In 2015, I was watching an episode of television when I realized that an arrogant side character was headed for a downfall. But how did I know that? After thinking it through, I finally concluded that in the world of stories, the force pulling characters toward a fate they deserve is as real as gravity.
I named it character karma and wrote the article Managing Bad Character Karma about how it influenced horror movies and minor antagonists. But I had already begun to see karma everywhere.
- In any story where a protagonist gets a wish granted, they rarely get to keep the spoils. In fact, a great many stories use the monkey’s paw trope, in which a wish backfires on the wisher. We even have a movie series, Wishmaster, about a big bad that grants a wish before killing the person who makes it. Why can’t characters just benefit from their wishes? Character karma.
- When movie makers don’t want the hero to dirty their hands by killing the villain, the villain will end up dead another way. But they never die because of random chance. Either their efforts to attack the hero will somehow rebound, or the villain’s previous victims will come for them. Their own misdeeds are the direct cause of their downfall. Why is this? Character karma.
- Most of all, protagonists don’t get their happy ending with just another swing of the sword. A well-crafted climax contains a moment where the protagonist does something remarkable and heroic. This is the direct cause of their victory, which makes the ending feel right. It’s character karma.
As I observed character karma at work in story after story, it grew from an occasional oddity to a deeply embedded principle. Character karma is the magical link between character and plot. It’s the secret to crafting conflicts that resonate.
I didn’t write my original primer on character karma until 2018 (PDF), and only four years later, it’s time for a new version. The way karma operates in stories is complex, and my understanding of how it works has grown deeper.
On top of that, character karma hasn’t gotten the sunniest reception; it’s as controversial as likability. Since the Romantic movement took over in the 1800s, the cultural attitude among many Western storytellers has been antagonistic toward morality tales. Character karma reveals that at an instinctual level, every story is a morality tale. That’s not what many storytellers want to hear. Plus, when stated in brief, it can seem simplistic and pat.
But we need not fear character karma; it’s already at work in the stories we love. It enables us to add meaning to our work, and in practice, it can be very nuanced.
So in version two of this primer, my goal is not only to explain the concept better but also to help bridge the gap between the abstract principle and its application across countless stories. If afterward you’re still a karma skeptic, let me just say this: you may not believe in character karma, but it believes in you.
Spoiler Notice: Midsommar, Free Guy, and Ms. Marvel episode two.
The Polarity of Our Choices
Allow me to break down why you can’t avoid character karma – not if you want a pleased audience. To do that, let’s dive into how karma manifests in a single conflict: the climactic conflict. Why the climax? The more epic the conflict is, the more noticeable karma becomes. Plus, what unfolds at the climax is usually the final outcome for the story. That makes analysis a lot less complicated.
For the purposes of plotting a story, the role of a character is to determine the story’s outcome through their intentional actions, aka choices. This is called character agency; audiences generally become frustrated and dissatisfied when it is missing. They’ll often turn against protagonists without agency and root for characters who make a difference instead.
A story conflict occurs when the protagonist struggles to achieve a goal. For the conflict to have enough tension to be entertaining, both success and failure must be possible. Then, because the protagonist needs agency to make audiences happy, they’ll make a choice that determines whether they succeed or fail to achieve their goal. This is the turning point of any well-crafted story.
From there arises karma. If you grant your protagonist a successful outcome, you’re making their choice look like the right choice. It led to success! If you hand them a failure, you’re making their choice look bad. They had a chance to succeed, but they failed because they made that choice.
Of course, the conflict’s outcome isn’t the only thing that makes choices look good or bad to us. Some actions are obviously right or wrong. What do you get if your protagonist eats a baby and is rewarded with eternal youth?
You get an angry audience, that’s what.
Take the 2019 movie Midsommar. This folk horror features a straight couple slowly and painfully working their way toward a breakup. The boyfriend, Christian, neglects the relationship and becomes hostile when his girlfriend, Dani, tries to communicate with him constructively. Since this is folk horror, they visit an isolated Swedish community that sacrifices people. The community gives Dani the love she is desperate for, and she joins them. At the end, the community gives her the choice to sacrifice either one of their own members or Christian. She chooses Christian. She smiles in the movie’s closing shot, indicating the choice made her happier.
One of the most common complaints from viewers is that Christian, for all his faults, did not deserve to die. Yet it looks like Dani is rewarded for killing him instead of someone who is complicit in murder.
If creating this kind of disgruntled reaction and discussion is your goal, go do that. I’m not the boss of you; I’m just trying to explain how stories work. In this case, I’m not sure the reaction is what the movie’s writer and director, Ari Aster, intended. In the director’s cut, Christian’s actions look worse, making Dani’s choice look better. Aster only removed those scenes because the studio made him cut the film down.
To summarize all that, by showing what choices lead to success, the storyteller is seen as endorsing those choices. However, the audience has their own opinions about what choices are good choices. They want characters to be rewarded for making the right choice, not the wrong one. This can create some push and pull between audience and storyteller.
Okay, but surely there’s still a way to avoid karma. What if the protagonist makes a hard choice to kill one person to save the many, and they succeed but they’re haunted by their choice? Every day, they ask themselves if they did the right thing.
In this case, your endorsement might come off as less resounding, and the story may be interpreted as welcoming discussion. But as long as the cost of the choice doesn’t negate or exceed the benefits of success, you’re still endorsing it. Basically, the protagonist’s guilty conscience is the cost of doing business. This is typical in stories; protagonists make sacrifices to succeed all the time, including sacrificing their personal happiness. It’s considered heroic. If the costs are high enough to negate the success, that means the protagonist failed. You’ve endorsed the other viewpoint.
Alright, it’s time for a Hail Mary – what if the end is ambiguous? This means that the audience can come to more than one conclusion about what actually occurred in the story. First, I’ve got to say this is incredibly difficult to depict. Stories that manage to pull off an ambiguous ending rather than merely confusing the audience are rare. The 2010 movie Inception is one of the most successful. Based on how you interpret the last scene, the protagonist either gave into temptation and failed or resisted it and succeeded. Either way, the storyteller’s endorsement is the same.
Could you create an ambiguous ending that also makes your endorsement ambiguous? Theoretically. But even if you succeeded, it wouldn’t erase the existence of character karma, and it would be completely impractical for the vast majority of conflicts.
No matter which niche scenario you try, there’s one big reason it can’t change the rules of the game. That’s because if you manage to remove any endorsement from your story’s turning point, it won’t give the audience a meaningful experience. It will only make your end feel pointless. Why? Because you aren’t making a point.
I imagine some storyteller out there wants their audience to walk away feeling like their time was wasted, but that’s probably not you.
What Makes Choices Look Good or Bad
So far, we’ve covered that when our characters succeed or fail, we are seen as endorsing a course of action. However, audiences have their own opinions about what choices are the best. When the audience disagrees with us, they’ll have complaints.
I’m not of the opinion that we should only say what other people will agree with. However, I am of the opinion that it’s better to understand as much as we can about how they’ll react. Plus, even when we want to be provocative, doing that for every single conflict would overwhelm audiences and drown out the principal point we’re trying to make. For this reason, rewarding choices that look good to audiences is our bread and butter.
When a choice feels right to the audience, we can say it gives a character good karma. When a choice feels wrong, it gives a character bad karma. To clarify, “right and wrong” doesn’t necessarily refer to the morality of their actions. In many cases, it’s more a matter of practicality or reasonable causality. Put simply, gaining karma means that in the mind of the audience, a character deserves success or failure.
Naturally, the culture of the audience impacts a character’s karma. Some actions, such as staying chaste, may or may not generate good karma depending on cultural values. Since I couldn’t cover the values of every culture if I dedicated this entire blog to it, let’s stick to what appears to be the most universal, at least to Western audiences.
Good Karmic Actions
Characters generally gain good karma with:
- Cleverness, including solving tough puzzles, creating ingenious plans, or making insightful observations.
- Selflessness, including generosity toward others, extending olive branches to enemies, or any form of self-sacrifice.
- Perseverance, including hard work, pushing past barriers, or showing discipline in the face of temptation.
Let’s take an example. In the 2021 movie Free Guy, the main character, Guy, is a non-player character (NPC) in a video game. He becomes free of his programmed routine after he acquires a pair of sunglasses that give him the powers of a player – he can level up and get in-game cash and equipment. Guy wants all the other NPCs to expand beyond their programming and enjoy the freedoms he enjoys, and as the movie continues, many of them take tentative steps.
At the climax, the real-world antagonist who controls the game server sends in an antagonistic NPC designed for violence, named Dude. Dude attacks Guy, and Guy struggles to keep hold of the sunglasses that give him extra fighting powers. Finally, when the antagonist pins Guy down and starts crushing him, the turning point comes. Guy puts his sunglasses on Dude.
This gives Guy a ton of good karma. First, because Guy shows that he considers Dude to be a person worthy of freedom like everyone else, and he’s willing to risk his safety for it. Second, because it’s clever, as giving your enemy your greatest weapon is not an intuitive action to take. Naturally, Guy is rewarded for his choice. Dude is too delighted by the glasses to bother with the fight.
For more examples of standard turning points, see Six Types of Turning Points for Climaxes.
Bad Karmic Actions
Characters generally gain bad karma with:
- Carelessness, including ignoring warnings, cutting corners, or acting impulsively.
- Selfishness, including cruelty to others, hoarding resources, or just being full of themselves.
- Indolence, including avoiding work, giving up easily, or embracing temptation.
Generally, actions that earn the most bad karma are reserved for villains. Heroes can also earn bad karma and fail, but in most cases, we still want them to be likable. For this reason, storytellers usually soften the wrongness of their choice.
As an example, let’s take a downward turning point from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The characters are in an ancient temple, where Indiana has just recovered the Holy Grail and used it to save his father from a mortal wound. Elsa, the untrustworthy love interest, grabs the grail. She doesn’t believe in its powers, but she’s ecstatic that she and Indiana found the artifact – it’s worth a lot of money and fame. Indiana warns her that she can’t take it out of the temple, but she tries to leave with it anyway.
The ground opens up beneath Elsa, and she falls into a crevice. Luckily, Indiana manages to grab her hand and keep her from falling. However, Elsa can see the grail just out of reach on a ledge below. She continues to try to grab it as Indiana pleads with her to climb back up, and, as a result, she slips from his grip and falls to her death.
In this sequence, Elsa wants the grail for self-serving reasons, she ignores multiple warnings that what she’s doing could result in disaster, and she chases the temptation the grail offers instead of making the hard choice to give it up.
For more examples of downward turning points, see Six Types of Downward Turning Points.
Context Always Matters
Listing actions that usually result in good or bad karma can obscure what is actually a much more complicated picture. Many choices are not automatically right or wrong because of their inherent worthiness but because the storyteller has created context that demonstrates they are right or wrong.
In Hamlet, the titular character decides to use due diligence in investigating his father’s death, rather than immediately assuming his uncle is guilty. In most contexts, that would be the right decision. But in this context, Shakespeare demonstrates that Hamlet’s choice is an act of carelessness, because it gives the uncle time to strike first. Indecisiveness is Hamlet’s fatal flaw.
Your audience will make their own judgements, but as long as they like your protagonist, they won’t be looking for reasons to judge decisions harshly. In most cases, you can keep the audience happy just by making a reasonable argument why the protagonist’s choices are the right ones – or the wrong ones.
If you want your protagonist to do something edgy, that’s when you’re likely to get some negative reactions. Creating a context where the protagonist must eat a baby to save the world will leave a bad taste in people’s mouths even if it’s technically justified. Everything that happens in the story is by your design, and your audience knows this.
The Karmic Balance Sheet
So far, we’ve been examining character karma in the context of turning points. But the effects of karma extend far beyond that one moment. If the character earns karma and doesn’t get any punishment or reward, that karma doesn’t just dissipate. Instead, it’s added to their tab. Then, the audience will expect this tab to be paid out before the story’s finished. In the case of good karma, that means the cashier will give out money instead of collecting it.
The Effect of Prior Deeds
Characters can succeed or fail conflicts because of something they did much earlier in the story. At Mythcreants, we call these prior achievements or prior misdeed turning points. A very common prior achievement is for a protagonist to selflessly help another person. Then, later, when the protagonist is battling the antagonist, the protagonist will be on the verge of losing when the person they helped shows up to save them.
An observer might conclude the protagonist has no agency in these conflicts, but that’s false. The protagonist made the choice to help someone, and that led to their victory.
For this to work well, one detail is key: the protagonist must not have received any prior reward for their selfless deed. If the person they helped already returned the favor or the protagonist benefited another way, then the protagonist’s tab won’t show a positive balance. When the turning point comes and the protagonist asks for money, the cashier will just shake their head. In practical terms, that means it won’t feel like the protagonist has enough agency in resolving their big conflict.
However, a karmic balance sheet doesn’t mean that every single good act or misdeed needs its own outcome for the audience to be happy. A hero can be rewarded for being kind to people in general. Often, a whole group will show up to help them, but if just one ally says, “I’ll help you because you help everyone else,” that counts. Similarly, villains will typically hurt numerous victims, and their comeuppance might come when just one of those victims gets revenge.
The Effect of Payouts in Want of a Deed
An essential storytelling tactic is giving characters punishments or rewards they did not earn. Why do we do this? To alter character likability and set up for a change in fortune later.
If a character faces hard times and they didn’t do anything wrong – or not wrong enough for their terrible punishment – the audience will sympathize with them. Rooting for the underdog gets the audience invested in seeing the character succeed. Then, once the character has done some good deeds, we can lavish extra rewards on them to cash out their tab and satisfy audiences. Countless stories about heroes employ this method.
If a character gets rewards and doesn’t earn them, that can be used to build resentment against them – if we want. Using this to build apathy for minor antagonists is quite useful, but if it happens to a protagonist that’s already likable, the audience won’t necessarily turn against them. However, that doesn’t mean the protagonist doesn’t owe money on their tab. Sooner or later, that unearned reward will be taken away, transformed into a punishment, or the protagonist will scramble to earn it.
This is why characters are rarely allowed to benefit from wishes. While there is nothing morally wrong with making a wish, a character usually hasn’t done enough to earn those rewards. That’s why in Aladdin, the titular protagonist struggles with the knowledge that his wish-granted status is a lie, and the villain ultimately reveals him as a fraud. In Big, the protagonist wishes that he’s an adult, but naturally he has to go back to being a boy by the end.
Making a wish means taking a shortcut and avoiding the real work of earning success. That’s bad karma right there. This is why the monkey’s paw trope is so satisfying – we want to see cheaters get punished. However, you might notice that none of these wishes are for world peace or anything else that doesn’t directly benefit the character. Such selflessness would negate the bad karma, leaving storytellers with nothing to punish.
The 2021 Spider-Man: No Way Home uses this to soften the protagonist’s misdeed so he doesn’t look too bad. In the movie, Doctor Strange casts a spell for Peter Parker that is broad enough to be very wish-like. Peter asks for the spell to help his friends, who didn’t get into MIT because they were associated with him. That’s pretty selfless.
However, after Peter asks for the spell, the audience learns that Peter hasn’t done his due diligence by appealing the admissions decision first. Then, during the spell, Peter overreaches by trying to get what he wants without making any compromises. Because of this, the spell goes poorly. At the end of the movie, Peter fixes this by making a personal sacrifice, thereby paying his tab.
What This Means About Endings
Characters rack up a tab with their deeds, and that tab is paid by the end of the story. Does that mean every single character needs a fate perfectly matched to their accomplishments? No, it doesn’t.
First, characters vary in their level of agency. The story’s protagonist should have the most, so balancing their karmic accounting is the most essential. You’ll only want to neglect that if you’re making a point that is worth reducing audience satisfaction for. The antagonist also has a lot of agency. Balancing their karma is expected, but not quite as essential.
Side characters may have agency, but sometimes they’re more like objects. In the latter case, their fate is usually tied to whether the protagonist succeeds or fails. For instance, in the second episode of Ms. Marvel, protagonist Kamala uses her powers to save a boy who’s about to fall. However, when success is near, she becomes overconfident and careless. While she still saves the boy’s life, he falls a short distance and is injured. This injury is Kamala’s failure, not his.
Second, character karma only determines the things that characters have control over. You decide what level of change is possible and how big successes and failures are. A homeless character probably can’t pull themself up by their bootstraps and end up with a new apartment, but if they’re clever, they might find a safe place to sleep the next night. A character’s fate at the end depends not only on their deeds but also on the tone and setting of the story.
How Karma Creates Meaning
Let’s go back to what happens if you actually remove any endorsement from a choice your character needs to make. In the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode The Serene Squall, the Enterprise is trapped in an energy net that’s maintained by devices on the asteroids around them. To get out of the net without it blowing up, they have to shoot the device that’s powering the whole net.
Science Officer Spock analyzes the net, and he identifies two devices that could be the right one. But he doesn’t have the data to narrow it further. Time is running out as the net closes in on the Enterprise, so Spock is told to simply use his gut to choose one. Since Spock is half Vulcan and generally rejects emotion, this is difficult for him. Finally, he does the hard thing and simply chooses a device to shoot, and luckily it’s the right one.
In this sequence, the choice of device is trivial. There is no endorsement of a specific device, and no greater meaning assigned to which one Spock chooses. It’s the choice to choose one at all that matters. Why? Because Spock persevered in making a decision that didn’t feel natural to him, and that made viewers feel like he’d earned something. Then, when the Enterprise survived, they attributed it to Spock’s karmic choice. Spock pushed himself, and it made all the difference.
Imagine if, once Spock had narrowed his options down to two, he’d simply picked one without difficulty. In the absence of another karmic moment, viewers would feel like the Enterprise survived through sheer chance. That would give them no meaning to take away from the conflict, making the resolution feel pointless and ultimately dissatisfying.
Stories are lessons, in the same way a tree is a plant and my cat is a killer. But that doesn’t mean our lessons have to be simplistic. You can create a nuanced context and invite discussion. Plus, let’s not forget that in most stories, we have more than one conflict to work with.
In the first season of The 100, two story arcs run in parallel. Down on the ground, one of the teens has been murdered, and the leaders, Clarke and Bellamy, not only have the murder weapon but also know who it belongs to. Clarke wants to tell everyone, while Bellamy is afraid that will lead to violence. Meanwhile, in the space station orbiting Earth, the adults are in conflict over whether to tell the inhabitants that they don’t have enough air for everyone. Jaha fears that it would create a panic, while Abby wants to follow the wishes of her dead husband, who was killed for trying to tell everyone.
In both arcs, the information is leaked. On the ground, it leads to disaster. Since the owner of the weapon is already unpopular, the teens form a mob and almost kill him before another teen confesses to the crime. Up in the space station, it brings out the best in people. Instead of the authorities choosing who lives and who dies, people volunteer so their loved ones can have a better life. By showing how two similar dilemmas had a different solution, The 100 demonstrated that the issue was a nuanced one without an easy answer.
Today, many writers don’t want to be seen as endorsing any message. An endorsement makes us responsible for what we write, and that means we can be judged harshly. But if we were to wish away that responsibility, our stories wouldn’t mean any more to us than yesterday’s trash. Let’s put that monkey’s paw back on the shelf.
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I think one story which does the ‘prior achievement’ karmic moment very well is “The Mark of Zorro” (the first novel in which Zorro ever appeared).
There are, of course, spoilers below, as I can’t talk about this without spoiling the climax of the novel.
There are two parts to the climax, as there are two characters who need their commupance at the end. One part is a duel between Zorro and the captain of the local soldiers (who is a douchebag, there’s no other word for him). The captain is the only person Zorro actually kills in the whole novel, usually, he leaves his enemies alive.
But it’s the second one where the ‘prior achievement’ comes in. Around the middle of the novel, several other young noblemen (Zorro himself, as everyone probably knows by osmosis these days, is Don Diego and a nobleman himself, albeit one who pretends to be horrid at it) in search of Zorro come to the country estate of Don Diego’s family and Zorro turns up (after Don Diego has gone to bed, much to his father’s shame) and challenges the noblemen to finally use their position in society to do good and help those who are helpless. They help him from then onwards in his bigger schemes, but the biggest payoff comes at the end.
After the duel, Zorro and his love interest are chased by the army, due to the captain’s death. They are trapped in a building and Zorro is about to unmask himself to his love interest and come out so at least she will live. In this situation, the young noblemen turn up, telling the governor (the second villain) to make the army stand down or he will be without their families’ support. At that time and place, not having the noble families behind him would leave the governor dead in the water and he knows it, so he has to comply and Zorro and his love interest are saved.
It would be absolutely unrealistic if Zorro could defeat all those soldiers on his own, but the appearance of the other noblemen whom he taught to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves is absolutely fitting. It’s a perfect end for the climax and the political change allow for Zorro to unmask himself and retire.
One thing to remember about karma is that our expectations can change to match the story
In a grim ‘n’ gritty story we might expect a character to be punished for naively doing the “right” thing, whereas in a much lighter story, we’d expect them to be rewarded for basically the same actions. Or at the very least, we could accept those outcomes
This can cause issues when the story changes tone, whether deliberately or by mistake
In other words, that must mean the story’s tone has an effect on character karma.
Precisely!
Absolutely. As another example, cutting corners at work could manifest as either cleverness or indolence depending on the context of the job and the story’s attitude toward authority.
On that note, my only gripe with this article is the claim that every story is a moral lesson. Every story* is a lesson, yes, but sometimes it’s a practical lesson about how the world works or how to achieve one’s goals, not necessarily showing the right thing to do. Chris does sort of address this, since she writes that cleverness, perseverance, and carelessness are related to karma even though most would agree they’re morally neutral.
*Almost every story. Absurdist comedies might be an exception. At least, they can teach lessons with no bearing on reality.
I know I’ve seen – and at least somewhat agreed! – with comments to previous character Karma articles, which question whether diligent use of character karma in stories might not end up sending harmful political messages.
Lots of people have a “just world belief” – they believe that in the real world, people eventually get what they deserve. So if people are poor, sick etc, it must be because they’re lazy and didn’t work hard enough, if someone has bad things happen to them, it must be because they weren’t sufficiently diligent and somehow invited these bad things to happen, etc, whereas if someone is successful, it must be because they’re a good person and worked hard. Stories that are satisfying to the audience because good people get rewards at the end and bad people get punished have the potential to strengthen these extremely harmful beliefs.
I know the Mythcreants crew have replied that it’s possible to portray, e.g., a fairly rigid class society like the US, and adhere to character Karma rules, without supporting harmful “just world” beliefs. The sympathetic poor protagonist need not get rich in the end and the rich douchebag need not lose all his money; intsead, the protagonist could get some other kind of success, which doesn’t change their overall economic status but still feels like a win to the audience, and the other way around with the antagonist. That’s a good point. But I also think it’s important to stress the difference between candy/spinach and success/failure here!
It might take some skill to pull off, but it’s possible to portray someone achieving success after success in, e.g., their social life and business career, while still having that person seem despicable to the audience, NOT cool and awesome. It’s also possible to portray someone who continues to struggle and struggle but still comes off as smart, kind, likeable, funny etc, NOT pathetic and contemptible. I think it’s mostly when you portray someone as COOL that the audience gets the message that this character’s actions are to be endorsed.
That’s why it’s completely unsurprising that much of the respective fanbases glorify selfish assholes like Rick in Rick and Morty and Walter White in Breaking Bad. In the early seasons or R&M, Rick was shown to be depressed because he didn’t have any real friends, at one point even contemplated suicide, and actually failed to save the day at several occasions (at one point, he accidentally wrecked the whole Earth and had to escape with Morty to an alternate Earth in an alternate dimension, in which the show still takes place now). Walter, obviously, was dying, and also increasingly emotionally isolated. But they were both portrayed as COOL, and that’s what most people take home.
Breaking Bad was like that to the end. Rick and Morty, on the other hand, have portrayed Rick as silly and pathetic sometimes in later seasons, while they’ve completely dropped the “he’s actually brooding and saaaaad”. I think that’s much better if they don’t want the fanbase to glorify him. As long as a character is shown to be COOL, you can’t really counteract that by also going “and he’s also saaaad because his extreme awesomeness isolates him”.
I think the reason why those characters have such a large fanbase is that they are usually not punished for their deeds. It’s less about the cool factor (although I’m sure that plays a role, too) and more about them pulling off what they’re doing and not suffering lasting consequences. It’s about endorsements.
If Walter got shot in the first season and ended up dying of cancer in prison, it would have been clear that he was in the wrong.
While I do understand the concept of character karma as it regards expectations, I agree with the point raised here. I think it’s rather broad and heavy-handed to insist that every single story is presenting a message, and the author is supporting that message. I feel this ideology is antithetical to critical thinking, as the implication is that you have a moral obligation to avoid anything that would allow the most impressionable members of the audience to broadly apply the circumstances in your story as universal truth.
This is akin to the whole craze about video games causing violence. It assumes people are unable to divorce the context of the media they consume from reality, and it’s the author’s job to ensure that the work reinforces the idea of how people should act in reality. I don’t think the makers of GTA are endorsing crime – I understand that GTA is fiction.
That’s not to say that stories don’t ever have messages – it’s quite common – but it’s a stretch to say that every story has one, and the author is responsible if people take their story about a criminal gang’s efforts to be an endorsement of crime.
I think it’s rather broad and heavy-handed to insist that every single story is presenting a message, and the author is supporting that message.
Every story *is* presenting a message to the extent that every story is set up to present particular choices as leading to success or failure – and that associating positive or negative outcomes with those choices can’t not be an endorsement for or against those choices. It doesn’t have to be intentional on the part of the writer (which “supporting that message”) implies, but it is what gets shown.
To take an example, there’s a novel called Black Widow, by Daniel Silva, about a terrorist scheme by Da’esh.* It was written and set during Obama’s time as president, and the intended theme – which is helpfully explained in an afterword – was that Obama’s presidency had made America stupid and weak.
Unfortunately for Silva, what it actually shows is that America’s drone problem would have decaptitated the terrorist attack before it even started, were it not for the intervention of the embedded Israeli agent (one of the protagonists), a doctor who saves the life of the injured terrorist leader. And when the target of the attack is identified as America, the legendary Israeli agent (the other protagonist) insists on being involved on the ground – and is recognised by the terrorist leader, who then adjusts his plans so that the attack succeeds.
Thus the story doesn’t really endorse the theme or message that Silva is trying to support, and from his afterword doesn’t even seem to realise that.
* ISIS, but calling them Da’esh is more insulting.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to call Pokémon an endorsement of animal fighting, or Halo an endorsement of child soldiers, just because those things are featured in the story and are essential for the protagonists to accomplish their goals.
And yes, the author *chooses* to create a story where certain things lead to success or failure. However, that can happen for many reasons, and the author wanting to convey a particular message is just one of them.
I can create a game with a ball because I think it would make a fun game. I don’t need to think that whatever action in my game gets points and leads to success is inherently good. It might involve a certain skill that’s interesting to do and interesting to watch.
People watching a movie don’t necessarily need some greater message to enjoy a story, any more than sports spectators need some greater message to appreciate a game. Sure, people are more inclined to watch a particular team they care about, but that’s not a requirement.
Why, then, would a book, show, or movie require the viewer to take away some greater message, at base? I hardly think the writers of the first John Wick wanted to show how getting back into the criminal life you left behind and starting gunfights in packed nightclubs help you find peace, or that that message is what resonated with viewers. The writers didn’t need to believe those things, and didn’t need to be trying to convey those things, to create a story where that worked.
As I pointed out elsewhere (about GTA), there is a difference between games, which are interactive, and stories told through books, TV series, or movies.
Generally speaking, a ball game is a competition, between single athletes or teams (ball games generally are team games, but tennis or golf could be called ball games, too, as they feature a ball). The points for any kind of game are usually linked to how hard it is to sucessfully do a certain action. Easy actions are worth less than difficult ones. The message, if you want to put it like that, is that it pays to try for the difficult action (or spam the easy one, if that is possible) to gain more points.
People watching a game are either very invested in the game as a such, have money riding on it (a lot of people bet on sports results), or are fans of one of the competing teams/athletes.
A game, like every other real-world interaction, has no story to it. A game is simply something we do to have fun and enjoy ourselves. It’s usually also meant to be safe to a degree (there are injuries and even deaths related to games, but it is not what you expect when you’re playing – there’s no ‘I’m going to die when I kick this ball’ thing). Games are replacements for more violent competitions, such as fights. By being regulated through rules, games allow people to compete against each other with much less danger to their life and health.
In a story, no matter the medium it’s told in, everything has been decided already. The audience has no (or almost no in case of CYOA books) control over what happens. There’s no interaction, there’s no choice. Even in CYOA or FF books, there’s only limited choices, because every outcome is preordained.
John Wick will always return to his ways as a professional killer when you start up the first movie. The message of the story of John Wick 1 very much is ‘be careful whom you bully and challenge.’ Those guys didn’t know who Wick was, didn’t know that the house wasn’t just inhabited by a dude with a little dog. They were too young to have met him professionally and they paid for it. The main culprit’s father paid for trying to protect his son from the revenge, too (and for trying to take out Wick). In the society of killers which we look into, this is expected behaviour. Nobody expects a character like Wick to just ‘turn the other cheek’ or ‘forgive and forget.’ That’s not how such a story plays out.
And, yes, John Wick 1 is a fun movie to watch. The fights are well-choreographed and well-shot. The actors are top-notch. When you want to watch an action movie, it’s definitely towards the top of the list of possible choices.
Games can have stories to them. Any fan of a sports team would tell you as much. There can be tension in a game just like there is in a story, based on what’s already happened, the perceived chance of success and victory, etc.
The audience has just as much influence spectating a game as they do reading a story. Why is it, then, that stories are inherently about a message, while sports can be entertaining to watch without one?
You chose a more favorable interpretation of John Wick. Someone who has a problem with it can very well, per how this article outlines an endorsement, say that John Wick endorses what the eponymous protagonist does, and is responsible for its harmful message. And that’s what I have a problem with – it’s unreasonable to claim that a story is suggesting that something is good, just because it works for the protagonist in the story.
The difference between real life and a story is that real life doesn’t have a narrative. Things happen and we have to deal with them. Some things we can influence to a degree, others we can’t.
Stories, on the other hand, are crafted. Everything in a story happens because the author says so (up to that ‘why are the drapes blue?’ thing). Even in a story ‘based on real events,’ the author takes control of the narrative, pushing certain aspects and holding others back. Stories are meant to have a meaning to them. And this is why every story has a message and every choice an author makes says something about the message.
No, the makers of GTA don’t endorse crime, but GTA is not quite a story – it is interactive and the player decides how criminal they want to be on this playthrough. To be clear, I don’t believe that any kind of media makes you more violent or criminal, but they can shape your perception of the world, nevertheless. If GTA were a fixed story, if we were talking about a movie, TV series, or book instead, the fact that the MC rises to the top and becomes a most wanted criminal would say something about the makers’ opinion on how the world works and what success means, thus delivering a message. As the level of success depends on how the player handles the game, there is no message, just some harmless fun and a chance to try out something one would not do in real life.
Games do have fixed stories. Sometimes, like in GTA5, they allow you to branch to choose the ending, but there are plots in video games. Hell, many games have a “story mode” where the game itself has only a token level of difficulty so the player can focus on just the story.
They are also interactive, though. The main quests of many games (like GTA, but also in RPGs and suchlike) usually string together a story of sorts, yes. Yet, it’s usually possible to finish such a quest in different ways (and to reach different endings). As the player in a game, you make choices and you take part of the responsibility for the outcome. Even in a visual novel, you to make choices which change small parts of the story (and visual novels are much closer to a novel than to a regular game).
That is a difference from a regular book, TV series, or movie where you have no choice at all. You do not interact with these media, you consume them. You have the choice to turn off the series or movie or put the book aside if you don’t like the story, but you can’t ‘restart’ them and make different choices to see a different outcome.
You can, for instance, play the Dishonored games as a brutal killer who goes through the levels taking out enemies for good left and right or you can play them as a sneaky spy-like character who finds a way to take out the bosses without killing them (although their fates are usually worse than just death). The game gives you a different ending for both approaches, but there’s also a lot of in-between. Your playthroughs of those games can be different every time, depending on how much carnage you allow yourself. A Dishonored movie, on the other hand (or a novelisation) would only show you one path, depending on whether the creator wants the carnage or the sly sneaking.
Most games have a linear story, and in fact, it’s very common for players to be forced into doing things they wouldn’t want their character to do because it’s the only way to drive the plot forward. To say that the story of a game loses significance because the player can restart those games is like saying a book doesn’t have a message because the reader can restart the book.
With games which do not offer any meaningful choices, it is very much like with a book, movie, or TV series. Yet, with GTA, which you named, there are choices. You will always be a criminal in any GTA game, yes. That’s the point. You can, however, decide to do many crimes on the side and use ultimate force on the quests you have to finish or you can minimize things. There are choices to make.
In an adventure game, you usually do not have those choices. You might not have to do them click by click the same every time, but you will always perform the same action with the same object, you will always have to choose certain dialogue options to move on, etc. There are wrong choices in those adventures which allow them (those where you can end up not being able to finish), but most choices will have little influence on the story. In such a game, the story very much has a message, if not always a meaningful one. How you have to solve a problem to move on is connected to how the creators want you to do that (and it can lead to problems, as with the monkey wrench in Secret of Monkey Island). In a game where you have choices, on the other hand, you are responsible for the outcome to a degree. Not fully, as the endings are normally limited to a couple of different ones, but to a degree.
I don’t see how that corroborates the idea that GTA doesn’t endorse crime by virtue of being a game instead of a story. Regardless of what you do on the side in GTA games, the stories still require you to commit crimes, and the characters still get rewarded for doing so in the story. I don’t believe this loses significance because you might choose to focus purely on the story instead of going on rampages.
In addition, the problem with the idea that the author is endorsing something just because they created a story where it’s justified is that it dismisses the nuance of fictional stories, by nature of them being fictional. This puts a moral burden on the author to avoid creating situations where anyone good has to do anything questionable because the situation requires it.
For example, you could claim that the author of Shiloh is endorsing animal theft. The author creates a situation in which the protagonist stealing someone’s dog is a good action, because the dog is being abused. Should the author not have the protagonist committing animal theft if they don’t want to be seen as endorsing it? At what point can we consider the circumstances, crafted by the author, to be a factor in the message, and at what point can we dismiss them?
I think the point of making it a good action to steal the dog of a person abusing it is a message – the message that protecting the dog is more important than obeying the law. Would the author also have the main character steal a dog just to demand ransom for it? Most likely not. It’s not about animal theft in general – a message can be much more poignant than just ‘animal theft = good.’ Taking that dog out of a bad situation is good, even if it’s against the law. Just stealing a dog because you want one or because you want to demand money for its return is also animal theft, but not endorsed automatically. It’s all about nuances.
The good side, the hero, the main character, the protagonist doing something questionable and being rewarded is a message that in this situation it was the right choice. Making the hard choice is something good in most stories, because the choice need to be made. Sometimes, you need to steal a dog or hack a corporate server or shoot a bad guy to make the world a little better and in these cases, with these motivations, it can be okay for the character to do so. In other circumstances, it would not automatically be okay as well.
Yes, the choice of when something is okay falls to the author. Yes, the author shows some of their own moral compass when making these choices while writing. An author who is an absolute pacifist will probably never endorse the killing of a group of henches and find ways their hero can cleverly avoid them instead. An author who thinks guns are great and everyone should have some will probably arm everyone on Team Good with a gun and see to it that those guns are used successfully on the henches in question. Life philosophy and moral do shine through in every story an author writes – it certainly does in mine.
All of that doesn’t change the fact that animal theft was only a good thing because the author created a context for it to be good. The message could be “protecting animals is more important than obeying the law.” The message could also be “if you think an owner is mistreating their dog that you want, then you’re justified in stealing it based on your own judgment instead of calling authorities.” Should the author be responsible for that message because the story allows that interpretation, and created the circumstances to justify it?
I don’t agree with your last point. It suggests that people are incapable of exploring any perspective that’s not their own. Being a pacifist doesn’t preclude me from writing a war story and requiring heroes to kill people, any more than being a law-abiding citizen prevents me from writing a story about audacious criminals.
Again: nuance is a thing. Messages are not always 100% clear. People might take different messages from a story. Most people will understand that there is a difference between freeing an abused animal and just stealing one that you’d like to have. Some people might not, but that’s people for you.
To a degree, the way you think a story through and plot it will always rely on your own life experience. It will rely on what you will accept your characters should be doing or not. You can create a character who is absolutely opposite to you in morals, but it will usually lead to you writing a story where you clearly do not endorse their view (like the novel “Lolita” where it’s clear that the author does not, in any way, shape, or form, endorse grooming an underage girl to make them one’s lover).
In most cases, your own life philosophy will come through here and there. I am not a former spy and write espionage stories. I’ve never raised the dead and write about two different necromancers. I’ve never stolen jewellery and write about jewel thieves. Yet, in my stories, my own ideas of how those characters should solve their problems come through.
If the message is based on how it’s interpreted, then it’s not right to say that the author endorses it, by nature of the interpretation being possible. Endorsements, by definition, are unambiguous. When someone endorses a candidate, people aren’t left wondering whether they really support the candidate or not.
Calling any unfavorable interpretation an endorsement is essentially an attack on the author for allowing immoral or unethical actions to do anything other than backfire. It’s one thing for an author to make it clear that a certain view is supported – like having the protagonist make a speech about what’s worth fighting for – but just allowing something to happen a certain way in a story is not on the same level.
I get your last point, but that assumes that protagonists are self-inserts by default. You used examples of characters performing a specific job, but that’s independent of writing characters with different motivations. I don’t think anyone can reasonably suggest that the makers of John Wick are legitimately suggesting that gunfights in crowded nightclubs are the ideal way to retaliate against criminals. I don’t think the makers of The Last of Us can reasonably be said to believe that betraying humanity in favor of an individual is ideal. Strong characters don’t need to have the author’s own ideals as their grounding.
I believe it’s a cultural issue. For example in my homeland, Poland, most people would consider the strict “just world” belief delusional. Peronally I know about the multiple literature classics that present this reality like “Lalka” (The Doll) by Bolesław Prus, where the success being determined more by your birth, renown and wealth than the true skill is one of the central motifs. In general, my culture has rather grim view of the reality forged by the hardship we experienced. What I am saying is that, the idea of some bastard escaping his punishment doesn’t change that he’s a bastard in our eyes the same way the suffering and doom don’t make somebody a pariah but a martyr or a victim.
I think character karma is an interesting concept. There’s mention of a karmic balance, but I’m wondering if it’s reasonable for a character to have both positive and negative karma at the same time. I also wonder if it’s possible for something to increase both good and bad karma.
Let’s use a hypothetical example. Say a character gets captured by the enemy. The main character, knowing full well that the enemy’s expecting and will be prepared for him, decides he’ll try to rescue the captive anyway, though he’s terrified. He tells no one else about his decision, because he can’t morally justify risking the lives of many others to save one, and feels he just can’t allow himself to fail when it counts most.
* Is it reasonable that people would expect the MC to both be punished for recklessly charging into almost certain death, and rewarded for choosing to neither abandon the captive nor risk the lives of others?
* Would the hero knowing that his effort would be reckless, and denying others the opportunity to talk him out of it, exacerbate bad karma for recklessness? Would it amplify good karma, because he’s making a premeditated decision to maximize risk to himself for the sake of others when he would be justified in not doing so?
* Would it be considered “cheating” karma if the MC’s allies discovered he was missing, intercepted him before he started the rescue attempt, and insisted on joining? By contrast, would it be fitting if the MC was on the verge of death during his attempt before being rescued by his allies?
* Would it be seen as balanced if the captive used the distraction created by the MC to make an escape, before doing something to save the MC? Would there still be debt if the captive was going to escape on their own anyway, since the MC’s actions would ultimately do nothing but endanger himself and burden others?
Not that I’m asking for answers to these specific questions, since so much would rely on the context of the story, but it’s just a bit of a thought exercise for me on how karma can manifest.
In your example, I think whether the rescue generates good or bad karma depends on the outlook and culture of the readers (do they value more heroism or self-preservation), and on the perceived chance of success, which itself depends on the tone (a very risky action will seem more reasonable in an action adventure than in a gritty drama).
And the outcome will probably retrospectively influence the karma received:
– If the hero successfully frees the captive and lives, his action will be portrayed as cool and heroic and be endorsed. Even if the narrator or other characters nuance this by saying it was incredibly risky, there no way the character didn’t get good karma, since he displayed selflessness and managed to save a life.
– If the hero saves the captive but dies in the attempt, there’s still a big chance the character will get good karma since he displayed selflessness and managed to save a life (and that good karma will be paid immediately with the glory of an heroic death). To avoid endorsing it and display his reckless rescue as foolish, you would have to show it was useless (maybe because the captive had a plan to escape anyway) or that the hero’s death will have bad consequences for other people (maybe he was the only one who could avert a future disaster).
– I think it would be possible to give both good and bad karma by giving the rescue both a good and a bad consequence of roughly equal value. For example, he could manage to rescue the captive but lose his magic/alien/incredibly advanced gun, giving the enemy access to a dangerous new weapon.
– If the hero’s allies discover his plan and insist to join, for me it’ll be perceived as a just reward rather than cheating, since he generated mostly good karma by acting selflessly and valuing the life of the captive and of his allies above his own (at least in our culture which often glorifies heroism above self-preservation). Being rescued at the last moment by his allies would work the same way.
– If the hero’s rescue created a distraction for the captive to escape on their own, it’d still generate good karma, since without it the captive wouldn’t have been able to escape. So getting rescued in turn by them would feel like a just reward.
– On the other hand, if the captive would have escaped anyway, the rescue will feel useless and the hero’s willingness to endanger himself will seem foolish. So here the character will gain mostly bad karma.
Btw this is probably one big reason why Husband and I had to drop Parks and Rec in later seasons. I remember talking to my colleagues at work about funny sitcoms, and said we had recently taken up Parks&Rec and thought it was funny. A colleague went “yeah I also thought it was funny in the beginning, but in later seasons they all get more and more successful and it’s just… ugh”. When we reached later seasons ourselves, and everyone suddenly becomes ridiculously successful, we were also like “ugh… what even is this”, and we disliked the show more and more until we dropped it.
I watched the first episode of the Office and was instantly turned off. Everyone was a horrible person which seemed to be the point of the show. I don’t know if they got their karma but I didn’t care either.
Another nice bit of karma in “Free Guy” was the antagonist. After the climax, everyone agrees to take their stuff and go their separate ways. The game the antagonist managed (it wouldn’t be fair to say he “made” that game) is enough of a failure there was talk of legal action while the game based on things he stole and returned became a hit. (But I’m not sure how well a game like that would work IRL.)
I always thought Hamlet’s fatal flaw was getting everyone else around him killed. :P
That’s the *result* of his fatal flaw :).
(An observation I’ve seen from time to time is that Hamlet and Othello would both have crushed it had they had the good fortune to be in each other’s stories instead of their own).
That’s a viable theory, as it were. Had Othello been Hamlet, he’d have killed his uncle first and asked questions later. Hat Hamelt been Othello, he’d have looked into things and found out that he’d been lied to.
I love the concept of character karma, and it was crucial to help me understand why some turns of events feel satisfying and others feel like a cheat or a letdown.
One thing that’s still ambiguous for me is what counts as a character being rewarded or punished. You equate reward as the character succeeding at their goal, but I feel it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes a character can gain something they weren’t consciously reaching for, like getting a new friend, so their happiness is a factor too. But some rewards can be cool things in the reader’s perspective that also come with bad consequences for the character (for example getting superpowers and thus getting hunted by an evil organization wanting to use the character’s powers), so coolness is also a factor.
Even more confusing, you say that succeeding at their goal is a reward even at the cost of the character’s happiness. But in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (spoilers!), Dr Horrible manages to reach his goal to enter the Evil League of Evil at the cost of his happiness (since Penny is dead), and it feels like a punishment for his bad choices rather than a reward. Why ?
I feel like success, personal happiness and cool-factor all play a part in determining what constitutes a reward, but in what proportion, and what happens when they conflict ?
Dr. Horrible gaining what he wanted (or thought he wanted) while losing Penny is a Pyrrhic victory – he’s won and lost at the same time – and it’s supposed to be one. It’s a punishment more than a reward, as his victory is hollow.
What constitutes ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’ is relative. Also, don’t forget that not every action needs to be rewarded or punished immediately. The main character might do something good in the first half of the story, but it will not pay off until the climax when they gain an unexpected ally, for instance. A character gathers good and bad karma, it’s not always paid out immediately. Not every result must be clearly rewarding or punishing them for what they just did.
Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
I found the ending of Midsommar to be tragic and not karmic for Dani and Christian. Dani’s smile came after a long shot of confusion and to me represented her finally embracing the death cult. Aster walked a fine line between glorifying the cult to the audience and glorifying it to Dani. For me, he succeeded because the bad stuff the cult did was always out of sight to Dani. And the cult made sure to frame their sexual assault of Christian as him cheating on her.
But it’s an ambiguous ending and everyone takes something different away from it.