On Doing Evil
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lightgetsin has posted a long commentary of her latest Dresden Files fic which includes a lot of comment about how she deals with writing John Marcone (a mafia leader) as a sympathetic character without compromising or whitewashing the terrible things he does and justifies to himself.I've seen this, and variations of it, appear fairly often in Dresden Files fandom, and certainly the archetype and fandom's fondness for it aren't limited to that one character, so I want to ramble on about it here (with the note that this isn't a direct response to
lightgetsin in particular, just my thoughts on things I have been pondering for a long time, that are informing a lot of my marcone!writing, and that seem to put me at an angle to a lot of other fan writers.)...and, um, for the record, this touches on things that I am usually too cowardly to write about in any way other than filtered through the safety of fiction, but I do want to talk about it, and I am never going to publish the Marcone epic with the Roman baths anyway, so I am crossing my fingers and posting it anyway.
Active discussion of this problem is for some reason happening more often in Dresden Files than in other fandoms I've been in that have the same archetype: We're writing a bad guy as one of our heroes. How to we deal with that, both from an internal storytelling perspective, and from our own morality as the writers? It's the guy who runs the Evil Empire, accepts the mantle of Bad Guy, but is doing it for the right reasons (or at least thinks he's doing it for the right reasons.) He is trying to make things better by working from the inside, but has chosen to damn himself to do it Maybe it's because in a lot of the fandoms with similar characters who become a major fanon character, the canon does a lot more of the work for us. Dresden Files does a good job of sketching out Marcone as fitting that archetype, but actually spends very little time with him in canon, so we have to do the woobifying work ourselves.
I have a weakness for this sort of character as protagonist, I do. I started thinking about fandoms I've been in and making a list, and yeah. Dumbledore, eventually everyone in PoTC, CSM and later Krycek, some Lex Luthors, Aral and Cordelia and Gregor, everyone in political RPF (but particularly Peter Mandelson), even the Lone Power in more sympathetic readings, I could go on...
A lot of people also talk about how hard it is to write these characters, how hard it is to get into their heads, to be that detached and ruthless. I am almost afraid to admit it, but I have the opposite experience: writing one of them is like breathing free air, I get to turn off all the things that normally clog up and obscure a character's motivations and reactions and write someone who makes sense.
I, for the record, am a criminal. I fully believe that, a hundred or two hundred years from now, people will look back at the way I live with the same revulsion that we look back on my ancestors who owned slaves, who settled the Indian Territory, who helped crush the Peasants' War or fought in the Crusades.
I hope they look back on us with revulsion, anyway. The alternatives are too terrible to contemplate.
Simply by doing what I do every day, I am hurting people for my own gain: the milk and cereal I eat for breakfast, the gasoline I burn to drive to the corner store to get more, the minerals that make my laptop battery run: by consuming them, I am actively hurting people, people alive now and in the future, people who have far less power than I do. And I can't stop: just by being born when and where and who I was, there is no way out. I can't win, I can't lose, I can't leave the game. Even dropping out of society will just mean me putting more pressure on the resources of the fringes, taking resources away from people who don't have the choice to drop out. The best I can to is be mindful of the harm I'm doing, try to minimize it, and try to make the world more just by working to change the existing evil system, even as I'm constantly doubting whether the work I'm doing is more help than harm, whether the system is fixable (while knowing that throwing it out entirely won't result in anything better.)
...except when my brain chemistry gets a little out of control and I start thinking that the only possible moral choice is for me to die and stop consuming resources. Which is a good marker that it is past time for me to do something about said brain chemistry, really, even if the conclusion is derived from impeccable logic, and the only reasons not to are that a) life is sweet, and b) I care more about the hurt I would hypothetically do to people I know personally by dying than the hurt I am actively doing to people I have never met, by living.
I have, mostly (except when the brain chemicals go a bit off), made my peace with this fact. Made my peace with the fact that, every day, a hundred times, I voluntarily make the decision that my own momentary convenience, and the happiness and prosperity of my own small community of choice, are more important to me than the pain of strangers. My ability to read Dresden Files fanfic while sitting on the porch is more valuable to me than the life of the Chinese miner dying of industrial poison, than the Bangladeshi village drowned by anthropogenic flooding, than the Saudi Arabian woman being beaten by her husband with no way out. And by making those choices, by deciding daily and clear-eyed that they aren't my primary responsibility, I am, by any rational moral analysis, a monster. I can live with that knowledge about myself. I have to.
...so when I write one of those monster-but-for-the-greater-good characters, I am not writing somebody who is foreign to me. I am writing somebody who thinks very much the same way I do, except that he cares a lot more than I do about fixing the system, that he is willing to sacrifice, in pain and time and soulstuff, a lot more than I am willing to sacrifice.
And that he is a lot more certain than I am that the path he has chosen will lead to a juster world in the long term, certain enough that he can shift us to a better way to stake life & sacred honor on it the way I never am sure even when I'm standing in crowd chanting slogans.
(I use "he" here because, in fiction, it's almost always a man. Women are supposed to choose family over the greater good, after all, because that makes them mothers, not monsters. They don't have a sacred manly honor to sacrifice, anyway. They don't have the moral capacity to make these kinds of decisions for themselves.)
Tragedy with these guys is finding out that, as certain as they were that their choices are making things better, they were wrong. (Final tragedy is when they have sacrificed so much that they can't admit to themselves that they were wrong, and they keep going down that path even when it's blatantly obvious that they aren't helping.)
The path to salvation for these characters, to peace and a happy ending, is for them to realize that they don't have to take the sole burden on themselves, that moral compromise can mean a quiet life with a kitchen-garden and a kid just the same as it can mean taking over a criminal empire, that they can let somebody else step up to do the same work they are doing or at least share the burden, that they are allowed to claim happiness even knowing that the whole world is corrupt and they are wallowing in that corruption, that there's nothing about them other than an accident of resources that makes them fundamentally more special, more morally important, more responsible for fixing their world, than that Saudi Arabian woman or Bangladeshi child: which is only to say of course that we are all responsible and we are all just that special and we all need to think in terms of using the resources we are given responsibly and nobody gets to make easy moral choices.
(This is not the same as the path to redemption. Frankly I usually find redemptive storylines with these characters uninteresting. Often because the writer doesn't do the work to convince me that self-flagellation and showy heroism actually is better than what they were doing before. I want either triumph or retirement, or sometimes a thoughtful self-aware change of direction, not a heel face turn.)
(Truimph of course is when they actually are just that special and they do fix things and they step down, or let themselves be killed, for a new generation running a visibly better world and not needing to face the choices they did. I like those stories too, even when I don't quite believe in them.)
...and then I was going to cut back to Marcone in particular and talk about what the American Mafia actually does, which a lot of fandom doesn't seem to have ever looked at closely, and how Marcone's outfit does & doesn't correspond to RL groups, and how the above specifically applies to writing about a crime boss from a version of a real organization in a real city, but I think I have probably written enough already for today.
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You're a sharp writer, btw. I really appreciate how you articulated all this.
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The fictional characters are just making all those little daily compromises larger than life, impossible to overlook - that's why people keep writing characters like that - but they aren't new compromises.
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And yeah, it does come down to what can you live with. When I was a kid, the lines for me were that I wouldn't treat others the way I was being treated- but I knew better than to try to step in to someone else's defense. Usually, because my trying would make it worse for them- I was sufficiently down the ladder far enough that I couldn't try to help most people without them feeling insulted I thought I should try, and the people bullying them picking up on it as a new method for causing misery. But sometimes, because I knew what would happen to *me* if I did, and that would bridge the gap between bearable unhappiness and unlivable misery. So I learned to live with that.
Nowadays those kind of choices have more to do with my work- well, my eventual work, long story- and of course my personal consumption. (Clotheslines, above-ground pools, vegetable gardens and the occasional temporarily-broken but to-be-fixed vehicle are all reasons why I refuse to live anywhere with even the vaguest concept of "housing associations". Ugh.)
But you don't get the same feeling- or I don't- from, say, your car's empty gas tank as you do from watching a classmate get verbally eviscerated in front of your peers, and knowing there's nothing you can do that would help. Not right that second, anyways. Makes it harder.
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But that meant that I didn't really understand why other people were being so badly hurt by it, either, and when I think about the times in middle school when that made me complicit in what was being done to other kids who were hurt by it, and badly... yeah. I am not, actually, a good person with a clean conscience.
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Thank you for this. One of the reasons I was so disappointed in what happened to the Hunger Games trilogy by the end of it was because I had somehow decided in books 1 and 2 that this universe was going to be exploring that complication, and I was very, very mistaken.
And, well, this. I have a big problem in that I grew up and currently live in very mobbed up towns, and I just can't imagine romanticizing the Mafia. But Butcher does, and correspondingly, so does the fandom (and no, his twitter excuses vis-à-vis race that he is talking about Fictional Chicago not real Chicago hold no water for me either with his race argument or where it comes to the reality of writing about the Mafia in a town full of the Mafia).
I love the way people write the Harry/John pairing, yet I can't stand when people buy John's argument that it is somehow moral or harmless to sell illegal drugs and guns to adults instead of to children. Everything that
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I think it's really obvious that Marcone's Outfit is based on the romantic idea of what the mafia was rather than any actual research Butcher might theoretically have done. The charitable explanation of this is that he was writing a half-parody Noir pastiche rather than urban realism when he introduced Marcone, but as he's moved the series far, far beyond those origins he hasn't really... carried things through.
>> when people buy John's argument that it is somehow moral or harmless to sell illegal drugs and guns to adults instead of to children.
See... my reaction to this is a) since when is selling drugs and guns the most important part of the business of the American Mafia? (I think I've only seen one DF fic where extortion or racketeering was even mentioned, and that was an accountancy AU,) and b) when did John argue that it was moral or harmless to sell illegal drugs and guns to adults?
When I get that in fic I don't go "the author is buying in to John's argument," I go "the author is writing John OOC."
The argument I read John as making is that somebody will be selling drugs and guns to adults no matter what, and better him than the alternatives, because at least he can and will try to mitigate it somewhat. That is a somewhat different argument. ...and no, in RL, I don't buy it, because there is nobody I trust to have that kind of autocratic power and use it that well - but within the fictional context of the books, where we've seen Marcone's soul, seen him at the end of his tether - yeah, I am one of the people who is willing to entertain the possibility that his way is the best of a bunch of bad choices.
(See also: why I simultaneously love reading about, and am deeply conflicted as regards to, the government of Barrayar. There is a whole essay to be written about the role of the Benevolent Autocrat, aka the "One Man, One Vote" system, in modern SF, and how it fails utterly as a RL governmental system and therefore its promotion within story is problematic at best, and yet as a way of exploring issues of personal morality, communality, responsibility and selfhood it's really compelling.)
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As to the latter, I honestly don't know if that comes from canon or fanon, because I admit they blur together in my head. But as far as the former, the US Mafia is plenty involved in the drug trade; Since World War II, the US Mafia has been involved in the import of heroin into the United States in a pretty major way.
This is one of my other problems with the romantic presentation of the Mafia in fiction (both pro and fan) -- it's the notion that the presence of the Mafia means that all crime in a single area is controlled by a single family, like a fantasy novel's Thieves' Guild. It doesn't work that way, and never has, at least not in the 20th and 21st century United States. He's not an alternative who's better than all the others, he's just one more criminal (albeit more restrained and likable) in a city full of criminals. A Mafia kingpin controls a particular crime family and may go to war with other crime families, but none of that prevents other crime, other drug sales, other crazed junkies shooting people, other gang violence, except maybe in the neighborhoods where the Mafiosos actually live.
And it doesn't feel like much of a benefit to live in the same neighborhoods as the mafiosos when your older sister comes home from her high school job slinging ice cream totally terrified because a mafia enforcer's daughter got a job at the same ice cream parlor, and her older sister came in with her on her first day and explained that her father was going to break everybody's kneecaps if her sister ever came home from work complaining about her coworkers.
...Did I mention that I grew up in a mobbed up town? Did I mention that it was scary?
And despite this, we still had to lock our doors, there were still break-ins in our neighborhood, there were still drugs, there was still just as much Non-mafia crime as you would expect in any equivalent suburb.
Oh, absolutely. I think this idea is prevalent in both fantasy and science fiction, and is incredibly troubling, very Ayn Randian at best. And yet it's really compelling, just as it's compelling to see the SGA team defeat those wicked, whiny bureaucrats who want to stop them exploring the galaxy by using things like "rules" and "standards". What we love to see in stories are benevolent autocrats, vigilantes, cowboys, and all kinds of incredibly problematic structures.
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As to the latter: I really need to go through the e-books and pull out all the Marcone appearances like I've been meaning to for ages (it's not like there are actually all that many) but I am fairly sure he's never a) actively tried to morally justify what he does at all or b) specifically made the kids=bad, adults=okay distinction. Having a strict no-kids rule is not the same thing as believing that anything that doesn't involve kids is okay (despite the occasional occurrence in fandom of that idea.)
As to the former: the more I thought about this, the more I realized how likely it was that my perception of La Cosa Nostra involvement in drug trade was heavily influenced by racism in reporting, so I have been attempting to dig up actual information RE: the modern American mafia and illegal drugs. It is for obvious reasons difficult to do, but from what I can piece together: LCN was heavily involved in alcohol smuggling during prohibition (obvs.) It also pretty much controlled the heroin trade in the US from the point at which Lucky Luciano took over in the '30s, until the end of the French Connection in the mid '70s. After that, though, all I'm getting is scattered references - it looks like LCN was continuing to facilitate imports through Florida (without necessarily controlling the trade) and there was a somewhat successful attempt by some of the New Yorkers to connect up to Corsican operations in Southeast Asia, up until the late '80s.
By the time I was old enough to have some idea what was going on (and Marcone was old enough to have been active), though, I'm having a lot of trouble finding information implying that drug trafficking/distribution was still a major interest of any of the American mafia groups. Almost none of the major mafia busts in the last two decades have mentioned drugs to speak of, and some of the Family Secrets stuff says that at least in the '90s, the Chicago Outfit was largely forbidden from getting involved with drugs, as too high-risk. I checked the archived NDIC Drug Threat Assessment papers, and going to the archived Illinois/Great Lakes regional assessments that I could find back to 2001, they don't even mention the Outfit or Italian organized crime; the national assessments either don't mention the Mafia at all, or only mention it in the context of the New York/New Jersey families doing some small-scale dealing, and greasing shipments through the Northeastern & Florida ports as related to developing alliances with the Mexican & South American groups that control the trade.
Which still leaves open the possibility that a) I have not found the right data, or b) even that reporting is systematically biased to avoid associating the drug trade with the nice, local, White criminals. But short of me stumbling across something that contradicts all of the above, TBH I am not interested enough to dig too hard into stuff that organized crime doesn't want me to know.
...which means that, if we assume Marcone's organization is the equivalent of an actual current La Cosa Nostra group (which in Chicago is supposedly currently led by an 84-year-old former retiree who reminds me of Ebenezar a hell of a lot more than Marcone. Who reminds me of Eb to a disturbing extent), then he is involved in drugs minimally if at all (and, going by the Family Secrets accounts, may be mostly involved in terms of keeping his people away from drugs by whatever means possible.)
If we assume that Harry's portrayal of Marcone's organization is in any way accurate, it doesn't resemble a modern Mafia group really in any way at all, and I've been assuming that Marcone totally transformed the organization after his takeover, to about the same extent that Luciano did in NYC the '30s (but in a very, very different direction.) But if you buy that part of the transformation was gaining control over parts of the city's crime that the Vargassis didn't touch, it means Marcone deliberately brought the mafia back into the local drug trade as part of his control-everything strategy. (Even then, though, I presume he's probably mostly controlling local retail for wholesale shipments brought in by non-Mafia groups, since he doesn't seem to be interested in international rackets.)
...Writing Marcone as Vetinari jr. is a hell of a lot of fun, but it would be interesting to see someone write a version where Harry is an even more unreliable narrator than usual, and Marcone is way less powerful in the city as a whole than Harry thinks he is and rules over an empire that is as limited as the current Outfit appears to be.
(gah. I appear to have started writing the Marcone and the Mafia post after all. There is a whole lot more I should put in here regarding race + ethics + storytelling + rpf principles as applied to place + many other things but I am using the fact that it's just a comment to not have to try to write down everything ever. yes.)
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Also, thanks for pointing to that