Fiction Books Discussion

I had the thought that part of the way some stuff glorifies fighting is by making it way “cooler” than fighting typically is IRL. For TV/movies, they literally choreograph martial arts fights/sword fights/gun fights in order to make them elegant and cool. They sanitize the brutality and goriness of fighting a lot (not all movies do that - some show fighting more realistically, as being more brutal - but it’s very common to sanitize it).

The decision to do this - to show fighting as more like ballet than as something brutal and gory - implies a positive attitude towards physical violence, at least in some circumstances. It implies a positive attitude in the sense of not just thinking that physical violence is something that might be necessary and morally right in certain limited circumstances, but is something to actually be promoted/valued/celebrated.

I think there is some value to using fighting in stories. For one, it’s pretty simple to grasp and follow for lots of people (though maybe if we had a different culture, people would find the sight of people settling disputes with martial arts moves jarring/bizarre/disorienting). If you see Rocky getting knocked down and then forcing himself to get back up, that conveys endurance/resilience easily to lots of people. Or like if you see the Greeks at Thermopylae fighting to the end, that conveys a willingness to die for a cause/one’s country and so on. So I think there’s some value there. But OTOH, there’s also a lot worth criticizing, like implicit pro-fighting attitudes. And I think it’d be better if the culture wasn’t quite so inundated in fighting stuff.