Do Y'all Ever Read A Fic So Good That It Makes You Want To Elevate Your Own Craft And Also Befriend The

fuck hussle culture, the toad to success is to sleep well, eat well and have fun

My thoughts are that I need to sit back and soak all this in. Ten times over. I knew there was a reason I liked Le Guin. Anyway, that's beside the point: I think now, perhaps more than ever, it is a crucial time to be reconsidering the lenses we place on history, fiction, and general media. How we even look at everyday life. I agree with Le Guin that Homer tends to take a very "middle ground" almost approach to telling The Iliad, which I like, and I think serves well in the telling of any story.

At the end of the day, I think it's important that an author presents a problem or a theme - and does not quite comment on it. They allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. From that principle alone, as Le Guin points out, there is a lesson in objectiveness and rejecting the creation of limiting dichotomies of Good vs Evil, Deserving vs Undeserving. It makes you question whether your idea of what's right... is what's right. Which is fascinating. And something I think people could possibly stand to do more of. We should critically evaluate moral ideas - what even is moral, why, okay but why do we think that, all right now so why are morals even important? Are there good or bad morals or just morals? (Spoiler: just morals)

Because morals are, by definition, either a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience, or standards of behaviour; principles of right and wrong. But that's the thing, isn't it? There can be a dozen views on what is right and what is wrong, but they're all principles - morals - that can be held by someone. People often confuse morals with ethics, making the mistake of believing someone's morals to coincide with ethics, or that ethics perfectly reflect morals. Ethics are their own slippery slope, because they do source from morals, but on a broader scale and blah blah blah (cue one of my university professors prattling on about theories of ethics...) The moral of the story I'm essentially getting at is: there's even different kinds of ethics. Many of these philosophical concepts have come from Greek scholars (legendary and otherwise).

I cannot say for certain whether this objective approach to storytelling on themes as complex as war where there are sides but no sides are taken is necessarily "a Greek thing", since I did not grow up in Greek schools. But! I do know that Greeks value the sacred Middle. I have been taught this since I was a child. You never choose the lowest, smallest, least or the highest, biggest, most, but whatever sits in the middle, because that will have the best balance.

Homer strikes balance between Greece and Troy by presenting you with two sides of a war: both fighting for their own reasons, neither Good nor Bad, because the moment you take a side, you are falling prey to evaluating things on your personal moral basis and not the broader picture of what is simply war. War never changes. As outlined above, Homer illustrates the way war is wasteful and cruel in its entirety. I believe it is often the case that you can only tell a truly resounding tragedy when you consider all sides. Better yet, when you tell all sides objectively. Because it is up to the audience then to take this narrative's detachment to the tragedy unfolding and feel, not be guided into what to feel and by what degree.

The human mind and capacity for empathy is incredible. It is a waste to narrow that potential into a set path of what is Good and what is Bad. Who is the right side and who is the wrong side. All sides in a war hurt. The concept of war hurts. That is the nature of it and of tragedy.

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.

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