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general media Morally grey or black-and-white stories?


Vefka

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What do you prefer? Games, shows, cartoons, etc, media type doesn't matter

By grey morality I mean stories without good and bad guys, everyone has their issues of some degree (Breaking Bad, The last of us, Bojack Horseman). By BW morality I mean stories with distinguished line between bad and good guys, and usually good guys win (MLP, most of Marvel)

While I mainly watch/play morally BW things and enjoy them, they leave me with just "huh, cool" feeling. Grey morality makes me emotional and can even put me in mood for a week, I prefer it

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Bojack Horseman might be my favorite show ever, so that's a lil self explanatory.

In general? I prefer morally gray media if it's written well, but if it's written poorly it can end up boring and pretentious. With black and white morality you have way less room to screw up or accidentally make some bad implications because you have a clear and obvious bad guy and don't have to think twice about stopping them, and it can also be really entertaining. One of my favorite things in MLP is how comically evil some of the villains are. Having an old school Disney villain every once in a while is a breath of fresh air.

TL;DR I like gray morality more in my stories, but having both is good. We need diversity in our storytelling.

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Both are good at times. Sometimes I want to see the good guys win. Other times unclear mortality is interesting. Moral ambiguity reflects morality and makes us think. But clear morality sets a standard that we can strive for.

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This is my new signature.

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I like grey characters but I usually prefer black-and-white stories so I can at least have a small idea of what to expect.  I like for the characters at least to be unpredictable so I can be a little surprised by the story’s outcome.


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Boom!

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I always prefer moral grays and it's actually part of my issues with certain popular media franchises. Black and white stories always come off as pretentious and a sort of virtue signal in a way if that makes sense. Grays while they can be done wrong, aren't a product of inherently bad writing. Black and white stories are. It's a choice the writers make to not develop the characters' motivations, and it really makes it much harder to invest in a story where there's somebody who's branded as always good and always evil, particularly the former tires me.

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Morally gray, for sure. I hold nothing against well-written stories where one side is clearly good and the other side is clearly evil, but such stories are usually more difficult for me to get into as someone who believes that no one truly knows what is good or evil. Of course, there exist poorly written morally gray stories that paint both sides as bad with one side being the "better bad", but those are usually written as a vain attempt to push an agenda of highfaluting lies on people. Stuff like that should not give you a bad impression of morally gray stories. Final Fantasy VII, one of the most acclaimed games of all time, has a morally gray story. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, another highly regarded game, throws you into a world where no side is right, yet you the player still have the option of picking a side, an option you wouldn't appreciate nearly as much if the story was just a fight between "good guys and bad guys". As a writer myself, I felt my writing improve the more I tried to actually understand why people did the wicked things they did and the less inclined I felt to write the villains in my stories as legitimately evil. 

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I agree with @EpicEnergy, I think I tend to prefer morally black and white stories over morally grey ones, however I do like morally grey stories too, especially if it has well written charters and interesting plots. ^_^ 

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                                                    RA RA RASPUTIN

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