What it means to be Good versus Evil

By Joe Jackson

I’ve had many an argument with players in my D&D campaigns about what it means to be Good versus Evil or – and I hate to even validate it by mentioning it – Neutral.  Their arguments usually boil down to “we’re the good guys because we kill the bad guys and evil things.”

Survey Says: [X][X][X]

No, sorry, no trip to the lightning round for you.  Killing “evil” things doesn’t make you good.  After all, evil characters and creatures kill other evil creatures all the time.  It’s a big part of why the good guys tend to win in the end – they can trust each other, they work together, and they have more than their own self-interests in mind (well, not so much in the books I’m talking about).  “Neutral” characters kill evil things too, so why aren’t they good?

Right.  Because what you fight and/or kill is irrelevant next to WHY you fight and/or kill it.  It’s all about your motivations.  And that’s what I find woefully lacking in a lot of the fantasy I’ve read in recent years.  The genre seems inundated with main characters – usually teenagers – with bad attitudes and even worse motivations.  It seems a lot of the time that authors don’t really ask why their characters are ultimately going to do the heroic things they have planned, they just take a random shmuck and drop them into a situation where they can either save the town / country / world or else enjoy burning along with it.

The problem is, even in the midst of undertaking these quests to save the town / country / world, the heroes tend to have bad attitudes or are only really motivated by preserving their own cushy little life or their new budding romance!  In these instances, it’s still not a true heroic motivation, because it’s self-serving.  Self-centeredness is the hallmark of the evil, because while they will sometimes do “good” things, it’s never in consideration of what others need, only their own wants and desires.  If your hero is going out and trying to do heroic things, but their reasoning is one of these:

-          Want to impress parents

-          Want to impress potential love interest

-          Want to become king / queen / prince / princess or marry one of those

-          Want to show up a rival

-          Needs to prove how tough their race /gender / whatever else is

-          Just don’t like the antagonist on a personal level

-          Have nothing better to do / think it would be cool

-          Wants to be adored/worshipped as a hero

Guess what?  They’ve already failed as a hero.  They have the wrong motivation.  None of those are reasons a hero wants to save the world.  Compare these laughable motivations with the words of one of fantasy’s purest, most admirable heroes, Samwise Gamgee:

Sam: Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t.
Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam:   That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Or, as G.K. Chesterton said: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

BOOM.  Love.  It’s the thing so many heroes in fantasy books seem to be missing these days.  And it’s important to note I’m not talking about the kind of love where Male Lead and Female Lead (or whatever combination a book features) fall in love because they just kill things so well together, or they’re fated soulmates, or – rarely – they’re just an actual normal couple who fall in love for more sensible reasons.  I’m talking about love for your fellow man, love for country, for the people you know and even – or especially – the people you don’t.  Fat lot of good it does to have heroes who’ll go out and slay dragons but don’t actually give a rat’s ass about the people of their home city.  Those are the “heroes” who start thinking the world owes them something for their services, or who have all the personality of a wooden plank with a war-cry face painted on it, or end up becoming villains because they think they know how to run everything and everyone else’s lives.

This was the problem for me with stories like Percy Jackson versus something like Harry Potter.  Percy Jackson and his friends just want to be heroes and one-up each other to score points for their deity parent (in the movies, anyway).  Harry, by contrast, didn’t want to fight and kill Voldemort to avenge his parents, he was willing to fight and kill Voldemort to save his friends and the people he cared about.  And he even risked his neck for Draco Malfoy, someone who had never been even remotely close to a friend to him.  But even the best of heroes in fantasy tend to be removed from the populace at large, especially once they’ve accomplished a heroic feat and/or saved the world.  They’ll say they love the common people, but they usually end up in a castle ruling over said people, or they wander off into the sunset because “life just doesn’t make sense anymore” or something.

Most heroes, I find, are lost in the pursuit of power; prestige; love (of the romantic kind); wealth; or their own badass-ness, which translates to, “universal peace and harmony OR ELSE” – and it feels like the authors don’t even see it.  Yeah, technically the MC saved the poor people in the slums by killing the dragon, but did they do it for those poor people and the commoners?  No.  Generally, they do it for some flighty reason, probably in the list above, and both the MC and the author sit back and kick their feet up, expecting to be lauded and praised for how badass their character is.

To borrow a phrase from The Critical Drinker: “Fuck off, book.”

To dig a little deeper into heroism, I’m of the opinion that a good author doesn’t kill a single person in a book without putting some thought behind it.  And I’m not just talking about the main or even major and minor characters, but any person whatsoever.  The people who die in a book shouldn’t be extras or cardboard cutouts that were brought in from the props department.  They’re PEOPLE.  They’re fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, sons, and daughters.  They have families, they have dreams, goals, desires, and just as much potential to be a hero as that jackass the book was designed around.  Even the antagonist’s aides, soldiers, and guards.  That’s what’s supposed to make war so horrifying, not just the potential results of the good guys losing and being ruled by Sir Evilness.

So, if you’re going to kill people, some thought has to go into that.

How does their death affect their family?  Their neighborhood?  Their town?  Their county, country, and the world as a whole?  If you answered that question immediately in your head by thinking either, “Who cares” or “it doesn’t matter”, then you’ve just explained the entire issue I’m talking about today, because you have the same wrong mental attitude that these MCs do.  Ask yourself if you’d want to be a statistic that no one cares about when the MC comes through to save the day.  Don’t we see enough of that on the news?  Lives reduced to a number or a statistic to fit a narrative rather than having any value assigned to them?

It absolutely does matter, and if people don’t care, it’s because they’d been trained not to by lazy writing.  Imagine for just a minute that the MC is invading a castle.  There’s a big bad guy in it.  And naturally, as villains’ castles are notorious for, the halls and rooms are full of guards and henchmen.  Does the MC wade through that castle all willy-nilly and just kill every person they come across?  Do they even hesitate or stop to consider what it might mean to kill everyone?  Does the thought of trying to redeem any of those guards, henchmen, servants, and whoever else even cross your MC’s mind?  If not, why not?  Is redemption reserved only for “boss” villains and named characters that would make for a great twist?  That would seem a bit ironic, since all those henchmen and guards were just doing the villain’s bidding, no?

The typical application is the hero rushes in and puts everyone in the way to the sword, then has a big fight with the boss that either ends in death or redemption, then everyone lives happily ever after, right?  Well, really?  Do you think the families and friends of all those people the hero just put to the sword are suddenly thankful and enamored with the hero?  Unlikely.  That’s where you usually end up creating more villains, or simply pissed-off people that don’t worship the hero in the aftermath.  This is something the hero should be considering before they ever set foot in the villain’s lair.  If you’re dealing with “monsters,” it’s likely different, but when your story is man against man, are you considering this type of fallout of just glossing over it?

The issue becomes a lot more difficult to deal with in a war.  I know this from writing experience.  But if the MC’s heart and head are in the right place, they’re thinking about it even during battle.  War should be a shame to these characters, not something they enjoy because they get to show how tough they are.  You may think a battle scene where the MC kills 500 people single-handed without breaking a sweat shows what a badass they are, but in all honesty, it’s trite.  Everyone does that already, so if that’s what’s supposed to differentiate your character, you’re setting yourself up for failure in that regard.  And let’s be honest, when it comes to MCs who are “badasses”, everyone’s favorite badass is typically the last one they read about, because they start to blur together after a while.

What makes a character memorable?  Seeing them lament the loss of even their enemies.  Having them think about all the men and women they’re putting to the sword or cremating alive with incendiary spells.  Showing that they’re fighting for love and to protect, defend, and preserve rather than because they’re a psycho or sociopath who gets a hardon from killing as many things as they can.  Showing that they’re a hero by thinking about their MOTIVATION, making sure they have one worth writing about, and then following it to its logical conclusion, win or lose.

For me, if I’m just reading about another human blender that can only be hurt by someone not loving them back the way they want, I’m not reading about a hero.  Most often, it feels like a self-insert or an embodiment of wish-fulfillment.  An author may sell a lot of books to people looking for exactly that, but will their hero be remembered like Samwise Gamgee?  Or will they just be someone that gets remembered as “Oh yeah, that guy was such a badass, though I can’t remember a single thing he said or did other than kill lots of people”?

I guess what you ultimately decide… comes down to your motivation.