία is pretty much a universal human constant. Almost all global cultures historically treat hospitality as sacred.

[Anonymous No.21415439]

>>21406156
When you say modern, you're not talking about modernism, but 20th century literature. And no, it goes back 200 years back, at the very least.

[Anonymous No.21416535]

>>21406156
Black and white morality is both more exciting to read about and is more based in reality. The push for grey vs gray morality is by evil people who want you believing evil shouldn't exist.

[Anonymous No.21416556]

>>21414086
Wrong Tolkein didn't believe in absolute evil

[Anonymous No.21416573]

>>21406291
>you think Zeus is morally ambiguous bc he's unfaithful to Hera.
I always thought that was supposed to be comedic more than anything.
ULTIMATE COSMIC POWER!....And yet he's still forced to sneak around behind his battle axe like any old lecher.

[Anonymous No.21416646]

>>21413220
LOTR is very black and white. Name one negative characteristic of a fellowship member other than Boromir feeling temptation when confronted with an eldritch evil artifact and then immediately regretting it. Name one redeeming feature of anyone on Sauron's side.

I don't present this as a bad thing per se - Tolkien was working in the tradition of medieval heroes tales, where the good hero fights evil monsters to save the good kingdom. This has its own charm and is perfectly valid as a story. Not everything needs to be grey and gritty and complicated. But since modern tastes lean that way Tolkien fans often try to cope and introduce grey morality into LOTR when it isn't there. It is in the Silmarillion though - Feanor's a legitimately ambiguous character as are many of the Noldor.

[Anonymous No.21416912]

>>21406182
>who was the bad guy
wouldn’t it be the guy wearing an eyepatch?

[Anonymous No.21416918]

>>21416535
This.

[Anonymous No.21418547]

>>21406156
False dichotomy. Checkered morality is an artifact of lesser minds, not civilizations.

[Anonymous No.21418673]

>>21406248
you have not read old lit. “good guys” are pov character who REGULARLY do acts that are portrayed as bad and destructive. bloody rages being a common one as well as huburis. they aren’t portrayed in a “good” light, but more naturally and rawly. its what it is. it is t heavenly rage. its rage. and that comes with both the hate and glory it entails. it doesnt make it good simply part of the world that is not seen through a miopic lense.