Some unfinished meta about moral compromise and mass murder (in fiction!)

[hmpf]

SF&F lately has been strangely obsessed with themes of mass murder for the "Greater Good", as well as other forms of extreme moral compromise for various lofty(ish) goals. My latest fannish love, the show I kind of refuse to call 12 Monkeys (it's called Splinter, I tell you, Splinter!) is part of that strange glut of texts dealing with extreme -

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[beccadg]

I'm somewhat troubled by my own fascination.

On the one hand, I don't think you should be troubled by your fascination. The stories exist so you can safely think about the issues in fiction. No matter how high a fictional body-count it's only fiction. On the other hand, I can't say as I fall into your, "All the while we still can‘t help but root for our heroes. The reader thus becomes complicit, too." I did read some of the Laundry Files, but I was losing interest before Stross introduced his version of vampires and I quit altogether after finishing The Rhesus Chart. I found them fun at first, but they went from creepy, weird, and fun to just creepy and wrong. I stopped rooting for "our heroes." I suspect my problem lay in "the problems of trying to have your Lovecraftian apocalypse and subvert it, too." He might pull it off--he might even pull it off in a way some find entertaining--but le lost me sometime ago.

[hmpf]

Yeah, see, I enjoy creepy and wrong, I think. On a certain level, at least. Mostly on a level that involves thinking "wow, you guys, LOOK AT WHAT YOU'RE DOING" at all the characters a lot. :D

[hmpf]

(Like... 50 percent of the current fic are basically all about Bob's brother going "WTF are you doing, man?" at him a lot. Okay, that's an oversimplification, actually - things are going to get a lot more emotionally and ethically complicated than that, for both of them. But it's definitely going to be an important stage on the way.)

[beccadg]

Which is fine. I mean you and I have a number of fandoms in common, even if I quit the Laundry Files when I stopped finding them fun. Just in the ones you name at the top of your tumblr we share Farscape, Methos, and Doctor Who. They work for both of us because they can get all "creepy and wrong"--Scorpius, the Jimmy Scene, The Master, etc.--and they can also give me the feeling that if love and justice don't always win the day at least there's hope they will win the next one. It's why Stross trying to have his Lovecraftian apocalypse and subvert it too couldn't maintain my interest. He didn't maintain the... space... for me to see hope in. You described Stross as using "genre expectations ... to manage and ... misdirect the reader‘s expectations." I would say either his capacity to misdirect me broke down before The Rhesus Chart or he didn't manage much less misdirect my expectations.