03-28-2019, 10:58 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-28-2019, 11:04 AM by Hexenadler.)
(03-25-2019, 05:36 PM)FaceInTheCrowd Wrote: Not so much shackles as blinders.
In my childhood, television presented a fantasy world in which police never used excessive force or shot unarmed black children, prosecutors immediately moved to dismiss charges when they found exonerating evidence in the middle of a trial and lawyers never encouraged their clients to lie on the stand. Depending on who you are and where you grew up, it was either an obvious lie that insulted you with its denial of the reality you saw every day or set you up for a crushing disillusionment when you grew up and saw the world as it really is.
Better to show people as they are (or can be), warts and all, and let viewers decide for themselves what they think of them. We're going to anyway.
Yeah, uh...no, FITC. The worlds presented by television in our childhoods (I'm assuming you and I are of the same generation) were fictional, but dismissing a reality where the good guys actually came out on top once in a while as "fantasy" is just as ridiculous in its own way. Most of the shows you're criticizing didn't avoid the presence of evil, in their own realities as much as our own. But instead of imbuing that evil with a kind of invincibility, the writers demonstrated how the protagonists should respond under such circumstances, regardless whether or not their good deeds went unpunished. That's what role models are supposed to BE. Who can we look up to these days? Walter White? No wonder the planet is on the brink of total destruction.
Extreme cynicism (at least the type that you're displaying ATM) can be its own variation of naivete. I think Rowan Light put it quite succinctly in this article:
"Martin is a materialist, whose closest acquaintance with war and human depravity is computer games and graphic novels. His plot and characters are complex and full of bloody and sexual twists, but they plod on like a dark and desperate soap opera. But without goodness and beauty, is his world realistic?
All enduring literature is realistic, because it reflects the truth of the human condition for generation after generation. My hunch is that Tolkien, whatever the critics say, will still be sitting on the throne of fantasy in a hundred years’ time while George Martin will be dismissed as the practitioner of an early 21st Century fad for grimy pessimism."
https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/vie..._the_rings
If you drop phrases like "obvious lie" and "crushing disillusionment" in relation to morality, it raises some troubling questions about your own personal perception of reality, as opposed to what reality actually is.
However, this is meandering a bit from the original topic. You're ultimately giving the writers of GRIMM too much credit, like irukandji. There wasn't any intentional plan to turn GRIMM into a morally murky show when it first started out. G&K simply didn't care about the larger ramifications of the actions of their characters, so long as they moved in the direction they wanted them to go in the story.