![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI was reading an always-angels wingfic the other day and it had one half of the OTP as heaven's good soldier and the other as the fallen, probably demon, rebel dude. And I thought that the characterisation was pushed too far, flattened them out, but I was rolling with it... until the good soldier gets back to 'heaven', and the council that gives him his orders? Is made up of canon bad guys.
At that point, subtlety was gone, and the whole thing stopped even making sense. They'd mixed the alignments and motives of 'heaven' so badly there were capitalist get rich quick scheme guys in charge of the hosts. What does rich even mean when everyone can manifest anything? So then the bad guys made no sense and the story fell apart.
If you want to write about rebellion against heaven, if you want to write the triumph of team free will, then yaayness, go for it, this is a solid place to start. But you've got to see clear what the conflict is.
One of the martial arts films I saw, I think it's Iron Monkey? It had three sides in conflict. It was very very clearly a conflict between Lawful Good, Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil. The Lawful Evil were the lords of the land, that's the Lawful part. But they were also in it for personal profit and indulging their appetites, all at the expense of others, and that's the Evil. But Lawful Good initially served them, because Law. Sure these bosses were currently Evil, but you can't break the system, or you'd have no bosses at all and everything would be awful forever. Because from Lawful point of view, Chaos is as bad for people as Evil is. So then the Chaotic Good guy, who thought maybe bosses shouldn't be bosses if they were going to be bastards with it, he was running around nearly getting arrested and all that. Because stealing to feed people is still stealing. And in the end the two kinds of Good teamed up, because Evil had just been too evil, and hadn't left them much choice. But the conflict didn't resolve, the Lawful guy didn't say hey, maybe we should bring down the whole government! And the Chaotic guy wasn't going to stop rebelling with just this one official. They still both had their priorities and it didn't have a simple answer.
That's how you do rebellion against heaven.
Everyone has an actual point. Everyone is getting something out of their alignment, something actually noticeable. Their priorities and values make sense of the world, from their point of view, so the conflicts roll from them.
Lawful Evil makes sense to Lawful Evil characters because everybody is out to avoid suffering and pursue happiness, and these are the laws they have as a framework to do that within. They're just doing the same as the next guy, only they're better at it, so they get their rewards. Helping out other people or giving up their own share so someone else gets something just doesn't make sense to them, and may even seem like it breaks the rules, because here are the laws that regulate behaviour, they act within them, and it's working out pretty good for them so far. Rampant capitalists are probably Lawful Evil.
Tony Stark is arguably Lawful Evil, before the cave. You can write him as doing it all for the good of the company ie his employees and shareholders, thinking of others first. That's valid too. But you can also write it as complete self centered playboy narcissism, and canon fits fine. That's Lawful Evil. He's getting his, and the getting is good, so why worry about anyone else?
Obadiah isn't so much with the Lawful. On account of breaking the laws when it suits him, dealing under the table, contracting Tony's death. But he's not Chaotic, he doesn't break the laws to break them, he'll play the system for fun and profit too, he just wants what he wants. He's straight up Evil.
Putting him in charge of heaven stretches credulity, because no part of his alignment lines up with those he's leading. And it's hard to see what he'd get out of the position, because the power doesn't seem to come with perks, and indulging his appetites would logically alienate those he's got power over. It doesn't seem like it would work, certainly not for millennia.
But the whole mess with Hydra, that is a conflict of Lawful vs Good. I mean I can even plausibly explain why people would join Hydra as Lawful and not Evil. They can honestly believe that increasing control is for the greater good. They can be dedicated and self sacrificing agents of Law, and agents of Hydra. That's pretty much what brought down SHIELD, that everyone was on board with increasing control, all pulling in the same direction, and oops, the rest of the world was not okay with that.
That is a viable conflict in Heaven. The classic. The one where the angels look around at all the things that humans do and think, Free Will? What was the Father on?
Pierce in charge of Heaven? That's a direct translation of CA:TWS.
But Steve is not Lawful Good. CA:TFA is in no part the actions of a Lawful soldier. He'll lie, cheat, steal (equipment, supplies, help, airplane rides), ignore orders, and have a grand disregard for the whole concept of chain of command. Steve Rogers is straight up Good. He's got no problem with the Law while it's working, but he'll ignore it when there's something more important to do, and helping people is always more important.
So Steve as heaven's soldier, a Good man in a Lawful Good organisation, meeting a fallen Chaotic Good Tony Stark and, well, falling for him, or leading heaven's hosts in rebellion in the cause of Good against Law, that all works great. They'll match on the alignment that means everything to Steve.
But finding out heaven is secretly evil? That's oversimplifying the matter. That requires everyone to be stupid for a really long time.
Unless you focus on Evil as liking to hurt people. Because you can get a whole lot of torturers in the standard heaven and hell scenario, and enjoying sending people to the demons for their punishment can slide right into liking to punish. You can read Stane that way, a bit, in the more gloating moments.
But then you have a whole flaming swords of the righteous, enhanced interrogation techniques, it's not torture if the good guys do it thing to sell.
And it's kind of difficult selling Steve as part of it. Tony, sure, he'd build the swords, but Steve never liked bullies, so if heaven is bullies then why is he working for them?
Because that has nothing to do with current day America.
... yeah, the sarcasm got away from me a little.
But if you're going down that route, you can't just neatly exorcise the issues into known labelled bad guys like Stane and Hammer. Pierce as Lawful Evil who likes to punish, given how he treats the Winter Soldier, is going to work. But how about Natasha? Fury? Coulson and team? The whole point of calling one side heaven is to point out they've got the unquestioned might of ideology on their side, they are team Good Guys and they know it. They believe it even. Having our heroes rebel against them has to be about questioning what it means to be a good guy, or why bother using that set up? So just putting the most selfish bad guys in charge is boring.
Also? If I understand canon correctly, it's usually Steve that rebels, while there's times Tony stayed Lawful to everyone's cost. Making Tony a demon, with the playboy thing, is easy, and this being MCU canon it wouldn't play with a lot of the 616 stuff, but still. Steve is on the outs with the US government pretty often. For Captain America that's the kicked out of heaven equivalent. And that's why making him mindlessly obey orders is ... really a difficult sell. There's a lot of canon to say that's not what he's for.
Coulson now, in MCU and on TV, he's the Lawful guy. Though I've been skipping over the whole thing where SHIELD acts like it makes its own laws, in contradiction of other lawgiving institutions, which do look like a complication. Coulson is sure that SHIELD has the authority to do so, he's all about the system, trust the system. That's a Lawful kind of attitude. And he's still sure it was Good, just got infiltrated. So Coulson is continuing on his merry way down what I consider a very problematic path, yet the writers seem happy with it.
... I used to guess my alignment at chaotic neutral, I'm going to have a problem with systems that think they get to be the boss of everything...
... actually lately I like True Neutral better. I re-read all the Mickey Zucker Reichert books lately, the ones where the protagonist becomes the god of the Balance and advocates true neutrality as the only way to survive. It involves some pretty specific definitions of chaos and evil, because destruction and inflicting pain are a difficult sell as necessary components of life, but change and seeing to your own needs are clearly central. So then some situations need law and some chaos, some good and some evil, or selfish vs selfless behaviour. The middle way, sort of thing. Do no harm but take no shit.
to my mind that's the position of humans in this whole war with heaven gig.
also why personally I'd put one (some) character(s) as a human, probably Tony (and Steve's modern friends), and then because of being from before Steve and Bucky as dead souls drafted on different sides of the war. Then you get someone to be team Free Will and the two dead stuck with being told they've got no more choices, because Hell is pretty invested in the whole no exit concept which only works if free will stops applying. but obviously if hell is a temporary thing you can get over, well, people only get trapped there if they don't see the way out. ... and yes, I'm subverting the Christian heaven/hell paradigm by introducing standard eastern concepts, so hells are somewhere you can serve your time until you learn your lessons. If Bucky went down there it'd be to do with feeling like he's past saving because of all the stuff he did in the war, and that would be something that needs fixing from a reader's point of view, easy sympathy. But someone like Loki would be a reign in hell type, which would give him no interest in getting out unless it's to conquer heaven. The old tropes recur. But anyways, humans as team free will, Steve as wanting to save Bucky, Steve with his old team the Howling Commandos but only while he works for Heaven. Then if he lets go of his mission, drops the shield, to try and save Bucky, he'd be losing the old set of friends. End up effectively moved to the present. With a whole set of fallen angel complications. And you could do some interesting things with Peggy, who was part of the intelligence world for so long, so might not have such a black and white view of what counts as team good or evil.
ugh, if I ever actually wrote stuff any more then this 'clearly you should write what I tell you' style meta would be less... suck. I suck more than writers who have actual finished work out there, they obviously are winning. I just get frustrated because it could be more win.
This is also why I don't write this kind of stuff as comments or link to whichever story sparked it. That would be rude and annoying. That writer did the story they wanted to. These are the thoughts I had about it, is all.
If you're going to use the heaven vs hell trope set, then heaven is every good thing anyone could ever want, or at least can plausibly sell itself as that. Heaven's angels know unquestionably that they are the good guys, they get what they deserve, and that what they want is the Father's will. If you're going to just drop secretly selfish angels into that, it gets difficult to sell, because what even is it they have left to want? Secretly judgey angels who want all that good stuff for themselves and don't think humans deserve it, sure. Angels who can't even have the good stuff because humans are the only ones that get rewards, great, they can work that problem. Angels fed up with singing the praises of the dude that made them, maybe want their own songs, fine. But it takes a little work, because the source trope is angels and heaven are all the good things, so just dropping some bad guy names on them doesn't make first glance sense.
And it's much more interesting to use the whole set up as a way in to questioning what we even mean by Good.
At that point, subtlety was gone, and the whole thing stopped even making sense. They'd mixed the alignments and motives of 'heaven' so badly there were capitalist get rich quick scheme guys in charge of the hosts. What does rich even mean when everyone can manifest anything? So then the bad guys made no sense and the story fell apart.
If you want to write about rebellion against heaven, if you want to write the triumph of team free will, then yaayness, go for it, this is a solid place to start. But you've got to see clear what the conflict is.
One of the martial arts films I saw, I think it's Iron Monkey? It had three sides in conflict. It was very very clearly a conflict between Lawful Good, Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil. The Lawful Evil were the lords of the land, that's the Lawful part. But they were also in it for personal profit and indulging their appetites, all at the expense of others, and that's the Evil. But Lawful Good initially served them, because Law. Sure these bosses were currently Evil, but you can't break the system, or you'd have no bosses at all and everything would be awful forever. Because from Lawful point of view, Chaos is as bad for people as Evil is. So then the Chaotic Good guy, who thought maybe bosses shouldn't be bosses if they were going to be bastards with it, he was running around nearly getting arrested and all that. Because stealing to feed people is still stealing. And in the end the two kinds of Good teamed up, because Evil had just been too evil, and hadn't left them much choice. But the conflict didn't resolve, the Lawful guy didn't say hey, maybe we should bring down the whole government! And the Chaotic guy wasn't going to stop rebelling with just this one official. They still both had their priorities and it didn't have a simple answer.
That's how you do rebellion against heaven.
Everyone has an actual point. Everyone is getting something out of their alignment, something actually noticeable. Their priorities and values make sense of the world, from their point of view, so the conflicts roll from them.
Lawful Evil makes sense to Lawful Evil characters because everybody is out to avoid suffering and pursue happiness, and these are the laws they have as a framework to do that within. They're just doing the same as the next guy, only they're better at it, so they get their rewards. Helping out other people or giving up their own share so someone else gets something just doesn't make sense to them, and may even seem like it breaks the rules, because here are the laws that regulate behaviour, they act within them, and it's working out pretty good for them so far. Rampant capitalists are probably Lawful Evil.
Tony Stark is arguably Lawful Evil, before the cave. You can write him as doing it all for the good of the company ie his employees and shareholders, thinking of others first. That's valid too. But you can also write it as complete self centered playboy narcissism, and canon fits fine. That's Lawful Evil. He's getting his, and the getting is good, so why worry about anyone else?
Obadiah isn't so much with the Lawful. On account of breaking the laws when it suits him, dealing under the table, contracting Tony's death. But he's not Chaotic, he doesn't break the laws to break them, he'll play the system for fun and profit too, he just wants what he wants. He's straight up Evil.
Putting him in charge of heaven stretches credulity, because no part of his alignment lines up with those he's leading. And it's hard to see what he'd get out of the position, because the power doesn't seem to come with perks, and indulging his appetites would logically alienate those he's got power over. It doesn't seem like it would work, certainly not for millennia.
But the whole mess with Hydra, that is a conflict of Lawful vs Good. I mean I can even plausibly explain why people would join Hydra as Lawful and not Evil. They can honestly believe that increasing control is for the greater good. They can be dedicated and self sacrificing agents of Law, and agents of Hydra. That's pretty much what brought down SHIELD, that everyone was on board with increasing control, all pulling in the same direction, and oops, the rest of the world was not okay with that.
That is a viable conflict in Heaven. The classic. The one where the angels look around at all the things that humans do and think, Free Will? What was the Father on?
Pierce in charge of Heaven? That's a direct translation of CA:TWS.
But Steve is not Lawful Good. CA:TFA is in no part the actions of a Lawful soldier. He'll lie, cheat, steal (equipment, supplies, help, airplane rides), ignore orders, and have a grand disregard for the whole concept of chain of command. Steve Rogers is straight up Good. He's got no problem with the Law while it's working, but he'll ignore it when there's something more important to do, and helping people is always more important.
So Steve as heaven's soldier, a Good man in a Lawful Good organisation, meeting a fallen Chaotic Good Tony Stark and, well, falling for him, or leading heaven's hosts in rebellion in the cause of Good against Law, that all works great. They'll match on the alignment that means everything to Steve.
But finding out heaven is secretly evil? That's oversimplifying the matter. That requires everyone to be stupid for a really long time.
Unless you focus on Evil as liking to hurt people. Because you can get a whole lot of torturers in the standard heaven and hell scenario, and enjoying sending people to the demons for their punishment can slide right into liking to punish. You can read Stane that way, a bit, in the more gloating moments.
But then you have a whole flaming swords of the righteous, enhanced interrogation techniques, it's not torture if the good guys do it thing to sell.
And it's kind of difficult selling Steve as part of it. Tony, sure, he'd build the swords, but Steve never liked bullies, so if heaven is bullies then why is he working for them?
Because that has nothing to do with current day America.
... yeah, the sarcasm got away from me a little.
But if you're going down that route, you can't just neatly exorcise the issues into known labelled bad guys like Stane and Hammer. Pierce as Lawful Evil who likes to punish, given how he treats the Winter Soldier, is going to work. But how about Natasha? Fury? Coulson and team? The whole point of calling one side heaven is to point out they've got the unquestioned might of ideology on their side, they are team Good Guys and they know it. They believe it even. Having our heroes rebel against them has to be about questioning what it means to be a good guy, or why bother using that set up? So just putting the most selfish bad guys in charge is boring.
Also? If I understand canon correctly, it's usually Steve that rebels, while there's times Tony stayed Lawful to everyone's cost. Making Tony a demon, with the playboy thing, is easy, and this being MCU canon it wouldn't play with a lot of the 616 stuff, but still. Steve is on the outs with the US government pretty often. For Captain America that's the kicked out of heaven equivalent. And that's why making him mindlessly obey orders is ... really a difficult sell. There's a lot of canon to say that's not what he's for.
Coulson now, in MCU and on TV, he's the Lawful guy. Though I've been skipping over the whole thing where SHIELD acts like it makes its own laws, in contradiction of other lawgiving institutions, which do look like a complication. Coulson is sure that SHIELD has the authority to do so, he's all about the system, trust the system. That's a Lawful kind of attitude. And he's still sure it was Good, just got infiltrated. So Coulson is continuing on his merry way down what I consider a very problematic path, yet the writers seem happy with it.
... I used to guess my alignment at chaotic neutral, I'm going to have a problem with systems that think they get to be the boss of everything...
... actually lately I like True Neutral better. I re-read all the Mickey Zucker Reichert books lately, the ones where the protagonist becomes the god of the Balance and advocates true neutrality as the only way to survive. It involves some pretty specific definitions of chaos and evil, because destruction and inflicting pain are a difficult sell as necessary components of life, but change and seeing to your own needs are clearly central. So then some situations need law and some chaos, some good and some evil, or selfish vs selfless behaviour. The middle way, sort of thing. Do no harm but take no shit.
to my mind that's the position of humans in this whole war with heaven gig.
also why personally I'd put one (some) character(s) as a human, probably Tony (and Steve's modern friends), and then because of being from before Steve and Bucky as dead souls drafted on different sides of the war. Then you get someone to be team Free Will and the two dead stuck with being told they've got no more choices, because Hell is pretty invested in the whole no exit concept which only works if free will stops applying. but obviously if hell is a temporary thing you can get over, well, people only get trapped there if they don't see the way out. ... and yes, I'm subverting the Christian heaven/hell paradigm by introducing standard eastern concepts, so hells are somewhere you can serve your time until you learn your lessons. If Bucky went down there it'd be to do with feeling like he's past saving because of all the stuff he did in the war, and that would be something that needs fixing from a reader's point of view, easy sympathy. But someone like Loki would be a reign in hell type, which would give him no interest in getting out unless it's to conquer heaven. The old tropes recur. But anyways, humans as team free will, Steve as wanting to save Bucky, Steve with his old team the Howling Commandos but only while he works for Heaven. Then if he lets go of his mission, drops the shield, to try and save Bucky, he'd be losing the old set of friends. End up effectively moved to the present. With a whole set of fallen angel complications. And you could do some interesting things with Peggy, who was part of the intelligence world for so long, so might not have such a black and white view of what counts as team good or evil.
ugh, if I ever actually wrote stuff any more then this 'clearly you should write what I tell you' style meta would be less... suck. I suck more than writers who have actual finished work out there, they obviously are winning. I just get frustrated because it could be more win.
This is also why I don't write this kind of stuff as comments or link to whichever story sparked it. That would be rude and annoying. That writer did the story they wanted to. These are the thoughts I had about it, is all.
If you're going to use the heaven vs hell trope set, then heaven is every good thing anyone could ever want, or at least can plausibly sell itself as that. Heaven's angels know unquestionably that they are the good guys, they get what they deserve, and that what they want is the Father's will. If you're going to just drop secretly selfish angels into that, it gets difficult to sell, because what even is it they have left to want? Secretly judgey angels who want all that good stuff for themselves and don't think humans deserve it, sure. Angels who can't even have the good stuff because humans are the only ones that get rewards, great, they can work that problem. Angels fed up with singing the praises of the dude that made them, maybe want their own songs, fine. But it takes a little work, because the source trope is angels and heaven are all the good things, so just dropping some bad guy names on them doesn't make first glance sense.
And it's much more interesting to use the whole set up as a way in to questioning what we even mean by Good.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-06 06:49 am (UTC)I'm not convinced of the utility of the True Neutral path, but that gets into definitions of good and evil. I would say that moderation is a kind of good, just one that sees itself as in the middle, and I'd probably then annoy other people.
I remember that Monte Cook made a point in one of his RPG's of not referencing Law/Chaos and barely referencing Good/Evil. Each character could have a distinct alignment based on their allegiances, priorities, and beliefs.