I like moral dichotomies and moral conflicts in settings. I even, on occasion, enjoy the epic struggle between Good and Neutral, or Candy and Chocolate. But when you have a conflict between the forces of Light and Darkness and they represent Good and Evil every time, well, I get a little exhausted by it. The next go-to option is little better. Order and Chaos? Nowadays that seems to be just as overplayed as Good and Evil. Sometimes even more— or worse, it’s supposedly about Order vs Chaos but these are just synonyms for Good and Evil. (more…)

This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on May 22, 2014.

“Companions, the creator seeks- not corpses, not herds of believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks, those who inscribe new values on new tablets. Fellow creators, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.” Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Blue and orange morality, says TV Tropes, is what you have when “characters have a moral framework that is so utterly alien and foreign to human experience that we can’t peg them as good or evil… There might be a logic behind their actions, it’s just that they operate with entirely different sets of values and premises with which to draw their conclusions.”  (more…)