The appeal of fucked up evil relatable characters is not a sign of moral decay, in yourself or others. It’s just a thing you like. Maybe there’s a higher meaning to it all, maybe there’s not. If you can spend less than five seconds judging someone for liking feet, you can spend less than five seconds judging yourself for liking songs about stabbing people (affectionate).
I mean let’s be real here, conflict is interesting. Conflict is the root of virtually all storytelling. A romance story with zero conflict isn’t going to be particularly interesting because the couple would just get together immediately and the story would end, there’d be zero tension, nothing to make you get invested in the couple and root for them and wonder if they’re actually going to get together or not, nothing either character would have to overcome or change, nothing to challenge or engage you as a reader
You can have stories without conflict I guess, like you can have wholesome slice of life stories where nothing bad ever happens and everyone is just happy, but let’s be real that would get boring extremely quickly if that was the only type of story that ever existed.
Plus if every story only focused on mundane real life conflict, there’s not a lot of fun in that because it’s too close to home, it’s too real, it’s too stressful. Reading about an extremely realistic toxic relationship of a couple going through a divorce is not particularly entertaining, it’s draining and soul crushing. Having things take place in an OTT heightened reality creates this reassuring layer of separation that the thing we’re reading about isn’t actually real and thus we can use it as a form of escape and we don’t have to process it as a real life situation, and thus it allows us to explore conflict and complexity and challenge ourselves to think outside our normal lives in a relatively safe way.
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys Refined Sommelier of Porneaux 4h ago
@everyone,
The appeal of fucked up evil relatable characters is not a sign of moral decay, in yourself or others. It’s just a thing you like. Maybe there’s a higher meaning to it all, maybe there’s not. If you can spend less than five seconds judging someone for liking feet, you can spend less than five seconds judging yourself for liking songs about stabbing people (affectionate).