I’ll double-check. Certainly it had the rest (murder, theft, slavery, etc.)
I would not consider Saruman or Shelob as among Sauron’s forces at all. He has vast forces that are referred to early and often, before Saruman’s allegiance is known or Shelob is mentioned. I don’t recall anything specific about orc motivations, but it’s been over 10 years since I read Lord of the Rings so perhaps I’ve forgotten. Point is, the whole plot from the start hinges on the fact, known from near the start and accepted by all characters, that Sauron has a vast army and his power is so great that holding his attack off forever is simply not an option. Thus the need destroy the ring. Thus the plot of the book.
But it was on the minds of the authors of Ramayana - you don’t get more clear big-E Evil than wife-kidnapping cannibalistic demons for antagonists. The takeaway here being that it doesn’t do to cherry-pick examples.
In many cultures and religious have ‘origin’ stories stories of one form or another about the reason the state of humanity is so rife with pain, which is due to some sort of selfishness - and this ‘disconnects’ us from our true state of being, and some of times includes at least hints to overcome it, forms of awakening, battle and enlightenment. That overcoming it is usually the individual self against the forces of the world, which seem overwhelming, impossible and against all odds.
It is also the good characters where we normally identify with, and see parallels to our own struggle. We are actually rooting for us, we are also taking revenge on the evil and given hope that there is a way even when the way is impossible. In short yes it’s the age of story of humanity fallen from grace, or detached from the source, or whatever, taking that journey back to ‘origin’ even though the ‘world’ battles to maintain itself as the controlling force.
Certainly not all novels are simply Good vs. Evil. If they were, there’d be no place for the Picaresque Novel*, in which a rogue fights against the (often but not invariably) corrupt society around him
You could argue that in a picaresque novel it’s still Good vs. Evil, because the roguish hero, who we identify with, is “Good”, and the Corrupt society he is in is “Evil”. But it’s not that simple. The “hero” is frequently pretty nasty himself, not exactly hero material. And the society isn’t invariably corrupt.
In addition to this, I’ve read several stories in which you have the hero working in an environment where he’s trapped between two evil sides – there is no “Good”. Yojimbo and the Clint Eastwood film inspired by it, A Fistful of Dollars, are of this nature, but in fantasy novels you’ll frequently find your protagonist trapped between warring Gods who are both Evil, or at least Not Good. Jack Chalker seemed to like this milieu a lot. The book, I’m currently reading, N.S. Dolkart’s Silent Hall, fits in there, too.
Maybe we could have a novel where Good and Evil band together to fight their common enemy, Bland Indifference
Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens would arguably qualify here.
ITR Champion, Sauron’s forces were definitely very strong, far too strong for a conventional military solution. But that was mostly due to raw numbers, not at all to loyalty.
Yes, certainly not.
The OP claims that “in our culture, the most popular stories” are.
The article it links to says that “almost every modern epic” is.
And the article it links to and discusses says that “Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society. These tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics.”
The “fantasy novels you’ll frequently find your protagonist trapped between warring Gods who are both Evil, or at least Not Good” certainly exist, and are perhaps more faithful to the spirit of classical mythology, in which the gods are not Good—but are they as massively popular? And does the fact that they don’t fit the Good Guys vs. Bad Guys pattern help to explain why they aren’t as massively popular?
Due to pragmatic loyalty, as opposed to moral loyalty. See, despite their size orcs are generally 1hd monsters. Even uruks, maybe 2hd, drop dead with a stern look and a whiff of steel. I mean, they’re freaking weak. So you get dudes like Gorbag and Shagrat who aren’t all that bright to begin with but are smart enough to know success lies in an ambush against an otherwise feeble opponent. So what do you do when you’re that lame in a world full of aggressors? You cower to the only aggressor that hasn’t sworn to annihilate you. Yes he’s going to throw you into battle anyway, and you’ll probably die if you’re closer than halfway to the front ranks, but you will be armed and fed in the meantime and not actively hunted as an exposed individual. Actually, I think it might be an interesting endeavor to flesh out the life of an orc–what it’s like to live in constant fear of dying from a simple briar scratch, and to consider it a blessing and magnanimous favoritism to have a master who simply regards you as one of a million…shit. That’s my life!
The “Hero’s Journey” structure remains by far the most popular template - and it doesn’t necessarily involve Good vs. Evil teams. In the linked article, the author explicitly mentions that Star Wars was deliberately based on this template. Darth Vader wasn’t irredeemably evil - he was a tragic figure who did evil, rehabilitated at the end.
The notion of good guys vs. bad guys being based on national or tribal identity, where the nation or tribe represents good moral qualities and their enemies are simply evil (presumably to be exterminated), long predates 19th century nationalism - see, for example, the Amalakites in the Old Testament, or more generally the struggle, documented at length there, for the righteous to root out “evil practices” from society like polytheism (and note that even the “heroes” are often drawn to these evil practices - see, for example, Solomon). “In old folktales, no one fights for values.” - not exactly true, as there is plenty in the OT to contradict that.
The essay overstates the practice in modern stories, and understates the practice in ancient stories.
Good = things not trying to kill us
Bad = things trying to kill us
Self = not trying to kill self or others = good
Universe = actually killing us and everyone else = bad
Good vs. Bad is just shorthand for life as every creature experiences it, with all the clutter removed from the nomenclature.
On thinking about it, TV shows, and especially popular TV shows, don’t seem to fit the OP’s premise at all. Let’s look at some of the most popular TV shows:
Game of Thrones: While some characters are undoubtedly evil, very few of them could be described as good, and how good someone is seems to have no relevance to how well they end up doing.
Breaking Bad: One bad guy versus a bunch of other bad guys.
24: Not only is it again bad guys vs. other bad guys, but the bad guys we’re supposed to root for are the ones with more resources available to them.
The Sopranos: Yet more of “everyone’s bad”.
Comedies like The Big Bang Theory, Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld: Not much “versus” here at all.
The Superbowl: Definitely a “versus”, but without morality: It’s just us vs. them, with the audience not even agreeing on which side is which.
Rick and Morty: Rick is willing to destroy entire worlds just for the sake of his own convenience. There’s no “good” here.
Battlestar Galactica: We finally see some of what the OP is talking about, here, except that half the “good guys” turn out to be evil, and half the “bad guys” turn out to be good.
MASH*: Evil is represented by the war itself, and whenever soldiers from either side show up, the good guys are trying to save their lives. Death of anyone is never a victory here.
Star Trek, in its various incarnations: Sometimes Good vs. Evil, but just as often Us vs. Them, or Us vs. impersonal and amoral forces of nature.
The only popular show that I can think of that does mostly fit the OP’s framework is Babylon 5, and even there it’s not absolute: Londo eventually repents, and Bester sometimes cooperates with the heroes, and so on.
Stories live on conflict. That is their food. Without core conflict, you end up with a landscape painting, such as Under Milk Wood or Slaughterhouse Five. Sometimes the conflict is direct clashing of opposing forces, sometimes it amounts to individuals wrestling with personal moral dilemmas or the difficulties involved in getting laid.
Art by its very nature is visceral. It attempts to reach the audience on an emotional level, one way or another. Good vs. Evil is the shortest path to a visceral response, hence it is a common way to get product moving. In a commercial environment, high-volume simplicity wins out over complexity that sits on the shelf.
Just an update: I reread about half of Aladdin and it was clean so far. My recollection of the story is that…
[Spoiler] Princess Jasmine (Badr al-Budur) is actually the evil magician, having used magic to transform himself into her figure. I was hoping to reconfirm my memory on that but got a bit bored and it wouldn’t really say much about this topic even if Aladdin and Jasmine have sex, since it’s the bad guy who is causing there to be sex without informed consent.
I’ll try to loop back on it and see if I can skim it the major plot points, after I’ve read some more stories. They’re all longer than I had recalled. [/Spoiler]
The second tale that I started reading is about the two most beautiful people ever born. A pair of Djinn get into a debate over which of the humans is more stunning, so they put the two together to see which one has the more extreme reaction on seeing the other.
The Djinn cause the girl to stay asleep and they introduce the boy to her. He immediately tries to take her, because she is so beautiful that he can’t help himself, but then decides against it because it might be a ploy from his father to set him up with a girl. (Otherwise, the text thinks that he would have been perfectly in his right to have had sex with the girl, despite having never met and her being in a magical coma.)
The Djinn put the boy to sleep, wake the girl, and she proceeds to rape the boy, losing her virginity, leaving blood all over him so that there’s evidence of their meeting after she’s whisked back to China by the Djinn.
For the record, Aladdin is Chinese and the evil magician is a black man that Aladdin believed was his father’s brother. No magical disguise in that case.
Does anybody here remember the original Bizarro story?
Mentally defective but super-strong mutant in a monstrous body, created by an explosion of a defective duplicating machine. All the wimmenfolk around Smallville scream and run when they see him; all the menfolk yell at him and chase him away. Bizarro, in fact, doesn’t have an evil or malicious bone in his body. He just wants to do good and be accepted, and doesn’t understand why everybody rejects him. In at least one scene, he is seen crying. But he doesn’t know his own strength, and every time he tries to do good, he ends up breaking things. At no point in the story does he harm anyone, or even think of doing so.
He finally meets a little girl who doesn’t scream or run, and they have a brief but amicable conversation. Bizarro is overjoyed to have found a little friend.
Fast forward: The next day, they meet again on opposite sides of the street. Little girl runs across street to meet him, but gets hit and pinned by a truck. Bizarro lifts the truck off of her, but dies in the process. (ETA: Turns out, it was a dump truck carrying the remains of the defective duplicating machine, which was Bizarro’s Kryptonite.)
Epilog: Little girl in hospital, all bandaged up, but will recover. We learn that she wasn’t afraid of Bizarro because she is blind. She said that Bizarro had a very kind and friendly voice. Superboy debates with himself whether he should ever tell her the awful truth of Bizarro, and decides that it’s for the best that she never know.
(Any Bizarro origin story you may remember that involves Luthor, or Lois Lane, or Bizarro characters on the planet Htrae, or any blind person recovering their sight, is a bogus latter-day re-write, not the original.)
There are multiple themes, of course, but the part of the Iliad which is about Achilles (“Sing o Muse of the wrath of Achilles” is the opening line) is a tragedy. Achilles is choosing whether to have a long, peaceful life, or a short, heroic one. He knows he is not going to live long after Hector, but he kills him anyway. A lot of Greek tragedy is like that - it is not much of a moral tale of Good triumphing over Evil. It’s more “the gods are going to fuck with you if they feel like it”. The whole cycle of the House of Atrius is like that - Cassandra is doomed never to be believed, because Apollo wanted to boink her and she said No. Agamemnon wins the Trojan War, and then comes home and is murdered. Then his son murders his own mother and stepfather for it. And the reason Agamemnon is murdered is because he had to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds, so he could go off and win the Trojan War and then return and be killed.
In the Norse myths, the Aesir are doomed. They are going to be destroyed in Ragnorak.
Certainly the Hero Tale is common, but so is tragedy. And even in the Hero Tale, often the Hero wins, not because he is morally correct - sometimes he is kind of a jerk, like Aladdin - but he wins because he is a Hero. In the Old Testament story of David and Saul, Saul is not that much worse than David. The worst thing Saul does is not kill a king he conquered, and sacrificed without waiting for the official priest/prophet to do it. David is a murderer, adulterer, and bandit. But he is the Hero - the Chosen One. So he gets to be king and is remembered as the great king, even though Saul did most of the heavy lifting in defeating the Philistines. Go figure.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, I was thinking: The popularity of the Super Bowl, and of spectator sports in general, shows that you don’t need a Good vs. Evil framework to be popular.
However, most people who enjoy watching sports care about the outcome. They either actually believe, or they pretend to believe (willing suspension of disbelief?) that it matters who wins.
One way they do this is by personally identifying with one of the teams, so that they vicariously win or lose when the team does.
Another way is by liking one or more of a team’s players, feeling affection or admiration or even hero-worship toward him.
Another way is by having a personal stake in the game, e.g. by betting on the outcome.
And some people do find the action and the events of the game inherently interesting enough that they can enjoy watching it even without caring who wins.
Now, all of these, except perhaps the third, can be used by creators of narratives (on the page or on the screen) to hold readers’/viewers’ interest without invoking Good and Evil. They can make us identify with the protagonists and thus root for them to survive and prevail. They can give us individual characters to love or like or admire. They can make the events and twists and turns of the plot interesting.
Ultimately, however, I find stories that lack a moral dimension to be less satisfying than those that have one. The moral dimension is what makes me keep caring after the story is over. The characters and the things that happen to them aren’t really real; but the moral realities they wrestle with, I believe, are. In the real world, whether good or evil prevails does matter, almost by definition.
This is certainly a true and accurate description of some stories and some fictional universes, but not of others (and I think there are some of each among those mentioned by the OP).
In something like Independence Day or Jurassic Park (I think—it’s been awhile since I’ve seen either), the “bad guys” are bad precisely because they represent a threat to survival. They’re more “forces of nature” than consciously morally Evil. And the “good guys” are the ones trying to survive (and to help each other to survive), and what makes them “good” are the qualities they have that are used to do this, and not any higher moral Goodness.
But some authors really do have a religious or philosophical belief in the reality of objective Good and Evil beyond mere survival (including but not limited to Christians like Tolkien and Lewis), and this comes through in the worlds they create.
And some readers/viewers believe in Good and Evil, and some don’t; and this can affect what stories resonate with them. (And some don’t believe but want to. And some do believe, but don’t agree with the way they’re portrayed in a particular fictional world.)