Does Enjoying GRRM Make Us Sociopaths?

[Lyanna Stark]

Yet my wife has rejected all of these arguments, disgusted that human beings take pleasure in negative emotions evoked through literature, and it's the simplest line of thought of all that I cannot truly answer: Why do we choose to experience negative emotions rather than happiness? What makes us tap our feet impatiently for the next Bakker or GRRM novel rather than trying to get cheap smiles from stories written to make the reader merely happy?

No offence to your wife, but what DOES she read apart from Mills & Boon and maybe Carebears?

If you're looking at classics, you will certainly not be spoilt by a lot of jolly outings, perfect lawns and happiness. A lot of the greats of the past are definitely more tragedies than they are happy go lucky (someone already mentioned Dante, for instance).

I mean, consider a story like Oliver Twist. A lot of human suffering in that one, orphaned children being treated horribly etc. Is it wallowing and perverted to like Oliver Twist? What about Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Christo or Les Miserables?

They all contain elements of suffering, whether it's orphans, imprisonment, bereavement and plain people being mean to eachother and performing acts of evil.

Themes like this make stories resonate; they make them feel real. It has nothing to do with being a pervert, it has to do with being able to sympathise with the characters and to find the setting interesting. A setting where nothing bad ever has a chance of happening is all very nice, but also terribly boring and predictable.

When so much of the world population seems so content with generic tales where the good guy always wins and lives happily ever after with his princess, what gives us such a fine appreciation and joy for dark literature?

I don't know if this is necessarily true. People just never get the chance to try and appreciate something different.

[Horza]

Shit, a brief perusal of Wiki's magisterial summary of the The Care Bears Movie (1985) you've got mind control, imprisonment, attempted murder and possibly the most horrible thing imagineable: the removal of caring from the world. Certainly not what I'd recommend to someone who doesn't like the thought of anyone suffering...

[Wik]

I'll speak for myself, but it seems to echo many of the opinions of others here:

I enjoy GRRM, not because all people die and suffer in a shitty world, but because some make it through unscathed, others don't make it at all and some come out with completely different attitudes/ideas/morals. Life changing events, both good and bad.

Tragedies like the Holocaust, the sinking of the Titanic and the Rape of Nanking have happened in our real world. While they are on a more grand level than, say one of the Starks dying in ASOIAF, it still shows that tragedy happens, despite our best efforts to live long happy lives. Sometimes we have shitty days and nothing goes well. Sometimes people die. It's a sad and inconvenient truth. The only thing any of us are guaranteed when born, is that we will die.

I don't know your social status, but there are tons of people who live in poverty and even below that, not only in the US but the entire world. Should we act like that doesn't happen because it's not pleasing to the eye? Despite even that, death could take any one of us, at any moment, rich poor, dumb, smart, attractive, ugly. No one is free of tragedy. Just as it could take Jaime, Eddard, Tywin, Tyrion, Bronn or the Hound.

In many books, characters are given an unfair advantage of survival. In GRRM and the like, these characters have no more luck than the average person who runs an inn. Frodo didn't deserve to survive his journey imo, I mean he could barely use a weapon, while on a great journey across the world and in enemy lands. If that was GRRM, he would have been ridden down and hacked in half by the Hound or Gregor or something. I'm not much of a WOT fan but I have heard endlessly that the main characters basically never suffer life and death situations, and all of this in the course of fighting some great demon and his minions that want to take over the world. Seems like dangerous work to me. Sounds like someone could die. As a matter of fact I would think a majority of the people facing that situation will die. But alas, author's all have their own plans.

Anyhow, I don't mean to harp. No offense to your wife. Perhaps she is just a more caring person than most of us :P but life is full of dark occurrences and great ones as well. To assume that books should never have any of the dark side of life is naive imo, but that is just me.

[Lyanna Stark]

Shit, a brief perusal of Wiki's magisterial summary of the The Care Bears Movie (1985) you've got mind control, imprisonment, attempted murder and possibly the most horrible thing imagineable: the removal of caring from the world. Certainly not what I'd recommend to someone who doesn't like the thought of anyone suffering...

That's some messed up stuff right there. :blink:

[shadow catlady]

I can relate to your wife, though I'm not sure exactly what creates fiction preferences or pleasurable escapes. I went years when any story darker than Anne of Green Gables or LotR upset me deeply, made me sick to my stomach. (Though I could read Dickens, or similarly romantically unrealistic grim novels.)

I remember when I had to read Grapes of Wrath, I asked my high school sophomore English teacher why she made us read such a depressing and horrifying book. When I re-read it in my 20s I cried because it was such a beautiful vision of humanity to me. Vonnegut transformed for me, too, over the same time frame, in the same way. My dad just said it was because some life had happened to me. I think it was an intellectual growth, combined with a few scary/ tragic/ sick experiences.

Books appeal to emotion and relate to our world views and life experiences. These things change throughout our lives, and vary widely for different people. What is exciting and real or even beautifully, romantically tragic to one person can be sick and twisted to another person. I don't think you can change your wife's preferences with a few literary recommendations. People look for different escapes in fiction reading. I'm friends with people who read Nicholas Sparks as well as people who would never touch genre reading. I wouldn't worry about your different tastes, but I wouldn't bother trying to change it, either.

[Grogsmash]

I can enjoy books with evil characters or extremely grey to dark ones if they either redeem themselves or get what is coming eventually. If a book ends with the evil ones triumphing or ends with all the good guys dead and buried, I have alot of trouble with it.

I do think though, that there is a scale to all of this. The torture porn movies like Saw, etc, I find deeply disturbing and I cannot understand at all why people would enjoy them in the slightest. Same with things like Battle Royale. On the other hand, a book like The Hunger Games, where you have horrific things happen but where I feel the good guys will triumph in the end, I can enjoy.

I see many people post that they want ASOIAF to end with everyone "good" dead. I cannot even grasp what enjoyment someone would gain from that kind of ending. If at the end of the series, Daenerys, Jon and Tyrion are dead, I would have trouble recommending the series to anyone. Heck, I have trouble with that now. My mother called me and cussed me out when she read the Red Wedding and refused to continue reading the series.

[Migey]

My mother called me and cussed me out when she read the Red Wedding and refused to continue reading the series.

I'm sure she will get over that :P I didn't have too much trouble with it (was shocked to the core but i kept on reading) but alot of the people i know refused to read the book for a bit after the red wedding. My brother said he hated it after that scene, but a few days later he picked it back up and read till the end. Same with alot of other people. The Red Wedding chapter was truly one of the best written chapters ever published. :bowdown:

I love the book for its characters, mainly. No other characters i have ever read about have ever made me relate to them and feel for them in the same way as ASoIaF does. No other book has made me feel so emotional, like say, when i felt a savage joy at the Purple Wedding, or when i felt angry at Joffreys mistreatment of Sansa, anger, denial, etc at the Red Wedding, etc. Few books can make me feel for the characters in the same way, and no other books (well, one or two, but not many) have given me the same feel of authenticity.

I also read it for the amazing plot. I want desperately to know what happens next. It is also refreshing to read a series where the author is willing to kill off his characters for the sake of the story, rather then keeping them there for the point of it. I for one respect GRRM immensely for this - i have tried my hand at writing a few times (i suck at it, but still) and i find it very, very difficult to allow harm and misfortune to come to the characters. Its nice to read a series where everything isnt served up the good guys on a gilded platter.

Sorry for that terrible post, i hope i got my point across :P (Not that it matters, since essentially im making the same point as everyone else)

[Galactus]

LOTR, by the way, I actually think is genuinely dark. There is a real sense of loss. Yes, there is victory... But there is a price to be paid.

I can enjoy books with evil characters or extremely grey to dark ones if they either redeem themselves or get what is coming eventually. If a book ends with the evil ones triumphing or ends with all the good guys dead and buried, I have alot of trouble with it.

I wouldn't mind it. It would be something DIFFERENT. I like when stories swerve off into unusual directions.

[dolorouseddwasright]

Imagine a human that is happy all the time. Happy, happy, happy. Happiness shines out of this person's every orifice, day in and day out, forever.

Is this a healthy human being?

Aside from the fact that I don't think any human is healthy who has things shining out of every orifice all the time, this thought scares the shit out of me. Nobody can be happy all the time unless there is something very very wrong with that person.

[Datepalm]

Apart from all thats been said about representing reality, and plain grittier not always being better, and the obvious point that if there isn't some kind of conflict (which is usually even in the sweetest baby book between something that is good and something...less good) theres isn't really much of story...

I think theres more of a question above and beyond the general tone of the book as to why characters have to suffer? Can't we have an interesting story with a interesting conflict and interesting characters not being exceptionaly miserable? I guess for me that extreme allows an author to show something more vulnerably and fundamental about the character, and on a good day, about humans in general by extension and give us some kind of a glimpse of something of what being human is all about, which I think is really literatures greatest achievment there.

[Liadin]

I wonder why the OP's wife jumped right from "husband likes a book that has torture/rape/disfigurement/etc. in it" to "husband enjoys torture/rape/disfigurement/etc. and is a sadist." Virtually every fantasy book includes both war and murder, does liking them mean we would derive pleasure from these things in real life? I doubt it (for most of us at least!). Shitty things happening to people = conflict and books need conflict. I personally enjoy the books in spite of the particularly gruesome bits rather than because of them, although not everyone can say that.... :P

ETA: Also, I don't see what's wrong with being happy all the time, and I don't believe you need to be unhappy at least 50% of the time to enjoy your happiness--although in a fictional context, a perpetually happy character is likely to be annoying and you need more suffering than happiness to be interesting (again, because fiction requires conflict). But I don't begrudge real life people with awesome lives their happiness by any means. I suspect most of you don't either--who's more fun to hang out with, the person who's always cheerful and up for a good time or the person who's always depressed or complaining?

[TrueMetis]

That's some messed up stuff right there. :blink:

Yep, turns out kids movie have some of the most fucked up themes to them, the whole plot of the movie ants was Nazism.

[jurble]

Yet my wife has rejected all of these arguments, disgusted that human beings take pleasure in negative emotions evoked through literature, and it's the simplest line of thought of all that I cannot truly answer: Why do we choose to experience negative emotions rather than happiness? What makes us tap our feet impatiently for the next Bakker or GRRM novel rather than trying to get cheap smiles from stories written to make the reader merely happy? When so much of the world population seems so content with generic tales where the good guy always wins and lives happily ever after with his princess, what gives us such a fine appreciation and joy for dark literature?

Because humans are spiteful, violent creatures and have done nothing but murder each other for thousands of years - first openly and proudly, and now under the pretenses of civilization?

I mean shit, the oldest works of literature in the world are not happy. The Epic of Gilgamesh? Not too violent, but it ain't happy - Gilgamesh fails in his quest for immortality. The Iliad and the Odyssey? Both full of ultra-violence. The Mahabharata and other Indian poems? VIOLENT! Beowulf - though not as old obviously? One man's quest to be so damn violent that he'll be remembered forever! (And it worked).

[Old Nan]

I wonder why the OP's wife jumped right from "husband likes a book that has torture/rape/disfigurement/etc. in it" to "husband enjoys torture/rape/disfigurement/etc. and is a sadist."

Occam's razor. In choosing between "reader is titillated by torture and rape" and "reader is repelled by torture and rape, but finds their depiction uplifting on a 'higher level'..." well, it's not a hard choice, given how many people have found their pleasure in brutality, and how few have found it in intellectualism.

And no, books do not "need" conflict. That argument seems rather circular...

[Horza]

Occam's razor. In choosing between "reader is titillated by torture and rape" and "reader is repelled by torture and rape, but finds their depiction uplifting on a 'higher level'..." well, it's not a hard choice, given how many people have found their pleasure in brutality, and how few have found it in intellectualism.

And no, books do not "need" conflict. That argument seems rather circular...

Name me a good story without conflict.

[Galactus]

Name me a good story without conflict.

Waiting for Godot?

[Kraken]

OP, you should read Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces. Aside from being a great book, he has a chapter on why tragedy is appealing (specifically using Anna Karenina as an example). Essentially, tragedy is meaningful because we know it to be true -- both in the literal sense that the world is full of suffering and in his psychoanalytic approach that we know our lives, and everything else, ends in death. Super happy fluff stories, while occasionally enjoyable, are false and forgettable.

I'm not explaining this well. I have the relevant passage saved on my home computer but I'm at work. If I remember, I'll post it when I get home.

This is the passage I was referring to:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With these fateful words, Count Leo Tolstoy opened the novel of the spiritual dismemberment of his modern heroine, Anna Karenina. During the seven decades that have elapsed since that distracted wife, mother, and blindly impassioned mistress threw herself beneath the wheels of the train -- thus terminating, with a gesture symbolic of what already happened to her soul, her tragedy of disorientation -- a tumultuous and unremitting dithyramb of romances, news reports, and unrecorded cries of anguish has been going up to the honor of the bull-demon of the labyrinth: the wrathful, destructive, maddening aspect of the same god who, when benign, is the vivifying principle of the world. Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixtion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

[Horza]

Waiting for Godot?

That's a good story now?

[TrueMetis]

Occam's razor. In choosing between "reader is titillated by torture and rape" and "reader is repelled by torture and rape, but finds their depiction uplifting on a 'higher level'..." well, it's not a hard choice, given how many people have found their pleasure in brutality, and how few have found it in intellectualism.

And no, books do not "need" conflict. That argument seems rather circular...

Name one book with no conflict, conflict is an essential part of any story.

[Old Nan]

Name me a good story without conflict.

You said "books" not "stories." It's perfectly possible for a book to be good without any particular story being told (and again, ASOIAF is a good example of this).