The Moral Black and White of Tolkien: an Affirmative Response.

**[10:40-11:22:]** "*But I've said in my reviews that so many of the supposed 'heroes' in* Rings of Power *are evil, and the show doesn't seem to realize it, and it seems like the showrunners genuinely don't understand what Evil is, themselves. Tolkien's world was black-and-white; there was Good and Evil, and they were battling. But not this one. Not in *Rings of Power*. [...] Sauron was evil. And yes: you can have good people who fall to Evil, but **they are good or evil;** there is no 'anti-heroes'*." **Disparu. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHQ0pLK1SBg]**

That sums it up, and it resolves a problem plaguing modern writers that I've tackled with great force and perseverance: moral ambiguity in place of genuine discernment and complexity. If there is an objective moral truth, then one can't say that "we are all the devil, deep within even the purest Soul," since it is in one's choices and one's actions that one either is a Hero or a Villain, with no in-between to mediate the conflict. Neither, then, can we allow for the absurd pretension that the *cause* for one's disgust in witnessing an evil is projection *in all cases*. Some of us project, but in a morally objective universe an act is either good or evil by default, regardless of perception, and the wise are those who see the good for what it is, the evil for its nature, and they feel approval or disgust accordingly, depending on their own degree of innocence or guilt.

Yet none of this I mean to push as though it were the *only* way of writing nor the *only* way of reading. *Breaking Bad*, *Better Call Saul*, and *BoJack Horseman* all have anti-heroes, as do *Death Note*, *Evangelion*, *Attack on Titan*, *Cowboy BeBop*, and *Ghost in the Shell*. However, there's a reason that the *Star Wars* franchise suffered in the hands of Rian Johnson, just as Marvel suffered in the hands of Gao and *Rings of Power* suffered on the fingers of McKay and Payne. It is because a writer who excels in working on a show like *Breaking Bad* or *Rick and Morty* or a modern *Star Trek* film is not at all equipped to tell *mythology*. An *archetype* is something sacred, not deserving of a deconstruction by the modern intellect, and trying to reduce the blacks and whites to grey is alien to the entire work not only of directors, novelists, and comic book developers, but also that of Carl Jung himself, the founder of projection as a psychoanalytic concept. Jung, like Tolkien, saw that Good and Evil worked in very clear and certain ways; he only sought to mediate between them. Tolkien did not seek that sort of mediation to the same extent, and neither of these men sought to *ignore* that these were opposites by making them ambiguous. That is the attitude of privilege and cowardice, not courage and adversity.

**[({R.G.)}]**


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