Insightful article. I do take issue with this claim:
> Stories need heroes and villains, otherwise you have no story at all.
This is completely untrue and speaks volumes towards the cultural failures of today's storytellers to offer a true alternative to Judeo-Christian frames. What stories need is conflict, not to collect all virtues into one character and all vices into that character's antagonist. And there are plenty of modern screenplays that feature non-heroic and non-villainous primary characters. The main one I'm thinking of is Billions. And stories where there are no heroes at all, I count Ozark in this category.
It could well be argued that a true alternative to religious determination could never be found in the morality play, which was invented in medieval Europe specifically to teach Christian values. It's taken over modern storytelling and only repackages Christian morals, nothing about science fiction, space opera or that other descendent of the morality play, fantasy, could ever escape the strictures of the form. By forcing heroes into a hero's journey in order to tackle a great evil, you're just telling old stories with new faces.
I would argue that if you really want to imagine post-Christian storytelling, you need to get away from heroes and villains entirely, and reframe the conflict in terms that aren't good and evil-focused. When I look that up in the encyclopedia in my head, it lands on romance. The conflict here forces both main characters to develop positive character traits, and gets completely away from good and evil.
Of course, you'd need postmodern analytical skills in order to get anything out of postmodern explorations, and that just might be too much to ask today's audience with it's rapidly vanishing liberal arts skills.
> What if your life could be a video game?
Stephenson played with the theme, poorly. In both books where this was a thing, the video game was mostly treated as an afterthought while all the real plot action happened irl. The true exploration of this concept happened in Ready Player One where the video game really did truly take over society. What did this do to the plot and narrative? Nothing meaningful. It doesn't seem to matter at all what setting human conflict takes place in.
Banks toyed with this concept as well but the most fleshed out version simply imagined a galaxy-wide holy war that was fought in the virtual world by the folks truly interested in either maintaining the status quo or obliterating VR worlds whose purpose was the eternal torture of living beings. Nothing post-Christian about that.
> Stories need heroes and villains, otherwise you have no story at all.
This is completely untrue and speaks volumes towards the cultural failures of today's storytellers to offer a true alternative to Judeo-Christian frames. What stories need is conflict, not to collect all virtues into one character and all vices into that character's antagonist. And there are plenty of modern screenplays that feature non-heroic and non-villainous primary characters. The main one I'm thinking of is Billions. And stories where there are no heroes at all, I count Ozark in this category.
It could well be argued that a true alternative to religious determination could never be found in the morality play, which was invented in medieval Europe specifically to teach Christian values. It's taken over modern storytelling and only repackages Christian morals, nothing about science fiction, space opera or that other descendent of the morality play, fantasy, could ever escape the strictures of the form. By forcing heroes into a hero's journey in order to tackle a great evil, you're just telling old stories with new faces.
I would argue that if you really want to imagine post-Christian storytelling, you need to get away from heroes and villains entirely, and reframe the conflict in terms that aren't good and evil-focused. When I look that up in the encyclopedia in my head, it lands on romance. The conflict here forces both main characters to develop positive character traits, and gets completely away from good and evil.
Of course, you'd need postmodern analytical skills in order to get anything out of postmodern explorations, and that just might be too much to ask today's audience with it's rapidly vanishing liberal arts skills.
> What if your life could be a video game?
Stephenson played with the theme, poorly. In both books where this was a thing, the video game was mostly treated as an afterthought while all the real plot action happened irl. The true exploration of this concept happened in Ready Player One where the video game really did truly take over society. What did this do to the plot and narrative? Nothing meaningful. It doesn't seem to matter at all what setting human conflict takes place in.
Banks toyed with this concept as well but the most fleshed out version simply imagined a galaxy-wide holy war that was fought in the virtual world by the folks truly interested in either maintaining the status quo or obliterating VR worlds whose purpose was the eternal torture of living beings. Nothing post-Christian about that.