Well, that partly depends on the definition of “good for you”, doesn’t it?

One sort of harm we recognize is immaturity. We can debate the details of that, with regard to things like pornography, but I still remember, more than 50 years later, the impact of the material in The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski) when I chanced across it on my mother’s bookshelves (she was auditing classes in the local college) in my mid-teens. It wasn’t the sexual stuff that was so disturbing but the detailed demonstration of torture and indifference to harm that made it so viscerally indelible. No doubt that was the author’s point, with regard to the causes and evils of war, but it was the first time I had encountered such an authorially-fascinated exploration of evil, in a world where corrective justice is absent for the story. (And perhaps, in reality, since these events or events like them happened).

Well, why should this matter in a fictional story? An author should be able to write anything, and I should be able to read it… it’s just words, after all. But in the worlds I create, I have moral opinions, and that didn’t come from nowhere — I have them when I read, too.

For me to sink into a story, I have to sink into the characters. I expect the author to define them and then demonstrate their behaviors and goals. Certainly they’re not all admirable characters — where would we be without villains? And even villains aren’t all despicable — many have a great sense of humor. Opposition isn’t immoral, necessarily. And it can be fun laughing at incompetent (or unlucky) villains.

But the morality does matter to me. It puzzles me — I’m not religious (years of convent school at a tender age cured me of that). But something slipped in. Something civilizational. I can accept a good guy losing, in the end — that’s what we call tragedy, fatal flaws and all. But I can’t accept not wanting him to win. If I end up cheering the opposition leader at the end, it’s because he’s made himself a hero to me instead of a villain.

This guides the stories I buy as well as the ones I write. The stories I want to read all have some sort of moral compass, and the ones I write, even more so. There are people who don’t give up, people who have to make mistakes and learn, people who are unlucky but trying, and people who deserve to die. I perfectly understand that there are other sorts of stories, and those have merits, but it’s not what I do.

What about you? And why?