How evil can your MC be ( or start off as)

mentacle

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I'm writing for the younger side of YA, with a 16-year old protagonist in a secondary world who happens to start off as an assassin and hunter. She kills several creatures and sells their hides to provide for her family. She feels it's wrong, without knowing why exactly, but she needs to put food on the table. Besides, it's like killing chicken, right? Then, she discovers the creatures are sentient.
I'm trying to make the revelation horrifying, not in a gory explicit way, but in an "I've been eating my neighbors" kind of way.
Does this ruin the character for readers, even if she spends the rest of the series seeking redemption? How evil is she allowed to be at the start of the novel? Will publishers be squicked about it? Can you point out examples of this happening in other novels, and maybe how it was handled?
Thanks for the input!
 

SVenus

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I wouldn't be grossed out by the revelation, or think the MC evil. I think as long as your MC realizes that an evil thing they did was evil, and when they did it they didn't know it was evil (and neither did the reader), then I think you're fine. For me specifically, I wouldn't mind it even if she knew what she was doing was wrong, but did it for noble reasons, but that's just me. As for specific examples, plenty of YA fantasy protagonists do bad things (I mean, half of them are thieves, assassins, etc.) I can think of an example from a recent YA fantasy where the protagonist basically murders someone, and I wasn't put off by it. From another recent YA fantasy the twist two thirds of the way through is that the MC did all the killings being investigated, but was essentially manipulated. In both examples these things are spoilers, so I wouldn't want to spoil them. YA, especially on the fantasy front, is darker than it was a few years ago.

In any case, I think you're fine, provided it's explained well.
 

skylessbird2218

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Define evil. I know of a past(historically speaking) of my country when during a mostly human-induced famine, some people(a minority) were so hungry, they might have had to eat the flesh of the dead to survive(it's hearsay and there's little evidence of what actually happened during the time). so in this instance who is evil? the people who created the Famine? or the people who were starved enough to be driven to cannibalism? so once again, define evil.
 

Bufty

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Without going into degrees of harmful intent, evil action usually has harmful intent behind it.
 

InsomniaShark

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I would not think your MC was horrible or evil in any way for killing creatures (that she didn't know are sentient at the time) in order to provide for her family, especially since it sounds like she’s upset about it and wants to make up for it somehow. I’d just feel empathy for her because I know I’d be devastated to find out what I’d been doing if I was in her shoes too, and as a reader I’d be intrigued to see how she handled it.

I wouldn’t be squicked unless she continued killing the creatures after she found out because she still needed to in order to survive. (I’d be more conflicted over her then, leaning more toward evil, but not completely evil.)
 

lonestarlibrarian

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I like how she's an assassin, which means she kills people (who presumably need killin'), but her oh-my-goodness-what-have-I-done-I-must-redeem-myself moment comes from the creatures she hadn't known were sentient. :)

I'd probably pick one, or pick the other. But someone who is a hunter knows very well that food doesn't magically appear in a grocery store on styrofoam, and that living creatures have a determination to go on living, even if they don't reason the same as we do. And they probably have the experience to know there's a great variety even within a species regarding awareness. A commercial rabbit raiser I know who raised NZW's said she could slaughter and process a rabbit right next to the other rabbits, that they might not care or associate it with anything relating to themselves. With my Rex, the same thing could happen out of eyeshot, and the next rabbit still knew exactly what was about to happen to it, and was visibly fearful. A lot of them ended up with a temporary reprieve for just that reason... they were too smart.

Child-assassins make me think of child soldiers in places like the Sudan or ISIS. (Global estimates-- 200,000-300,000.) The core audience for YA is 12-18. There's a lot of mental/emotional baggage that comes with that; it's not something you just walk away from and resume a normal life. So if you're going to get into that territory, I'd probably treat the subject matter with respect and responsibility---- and I would look with verrrrrry narrowed eyes at any adult who helped cultivate that aspect of her life but is still being presented as a positive character.

So, just from the OP, it's not a matter of how "evil" she is to start with-- because there's a difference between deliberate evil with full knowledge vs ignorant evil-- but I'm skeptical to see her being a killer for hire, no problem, but then discovering that some of her dinner was more intelligent than she gave it credit for.
 
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skylessbird2218

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Yeah, killing hoomaans is nothing bad, since they are just evil parasites infesting the planet. But how dare you kill'em cute n' cuddly critters?
 

neandermagnon

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Well, more aimed at a general audience than YA (but who knows what publishers will classify it as) my MC's about 14 or so (it's set 40,000 years ago so they don't count their ages like industrial people do) and he kills and eats animals for food. Anyone who's uncomfortable with the fact that hunter-gatherers need to hunt and eat animals probably shouldn't be reading books about hunter-gatherers to start with and 40,000 years ago, everyone was a hunter-gatherer, so I don't really care if anyone's disturbed by it.

Regarding sentience, the current scientific evidence suggests that all land vertebrates (birds, mammals, reptiles*) are sentient, as are some cephalopods (squids/octopus) and some insects (fruit flies are the only ones I recall being named but it's likely that there are a lot of other sentient insects). Additionally, there may be other animals that are sentient besides those, but those are the ones that scientists are pretty sure about. So I would struggle with the idea that "it was just like eating chicken, but then I found out it was sentient" because chickens are sentient. They're also quite a bit cleverer than they're given credit for, albeit not in the same league as ravens and parrots - which are possibly as intelligent as chimps.

*I don't remember if they classified amphibians as land vertebrates or not

Perhaps you mean sapient rather than sentient. Sentience means self-aware and able to feel fear, pain and pleasure and choose to flee from bad scary things and seek out nice, pleasurable things. It doesn't involve an ability to reason beyond "aagh scary" (runs away) and "mm nice" (goes towards it) - but awareness as yourself as an individual that can be hurt is necessary to have that level of reasoning. (Note that scientist distinguish between actual decision making versus reflex actions, and the animals named have shown evidence of decision making rather than acting on reflex. There's more to sentience than just this but I'm trying to keep the post short.)

Sapience isn't so clearly defined but usually meant as human-like levels of intelligence. Great apes* (humans are a species of great ape) have a higher level of cognition that involves recognising each other as individuals, the ability to understand past, present and future and understand the consequences of their actions, make plans, understand complex social interactions, etc. I'm a supporter of great ape personhood. (More details about the intelligence level of non-human great apes in that article.)

*and probably various other highly intelligent species such as corvids (bird genus that includes ravens), parrots, elephants, dolpins, whales and maybe a few other animals - I don't know as much about these as great apes but have seen signs that these animals have a very high level of cognition.

It's important to make the distinction between sentience and sapience because otherwise the whole thing of "I thought it was just like eating chicken, then I found out they were sentient" (deep shock) won't make sense to some biologists.

Further reading if anyone's interested: there was an excellent article about this in the New Scientist not so long ago, though out of a large pile of back copies I can't find it *facepalm* it might be searchable on their website.
 

neandermagnon

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Define evil. I know of a past(historically speaking) of my country when during a mostly human-induced famine, some people(a minority) were so hungry, they might have had to eat the flesh of the dead to survive(it's hearsay and there's little evidence of what actually happened during the time). so in this instance who is evil? the people who created the Famine? or the people who were starved enough to be driven to cannibalism? so once again, define evil.

It's hard to find any middle palaeolithic human remains that don't show signs of being eaten by humans. It seems to have been normal practice in both Neandertals and middle palaeolithic Homo sapiens to eat dead people after they die then carefully bury them (indicative that they died of natural causes and this was the funerary rite). There are even populations of modern humans that did this (eating their dead as part of funerary rites) until very recently who only stopped because they were all suffering from a prion disease called kuru (which is a bit like mad cow disease) that scientists found was caused by eating infected brains. While I wouldn't do this because of my cultural conditioning and because I know about prion disease, I don't think it's morally wrong because they're dead anyway and it's done out of respect and not an attempt to desecrate the dead.

Actually I think most people would probably eat human flesh rather than starve to death. (e.g. the incident where people survived a plane crash high in the mountains and ate the flesh of the crash victims to survive) There's a point where you get so hungry you don't care any more. Survival instincts kick in at some point and override logic, reason, cultural background, morals, someone's everyday values etc.

There's a difference between eating people who die of natural causes because it's a lot of protein that would go to waste and hunting humans for food. The latter is obviously wrong. Among palaeolithic peoples there's occasional evidence of this (I know of one archaeological site that shows this) but also evidence that the people who were eaten were very malnourished and in poor health and the people who ate them ate every single bit of them including breaking the tiny bones in the fingers to get out every last bit of marrow - all evidence that points to this incident happening during a famine.

If someone who's well fed murders a human and eats their liver with fava beans and a nice chianti just because they like to then that's evil. No-one really has the right to make moral judgements of what people do when they're close to starving to death.

Back to the OP: if the situation is that she's killed and eaten a few beings that turn out to be sapient and she feels bad and doesn't eat them any more then I wouldn't think she's evil.
 
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Kjbartolotta

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Pretty evil IMHO, but two books series I could never get into were Prince of Thorns and Thomas Covenant, sooooo...
 

Debbie V

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I think you mean the MC kills the creatures for others and thus earns the money to put the chicken on the table. To me, a girl has got to make a living. As long as she stops once she sees the truth of what she's been paid to do, I'm okay with it. She isn't evil, the system/world she's caught up in might be. I assume she fights that evil. I'm reminded of Katniss who has to kill to survive and to change her world.