Regarding Protagonist-Centered Morality

I dunno, I would hate for my readers to assume the POV given is the morally correct one.

I don't find subjective morality problematic to present. Protagonists should have world views and they should believe they are correct.

I would say it goes the other way. Being neutral is neither impossible nor desirable, and would be unrealistic to boot. It is impossible to write without bias or slant.

The world's morality *is* determined by you, because your perception of reality is your entire universe as a person.

Okay, I think (maybe) I see where you're going with this. I'd first thought it was about a writer's building the protagonist's moral code to such an extent that no slippage is permissible contrasted with situational morality. It's more layered and complex than that, isn't it?

Still, we do see that effect in the world around us—for instance, we know and feel that the mass murder of millions is horrific and heinous, but there is no individuation of the victims; i.e., it's more difficult to take in and feel deeply because they're nameless and faceless. That one instance of selflessness can be and sometimes is (wrongly) weighted greater because of the individuation; i.e., the object of the selflessness has a name and a face so it's easier to identify them and become more emotionally involved.

I think it takes a highly skilled and experienced writer to pull this off effectively by completely knowing what they're doing and by letting the reader see what's happening. I've seen it done clunkily and I've seen it done elegantly. But, no, I don't think it should be avoided 'cause I don't think writers should play it safe. So it's a skill one might want to work at acquiring. At the very least, the writer will learn to write more layered and nuanced characters rather than perfect protagonists and cardboard villains.

I think on some level the conversation splits into two conversations, the attempt to define the character's morality in the work, and the author's. I think you can make an argument that characters should reflect clear moral line that are right or wrong, or alternately that such distinctions are useless. On some level it's hard to convince me of anything as a moral certainty, so it comes down to how compelling the character is more than if they're wearing the white hat or not.

In terms of the author's morality, I think it's the opposite, there's no point in trying to convince the reader that you're coming from any kind of neutral ground.

I guess part of the interesting thing is exploring the tension between the subjective morality of the characters and the morality that you, the author, are trying to present.

It's realistic because it reflects our experience. We do not value all people or events equally.

Every time you breathe, a child on this planet has died, from oreventBle thirst or starvation. And another one. And another. Another. Another. Another. Etc.

But I dont have time or capacity to focus on the breadth of those objective experiences, and limit myself to what I encounter and (to an extent) what I am arbitrarily attached to.

I would say that it becomes a problem when the story itself tries to depict a protagonist's self-centered sense of morality as righteous, or fails to realize the implications of how it treats its moral in regard to its characters.

For that first problem, a glaring example is the video game Persona 5. In that game, literally everyone who does not agree with the protagonists falls into two camps: they're either cartoonishly corrupt and evil, or cartoonishly apathetic and stupid. The villains who break rules are evil, but the protagonists breaking rules is treated as defying corruption. Propaganda is treated as brainwashing by protagonists who literally brainwash those they oppose. Anyone who disagrees with the protagonists must be in the wrong, and anything is fine if the protagonists are the ones doing it.

For the second, I point to Undertale. The moral is supposed to be about how killing is bad, but holds blatant different standards between the player killing and the monsters killing. The player killing another, even if only in self-defense, is treated as wrong and unforgivable. Meanwhile, you're expected to befriend the monsters who purposefully try to kill your character without provocation. When the story reveals that most of the monsters are a threat to you without realizing they're harming you, you're expected to sympathize with the monsters...without asking yourself how many humans have died because none of the monsters who know better taught the others about humans dying when they are killed.

I've actually thought of this in one story idea I have, in which a random villager is turned into a monster, with the villain threatening to do the same to a friend of the MC. The MC is disgusting by how the villain thinks she'd care less about such a terrible fate happening to people she isn't close to.

It sounds like you're talking about a logical contradiction in story-telling & giving it a fancy name. This kind of logical contradiction has some kind of wiggle room, & that is the story-tellers skill. Some writers can convince when they present the kind of contradictions you describe. Others fail to do so and you go - wait - wtf.

Kjbartolotta said:

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In terms of the author's morality, I think it's the opposite, there's no point in trying to convince the reader that you're coming from any kind of neutral ground.

I guess part of the interesting thing is exploring the tension between the subjective morality of the characters and the morality that you, the author, are trying to present.

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Isn't it that there's no point in trying because we can't really and the best we can hope to do is not be preachy? I'm in the middle of an Inspector Gamache novel by Louise Penny right now that addresses the question of whether it's possible to separate the creator from the creation. It's interesting to see the two points of view through the eyes of charactors—those who are creators and those who are not.

I think TVTropes should be taken with a grain of salt. It's a fun site and provokes some interesting thought experiments, but I wouldn't at all say it's an authority on literary analysis.

For one, the site is so dependent on labels that the definitions sort of all circle back on themselves, and the level of labeling is so granular that every event in any story can be assigned to a trope, which rather makes the term "trope" lose its meaning. Second, the examples they give to support the trope definition are often taken in complete isolation from the story as a whole, which ignores all nuance you might otherwise find there (nuance that, imo, often elevates the event out of tropedom).

I think some amount of "protagonist-centered morality" is necessary for the reader to relate to the protagonist. Echoing what Harlequin said, we do have a concept of the overall tragedy of a situation. If a flight crashes, we're sad. We empathize with the people who lost love ones. We move on. If we had loved ones on that flight, the crash suddenly becomes a very personal tragedy, with very high personal losses, and that affects us on a much deeper level. Now, take that same crash, except there were a handful of survivors, and our loved ones were among them. Our immediate response to that same tragedy is now relief. In some ways, it's even a win (again, on a personal but not global level; it's still possible to feel conflicting emotions simultaneously).

Most of us will prioritize our close relations over others, even many others. I think it can be difficult to understand a protagonist who doesn't. It's rough to root for a protagonist and then in the final hour, know that they're choosing not to save their child in favor of saving twenty random people. Morally, logically, that makes sense and it seems like it should feel like the noble move, but the concept is a little foreign to a lot of people from an emotional angle. And it would be weird if, after a war, the character lamented that it meant nothing that friends and family survived when all these other people died. Nobody would say that.

In addition, when we've rooted for a character and we've become emotionally attached to that character, I think we automatically want to safe guard the things and people who are important to the character. We gain emotional satisfaction when the character and his/her people come out unscathed because at the end of a long, bloody struggle, we don't want the character we love to suffer even more by losing people who are personally important, realism be damned.

You mentioned Deadpool. I think vengeance is also a relatable theme. We've got stories that teach us vengeance is bad, but sometimes we want the wish fulfillment of the bad guys getting what's coming to them in the absence of a perfect justice system. It's basically the entire reason we have the vigilante sub genre. Seeing Deadpool, the Punisher, John Wick, etc., go on their rampages is satisfying because it's what we might wish we could do when we're seriously wronged if we had the same power and lack of consequences. Plus, good vigilantes only kill the bad guys, the guys who are worse than they are, and we can extrapolate that given their lives, those bad guys would continue to hurt other innocent people. And these guys are interesting, dynamic, active characters; they aren't waiting for trouble to happen around them and then fixing it. They're out there making their own trouble.

But referencing Deadpool again: His morality wasn't set up as the morality of the world, imo. Colossus delivers the lessons in morality, and if you watch both movies, you see that Deadpool does make tiny steps in evolving as a hero.

So I think it's entirely appropriate to write and as a reader to root for a flawed hero. As a writer, I think the trick is to make sure the reader can always see at least a facet of themselves in the character's choices and reactions without crossing a line that makes them irredeemable in the reader's eyes (and that line is going to be a little different for every reader). If a character crosses the line, then I think it's the writer's job to show the consequences of it so as to not normalize or forgive it. There are some things a character can come back from with appropriate penance... sometimes, though, the only penance is to eventually sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

There are a bunch of ways to handle this. If you're telling a story via a character-referenced narrative viewpoint (such as first or limited third), the moral tone of the narrative should (imo) reflect that of the viewpoint character (who is most often, though not always, the protagonist or one of the protagonists). However, this doesn't mean that you should set it up so the reader comes to the conclusion that the viewpoint character is correct in their views. There are many ways to keep alternative views of reality (and morality) on the table. You could present your central narrator as unreliable in various ways. You could show consequences of their actions and views that are subtly (or clearly) at odds with how they see things. You can have more than one pov character in the story, and the contrast between their views can allow a different perspective to emerge.

The challenge always lies in setting things up so the character is interesting and relatable, even if their views are not especially sympathetic to the reader.

If one is writing a story through the eyes of an external (omniscient) narrator, of course, one is free to filter everything through the external narrator's version of morality, or one can have their external narrator be neutral and (possibly) even fairly invisible.

Ari Meermans said:

Isn't it that there's no point in trying because we can't really and the best we can hope to do is not be preachy? I'm in the middle of an Inspector Gamache novel by Louise Penny right now that addresses the question of whether it's possible to separate the creator from the creation. It's interesting to see the two points of view through the eyes of charactors—those who are creators and those who are not.

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Tho to be fair, some of us are contrarians and will often argue against our own points while giving alternate points of view (within reason) plenty of airtime.

heza said:

I think TVTropes should be taken with a grain of salt. It's a fun site and provokes some interesting thought experiments, but I wouldn't at all say it's an authority on literary analysis.

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Agreed, I think TVTropes is great and can give you ten reasons why, but I worry about the way it can make flexible tools turn into inflexible dictums. I can't find here tweets, but I recall Nnedi Okorafor going on a fabulous Twitter rant about how tropes, in her mind, simply don't exist, every author is building there own story their own way. I think there's some value to tropes, but they can dominate the conversation.

TV Tropes. I learned about the site here on AW. Didn't know the site existed until then. I use them to find out if what I want to do has a name, to see examples in film and literature, and to see what might be considered overdone or worn out.

Oh, and I'd really like to thank y'all for kicking me down a known rabbit hole all unsuspecting. just sayin'

This issue comes up a lot in YA, because many see it as having (ideally) an educational function. What if the first-person narrator expresses some not-very-enlightened-or-informed views, as kids who are still forming their views of the world are apt to do? Is it enough for the author gently to imply that the narrator is unreliable and still learning? Or to present information that contradicts the narrator’s biases and let us draw our own conclusions? Or is it never okay to narrate from certain morally repugnant points of view because readers might take that as an endorsement, even when the book is about the narrator learning the error of their ways?

Personally, I think teens are just as capable of separating character morality from author message as adults are. That said, many adults have trouble with this. It came up lots in college classes where I was teaching pre-20th century lit, because it’s especially hard to parse the intent of someone who comes from a completely different historical frame of reference. Hey, I didn’t realize “A Modest Proposal” was satire the first time I read it—well, I hoped it was, but with no context, I couldn’t be sure.

Vida Paradox said:

What makes something called the 'Protagonist Centered Morality'? What makes it different from just writing from the Protagonist's Sympathetic Point of View?

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To answer your specific question, it's when the narration portrays what the protagonist does as right and good, despite the actual morality of whatever they're doing. Lilywhite portrayed a good example below, where being with the protagonist is right, and being against them is wrong. It's hypocrisy, and not intentional or ironic, but just because it's justified without examination because the good guys are doing it.

It's a common feature of sloppy or poorly thought out writing. Generic examples would be the guy wrongfully accused of a crime, on the run from the law, who does this, that & the other thing to prove his innocence. Except that 'this, that & the other thing,' includes high speed chases with spectacular crashes, shootouts with the cops... we're supposed to be siding with the protagonist because we know he's innocent and in the 'right,' but you stop and think about, he's putting innocent people at risk/getting them killed with his shenanigans. The cops might just be shooting gallery mooks, but from their POV, they are chasing a dangerous, trigger happy fugitive. They're not 'bad guys' except for the fact they're in opposition to the main character.

IIRC, that was one of the big complaints about The Sword of Truth series, because you had some characters who were bad guys simply because they didn't agree with the hero. They weren't the ones going around killing babies and burning villages, but because they didn't agree with the MC, they were evil and deserved to die. That's why it arises from sloppy writing - there's no attempt to build a framework or reasoning, the only determining factor is that the protagonist is good, and so therefore to disagree with them makes a character bad.

There's a manga called Blade of the Immortal that brings this up fairly early in it's story. A girl is after vengeance after her parents are killed, and after a harrowing fight, her badass, if amoral, bodyguard casually asks, 'so how many people have died now in your quest for revenge? Those guys didn't kill your parents, they just got in the way doing their jobs. What gives you the high ground?' And he does have a point - she's a very sympathetic character, but ultimately how big a pile of bodies can she claim is justified?

This also ties into another tvtropes entry, 'what measure is a mook?'