Heroes, Villains and Criminals

I have been talking a lot about what crime means to me as a philosopher and a social commentator, but today I want to talk about what it means as a writer. Crime comes up a lot in fiction, and not just when you're writing crime fiction...

Comedies may involve indecent exposure, drug use and "slapstick" assault.

A disturbing number of Romance stories feature stalking & sexual assault.
Traditionally, Slasher Horror starts with drug use and underaged sex.

Superhero action stories often rely upon vigilantism, torture and grievous bodily harm.
Although less popular, Western movies still love their gun-slinging outlaws.

And all of this is before we discuss the particular genres that are just about crime: Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure, Bank Heist Thrillers, Murder Mystery Whodunnits, International Espionage Thrillers...

Basically, unless you're exclusively writing early-childhood children's books (and sometimes, even then) as a writer, it's only a matter of time before you're likely to be writing about crime in one form or another. What I find fascinating is the way that crime, despite being, y'know... bad, isn't exclusively the domain of villains. I'm not saying I agree with the Hays Code, and that all crime should be depicted in a negative light, but it's fascinating to me the arbitrary way it is often depicted.

So many heroes are thieves, thanks to good old Robin Hood setting the standard that, so long as the rich guy doesn't deserve his money, he's fair game. Murder is also fair game, but usually only if it's quick... victims of heroes usually drop dead, they rarely strangle people. But animal abuse? Hell no, if you hurt an animal, you're evil, through and through.

Dangerous driving is usually a pulse-pounding action scene, since that's a car chase, nothing wrong with a good car chase. Torture, that can be pretty villainous, but more often than not heroes use it if "the ends justify the means" (even though in reality, torture doesn't work for gathering information). Terrorism? Well, that's pretty entirely villainous; in fact "terrorist" is synonymous with "bad guy" in a lot of action movies.

It may seem arbitrary, and that's because it is... arbitrary just means "determined by an arbiter" and an arbiter is any human making a judgement. In fact, I've noticed that when it comes to crime in fiction, a crime is judged not by whether it's cruel or kind, easy or difficult not even if it's good or evil, it's always about if it's presented as fair. Theft is unfair, unless the person doesn't deserve their money. Murder is fair, if the bad guys are also trying to kill you. Even Arson, Blackmail, Kidnapping & Stalking can be the actions of a hero, if you present it as a balanced response to some antagonistic injustice.

That's why animal cruelty, child abuse and sexual assault are so universally villainous - there's not much to really balance that scale since children and animals are already at a disadvantage and because nobody deserves to be sexually assaulted...

[Editor's Note: It bears pointing out that child abuse and animal cruelty have been depicted as heroic in cases where the hero is a child or an animal, themselves. Also, comedies, and several other films, seem to find the sexual harassment and rape of men justifiable for multiple reasons regarding gender politics that I'm not going into, but if not triggered by such discussions, you will find the following videos informative.]

So, if you're a writer, that's the lesson for you, here. See, there's a common, inaccurate claim regarding fiction-writing that "you should always make your main characters likeable". But in my experience, this isn't true at all—it's not about likeability, legality or even morality, it's about understandability, people need to understand why your character does the things they do. Even if they do some of the worst things imaginable, if readers can understand the reason why they did it, they can not only forgive it, but in some cases justify it. One of the easiest ways to do this is by making the scales of justice within your story clear, explicit and balanced, but you can even make a character act unfairly, if you can show that circumstances beyond them are forcing them to act in a rational manner.

I wasn't planning on this, but this actually ties back to my post about crime as sin, because this too is based upon cognitive bias. But, not the Sunk Cost, rather this is a kind of self-serving bias, in particular, Fundamental Attribution Error. For the sake of this post I will be referring to Fundamental Attribution Error simply as Attribution Error, but please take note that this is a personal choice that I'm making, but it may be confusing in other contexts, as there are many forms of Attribution Error, or Bias.

Attribution Error, simply put, is the cognitive mistake of attributing good actions or consequences that we (or our in-group) do on us simply being good people who do good things - the theory refers to these as "dispositional, or personality, factors"; but attributing bad actions or consequences to external factors beyond our control - the theory refers to these as "situational and environmental factors"

However, this is self-serving because we tend to do the opposite for others or members of an outgroup, and this bias is exacerbated when prior bias already exists (i.e. someone you don't like).
That's the theory, in practice it looks like this:

Let's say that several people take part in a somewhat difficult test.
If you and yours Succeed, you're likely attribute that to you being smart and earning it.
If them and theirs Succeed, you're likely to attribute it to them studying more, or getting lucky.
If you and yours Fail, you're likely to attribute that to not enough study time, or an unfair test.
If them and theirs Fail, you're likely to attribute that to them being stupid and not trying.

This happens more often than we'd like to admit. In fact, my favourite example is bumping into someone. If you accidentally bump into someone, it's because you were distracted. If someone else bumps into you, it's because they weren't watching where they were going.
The reality is, you weren't watching where you were going, because you were distracted.
And they also were distracted, which is why they weren't watching where they were going.
The reality is, we are all affected by multiple personal and situational factors, but we're more likely to give a charitable interpretation to our own actions, and an uncharitable one for others.

The reason this matters in fiction is twofold. Firstly, because that's how you game the system - by providing irrefutable, environmental factors as to why your character does bad things, you can sneak your main character backwards along this cognitive bias and into a reader's in-group. They're likely to do this anyway, by the nature of being granted access to their perspective (which I'm pretty sure relates to another cognitive bias, but I'm not going to research that right now because this is meant to be a post about writing, not psychology... even though I admit there's a lot of overlap when creating characters).

[Editor's Note: I couldn't help myself. Whilst admittedly my research was lacking, I did find a connection between empathizing with Point-of-View Characters, and the psychological and emotional drive, called Belongingness. Basically, when reading a book from another perspective, we have an inherent desire to belong to their group. It can be counteracted by strong enmity and pre-existing negative biases, but unless they are uncharacteristically strong, the desire to belong can break down those barriers. I'd argue this is the reason why bigots complain so much when feminine, queer and/or non-white characters are given prominence in fiction is because they recognize that it encourages empathy and it's a powerful force, but this editor's note is long enough, and that could be an entire blog post unto itself.]

Secondly, I think that this means the writer bears great responsibility when it comes to representation in stories. As I've said, and I will continue to say throughout this Countdown, criminals are not inherently evil people. I'm not concerned that stories depict crime, I love those stories because crime is rife with drama and drama is what makes some stories so deeply fascinating. But, we have the capacity to decide who people empathize with, who is good and bad, and more than ever I think that writers need to be conscious of that reality. It's too early for me to divulge, since it's an idea I had only a month or so ago, but I've been ruminating upon the idea of "authorial ethics". There's already study regarding ethics in journalism and there's some regressive discussion of ethics in media portrayals of violence and sex. I wonder if it would be beneficial to have a more definitive concept of ethics in fiction. I'm not actually sure if it's possible, since if it were too strict, it would be tantamount to censorship, but that's not my goal.
See, the point is, if you are a writer you have the power the decide, simply by putting words to a page, who has the right to be a hero, who has the qualities of a villain, who deserves to be considered a peer, who's in your in-group, who's in your outgroup, and what actions make the world a better place, and what makes it worse. I'm not prepared to tell you what you should and shouldn't do, but I can say without reservation: As a writer, you are responsible for the words that you write, and if you don't take that responsibility seriously, you can do more harm than good.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and I really think a "the true crime here is..." preface would be suitable, something about using words to do harm or not taking responsibility for your fiction, but I already used that cliche in a prior post, and I don't want to be here repeating myself. That's not really a fiction responsibility thing, so much as a mild compulsive tendency to avoid repetition whenever possible.
Until Next Time, what do you think? What crimes do you find interesting in fiction, and would you be interested in a discussion in regard to "authorial ethics"? Let me know in the comments below, and I'll see you tomorrow wherein I'm going to share an old story I wrote with you, as well as the story behind it...