On the Nature of Good in stories

Over on my Subscribestar page, I have a link to a bit of fanfic I wrote. This is a bit of a guilty secret of mine, but I do have a Thing about Tolkien's elves, and I like to think of how they would handle situations in other stories I've read.

This particular bit of fanfic is a mashup between Middle Earth and Larry Correia's Monster Hunter series, which is an unashamed tribute to the B-movie horror genre, with the added fun of Call of Duty Zombies mod. Given that Correia is a gun nut, I think he just wished for moving targets!

Now, his series is great fun in well-spaced doses, but I have a bone to pick: his moral universe doesn't have much topography.

So, what does that mean? A good illustration is that he has goblins/orcs, but they're refugees in a rural ghetto in this story; and he has elves, but they're trailer-park trash living on welfare and watching Jerry Springer! [As a side note, this came from when his wife was reading a story, she professed disgust with how elves are always so perfect, so he thought he'd make them the lowest of the low, this time - it's quite funny when you understand why!] However, the effect is to raise the low (goblins) from evil to pathetic, and lower the high (elves) from superhuman to, well, pathetic!

But, as they say in the shouty ads, that's not all! The most dangerous monsters - vampires and werewolves - have an ability to regenerate themselves after injury. It's a bit too much like miraculous healing for my liking, so I thought the moral universe would be more balanced if they had good guys who had the same magical ability - hence the Elves of Middle-Earth (have you ever seen an elf with a lasting injury? Me neither).

But now, I've painted myself into a storytelling corner. The flip-side of having powerful good guys on your side in a story is to make it less interesting! The power of an epic myth comes from the folk hero battling huge odds and overcoming them. This is why monsters in Hollywood horror schlock are always so ridiculously overpowered. So, to use super good guys in a story, there have to be strict limits on how much they can do, either from a practical, moral or mystical viewpoint - or the story lacks drama, and therefore interest.

An interesting side note to the process of creating this particular fanfic is that, when I started speculating on what Goodness looks like, my thoughts took me to a place that was so bright and compelling, I found it difficult to sleep! I had peeked into a universe that was so wonderful, I couldn't, I didn't want to think of anything else! Fortunately, it only lasted 2-3 days. I seem to remember tales of saints or mystics who glimpsed Heaven, and wasted away, eventually dying. They must have either pined away, or desired the vision more than even food or sleep. T.S. Eliot, in Murder in the Cathedral, explained it well: Mankind cannot stand too much reality (hat tip to Sarah de Nordwall). So I might have dodged a bullet there, heh!