I may be strange

I'm a little odd.

You may have noticed.

Now, while I'm smart enough and well read enough that it's taken me decades to find a sizeable number of people who I can have a conversation with without dropping my vocabulary to that of a six year old, I'm also wired a little differently.

For example?  Well, I'll give you two.

First of all, we had some jackass talking about how The Lord of the Rings was racist against Orcs. You read that right. It wasn't some twisted way of saying that Orcs were "persons of color." It was that it was racist against Orcs.

You know, those charming, peace-loving, cannibalistic genetic abominations who will eat each other and any sapient creature they decide looks tasty.

As they say on the internet: Obvious troll is obvious.

This isn't even the stupid Tor argument from a few months ago where they tried to say that Orcs meant that Tolkien was "racist against humans" ... I wonder if these dumbasses realize that Tolkien was at the Somme. Where the people trying to kill him were German. And if Tolkien actually did hate anybody, it was probably going to be blond and blue eyed Kraut bastards. But I don't even think Tolkien was the type.

I was going to dedicate an entire blog to that. But no. Sorry. The stupid is just so obvious. We needed people to refute this?

The other thing that everyone reacted to last week?

That black and white morality is more interesting than shades of gray.

.... True. And?

Again, I was going to make a blog argument out of it, but ... no.

Now, obviously, this sounds strange coming from me, since I have characters who seem to dwell in shades of gray so dark, you'd think they were black. I have heroes who don't mind a bit of arm twisting, and the occasional outright torture, of people who have it coming... That's because they have it coming. Duh.

Hell, even Marco, from Love at First Bite, might be considered a sociopath, is certainly a little sadistic, and enjoys his job. But even he has hard limits, and constrains himself to inflicting his darkness on people who deserve it. Honestly, he's a few steps short of Dexter Morgan and he has definite lines he won't cross.

Frankly ... you can't have conflict if you dwell in endless shades of gray. It's why I wonder why anyone bothers with Game of Thrones, since, as Rawle points out in the above link, the readers spent endless amounts of time trying to see the good in a collection of incestuous, murderous psychopaths, and anyone with a moral code gets the shaft.

Again, I considered making a whole blog post about this.  But it just felt like such common sense, I felt stupid writing about it.

Then again, I suppose that if it were obvious, Watchmen and Game of Thrones wouldn't be that popular.

Oh well. I may be strange.

If you're interested in reading a book where the character believes in only black and white, with no shades of gray, then you're going to want to check out Hell Spawn. Because the great accomplishment here is that I've written a good man who stops short of being a Hallmark movie character.