Originally posted by: Number20
I agree. I'm sick of the popular views anymore that we have to have 'realistic' heroes by having them to be not that good, and the villians to be not that evil, or we are supposed to feel sorry for them. I personally like things the way they've been, where the heroes are good, the villians are evil, and not all this 'shades of gray' stuff.
Originally posted by: skyjedi2005
In this series the author said he wanted to portray the chracters realistically and not simply black or white or good vs. evil but more gray.
This is a very new age concept where you as the reader are supposed to be confused as to who the hero or villains in the story are. they tried this with wheel of time series and was somewhat unconvincing.
This is why I dislike anti hero 90's ish type characters and I love the original star wars trilogy because the bad guys and good guys are so well defined. That might not be in vogue with post 911 darkness end of the world shit but so be it.
The prequels sucked and were a downer because we were supposed to root for the dark anti hero.
tolkien's hero's and villains had a very thin line between them because a christian writer would know about the fall of man and sin. although no such words were used in his books sauron and the devil are pretty much the same and the ring as the tempter. Frodo was saved by Grace because like Bilbo he pitied Gollum and forgave him.
In this series the author said he wanted to portray the chracters realistically and not simply black or white or good vs. evil but more gray.
This is a very new age concept where you as the reader are supposed to be confused as to who the hero or villains in the story are. they tried this with wheel of time series and was somewhat unconvincing.
This is why I dislike anti hero 90's ish type characters and I love the original star wars trilogy because the bad guys and good guys are so well defined. That might not be in vogue with post 911 darkness end of the world shit but so be it.
The prequels sucked and were a downer because we were supposed to root for the dark anti hero.
tolkien's hero's and villains had a very thin line between them because a christian writer would know about the fall of man and sin. although no such words were used in his books sauron and the devil are pretty much the same and the ring as the tempter. Frodo was saved by Grace because like Bilbo he pitied Gollum and forgave him.
I agree. I'm sick of the popular views anymore that we have to have 'realistic' heroes by having them to be not that good, and the villians to be not that evil, or we are supposed to feel sorry for them. I personally like things the way they've been, where the heroes are good, the villians are evil, and not all this 'shades of gray' stuff.
I agree about the moral ambiguity problem. I thought one of the classic examples of why this leads off a cliff was in Episode III - ROTS. Obi says to Annakin "Annakin, Palpatine is EVIL!", follwed by Annakin saying "From my point of view the Jedi are evil". Of course this was all preceded by "Only a Sith deals in absolutes". What a bunch of crap.
I do however believe that the classic "Good - Bad" can also lead to bad storytelling, and would never have worked for the series in question (ASOIAF).