What is this nuance thing, what good is it, and do I even want some?
That’s an excellent question, and I’m here to tell you that the answer is “It depends.”
Nuance is not exactly on-trend currently. Social media and the social media trained eye want things to be black or white, yes or no, good or bad. I personally like my art to get morally complicated and a little uncomfortable, because I think that’s more honest, but not everybody does.
Some folks are very confident that there is a Right Answer, and some books are very confident that there is a Right Answer, and I’m always left vaguely uncomfortable by them unless they’re so displaced in space and time from me that I can nod to myself and say, “Well, Agatha Christie was a product of her time.”
So often wildly popular novels will leave me with a sense that the author hasn’t thought through the implications of their worldbuilding or their character choices.
(I have a term for this: I call it Protagonist Syndrome, where whatever the Protagonist does is automatically justified. Remember 24, anyone? And in its attempt to be edgy, how toxically it shifted public perception of torture to something that’s useful and okay for the good guys to do? Amusingly, a show that deconstructs this idea of the Always-Justified Protagonist is Justified, where it’s pretty obvious we’re not supposed to agree with a lot of the disastrous life choices the Raylan Givens makes.)
But I think sometimes readers and viewers want that lack of nuance. They want there to be Good Guys and Bad Guys, and they want anything the Good Guys do to be morally upright because the Good Guys did it. And then they put their thumb on the scale for a positive outcome even when the protagonist objectively violated someone’s consent, or committed a murder, or… whatever really.
And I’m never sure how to navigate around this as a creator, because I find flawed characters and moral ambiguity interesting and because—well, if writers always put some aspect of ourselves into our characters, one bit that Dr. Llyn Jens from Machine gets from me is the lack of faith that there are outright positives and negatives in the world.
I do believe that there are people doing their absolute best, however, even if they are fragile and human and busted around the edges. And I really want to read books and watch television shows built around these people.
This is why I enjoyed the Fallout series on Amazon so much, even though it was extremely over-the-top violent for my taste and I spent several minutes of every episode resolutely looking at the ceiling or playing dumb phone games. (Huh, two Walton Goggins shows in one newsletter. He’s sure having a moment.) It takes it on the nose with the moral ambiguity, and I think it gets away with it because it does give its characters humanity but also because Lucy MacLean is a moral person, and significantly better than she has to be. So she forms a moral center around which the other characters can serve as foils.
Anyway, just a little musing for a chilly spring day. Hope this finds you well, and something as pleasant is happening there as the daffodils that are springing up all over my yard and the cherry trees that are blooming everywhere.
We didn’t get any cherry blossoms last year because of a late freeze, so I’m trying to enjoy them extra.
Best,
Bear