On Doing Evil

[melannen]

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.