Anti-Heroes

The term “anti-hero” can be used to mean at least two things. One is as a simple synonym for a phrase like “central character of a story who is evil”, such as Tony Montana from Scarface. The meaning unique to the term, however, is something like “a central character with a worthy goal who does wrong to attempt to achieve it”.

He's unstable, miserable, and highly dangerous to those around him.
But he gets 'er done.

Dualism: The Sequel

Last week we talked about the tendency of popular story-telling to engender dualistic thinking either directly, within the story, or indirectly, by making it look like nothing cool happens without evil people around mixing it up.

But, dualism isn't true, and its effect (whether it’s in a story, or in the mind of the reader) is to make stories about good and evil much less awesome. To illustrate this, let’s talk about Darth Vader.

Shooting lightning and getting pissed-off are strictly forbidden by The Force...
or, half of it anyway. 

We have a perfect example of dualism in The Force. A long time ago, a galaxy far, far away was held together by an invisible,

Magic... is Unnatural

One of the predicates of the arguments made in the other articles on magic is that, in the world of the story in which magic appears, the “magic” is a more or less natural phenomenon. While the “…means apparently unrelated to [the] ends…” which constitute the magic are apparently unrelated from our point view, they are, in fictional fact, related. Even a freshman student just on their way to Hogwarts can learn that saying “oculus reparo” and waving a particular stick will repair glasses. Harry is surprised because he’s lived with muggles his whole life. But it doesn’t surprise Hermione or anyone else in the “wizarding world”. It is the common way of fixing glasses it would seem, and simply “the way things are”; just like heating up bread in the real world makes it into toast.