I got the idea for this post while reading John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, but knowledge thereof isn’t required, and I’ll try not to spoil it too badly. Suffice to say that I’ll mostly deal with that Japanese stuff I’m always on about, as it’s full of counterexamples to things Scalzi does that I don’t especially like.

People compare Scalzi to Heinlein, and for good reason. The basic gist of his SF universe is thus: the galaxy is full of habitable planets, but it’s also full of intelligent races, most of whom prefer mutilating one another over any sort of diplomacy (this includes our own humble race). In some cases, this is unavoidable; when two species simply cannot comprehend one another, and they’ve both decided they want a particular plot of land, what’s to be done? Even a fairly recognizable race of bipedal mammalians might prove culturally impenetrable. This lends Scalzi’s setting moral complexity, and that’s good; shades of gray are interesting.

For me, however, moral grayness becomes problematic when it’s little more than a lesson in moral grayness. Old Man’s War seems to suggest that anyone who starts wondering whether it might be a good idea to come up with a moral code that doesn’t involve razing all the diverse cultures of the universe is either suffering a temporary lapse, deluded, or an asshole. I can think of one exception, and it isn’t the protagonist.

Look: this isn’t the era of Milton. This isn’t Victorian England. This is postmodernism — and, in fact, it has been for quite some time. I really don’t need to be told outright that morality can’t be reduced to a binary, or that “killing is bad” is an oversimplification. You may as well write a novel about how people can’t escape their circumstances, or about how the American Dream is dead, or about one day in the life of an “ordinary” but remarkably self-aware protagonist.

It’s not that I actively disliked Old Man’s War, and I’ll grant that, in just over 300 pages, Scalzi didn’t have time to do much besides set up his universe. The included excerpt from the followup book suggests that we might get a broader overview of subjective morality if we continue on. I’m just a little dissatisfied that Old Man’s War dwelt for so long upon the notion that we may want to stop and think before we hold soldiers responsible for returning fire when fired upon.

My point here is that moral complexity has been done to death, and while I’m highly skeptical of the notion that originality is automatically good, I do think that stories benefit from not repeating the same old lessons to the point of banality.

My preferred solutions to the “stark gray” morality problem are just that — my preferred solutions. But, with that glaringly obvious disclaimer out of the way, my position is thus: while the character who simply becomes accustomed to a morally gray universe feels like old hat, the character who rejects the notion of moral grayness through force of will or personal failure, who operates beyond morality, or who undertakes a nuanced journey through an established moral system has the potential to fascinate me endlessly.

I’ve only just begun Otsuichi’s Zoo, but the protagonist of the first and eponymous story in the collection is something like a moral adventurer — or, if he isn’t quite lucid enough to explore morality himself, he serves as a vehicle for our own moral self-exploration. He’s like a good Poe protagonist in that regard; crazy as he seems, we have to wonder whether we can really hold his objectionable actions against him, and, if so, to what degree. For much of the story he engages in a kind of act, filling a social role that allows him to maintain a certain degree of self-righteousness while avoiding whatever moral judgments he has made about himself, and this bizarre interplay puts the reader in a strange position. But I won’t go on for fear of revealing too much, as the story is well worth reading.

What I will do is talk a little about an especially fabulous Gundam villain who has recently earned a place in my heart: Paptimus Scirocco.

I wonder what it is about these complete bastards that so appeals to me. You may have noticed that I’m not one of those people who takes pride in being a dick. I usually try to avoid conflict altogether; when I take a stand on an issue, I often attempt to do so in a way that appeases all involved. Hell, I don’t even like to see conflict. Being so peaceable (yeah, let’s go with that), I shouldn’t be predisposed to enjoy characters of Scirocco’s ilk, but I am. With a vengeance.

Now, Scirocco isn’t quite the sort of villain I lovingly deem a “real fucker.” But he isn’t exactly an upstanding dude, either. Most notably, he has a talent for seducing every woman in a ten-mile radius, and he abuses this superpower to build himself a loyal harem of skilled mobile suit pilots. And he isn’t much concerned about who he has to kill to accomplish his goals — goals which, in the end, make him an interesting character, as he seems to want the same thing everyone else in Zeta Gundam wants, namely a more peaceful and generally better universe. Granted, his approach to the problem renders him almost Nazi-esque, but it goes to show that Scirocco isn’t operating in spite of a moral code; he’s doing things in accordance with a moral code of his own.

We don’t have to agree with Scirocco, to be sure, but it’s easy to see that, from one standpoint, he’s one of the good guys. The same could be said of everyone in Zeta Gundam, really. It’s not as if any of them simply wants to go around in an ugly transforming robot and cause some shit (well, maybe Yazan, but…). Morality only becomes “gray” when we let numerous individual moral judgments blur into an abstract bigger picture, and while a bigger picture is fine, I guess, I really prefer a more nuanced treatment of morality, one where each “pixel” in the gray slate is enlarged to allow for scrutiny. Someone like Scirocco — a character whose moral code differs vastly from that of the protagonists, but who is allowed to live for more than five minutes anyway — aids in the zooming process, demonstrating that the personal moral frameworks that contribute to the gray mass are not simply and uniformly gray.

To put it in D&D terms (because, you know, I do that), maybe I’m saying that I don’t really believe much in “true” neutrality, and that everyone probably acts according to whatever they consider “good,” whether that be societal improvement, personal gain, or something else entirely. Old Man’s War’s doing-what-needs-to-be-done justifications make sense, I guess; I just wasn’t satisfied that the novel didn’t give much of a voice to those characters who didn’t quite agree on what needed to be done. Only now do I realize that I may be complaining about the novel’s kind-of-anthropocentrism and resultant lack of moral complexity; a single shade of gray can only be so interesting by itself.