Suck it up, snowflake! And Alexandra Quick is too heroic

[inverarity]

So, is it the people who say I suck or the people who say I'm awesome who don't know what they're talking about?

I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to read this manuscript. It's been a long time since I was drawn into fiction the way I was with this chapter.

This is one of the most professional stories I’ve read on ________.

This is top notch stuff. I really had nothing to pick at. I can't tell for sure how the novel is going to work from just the opening chapter (plot-arc and such) but so far this looks like it's ready to go. You ought to be working on your query.

I'm so confuuuuuuuuuused!

Okay, indigo_mouse says I should stop obsessing. And half of you said I should finish the SF novel and half said I should start on AQ5. Only one dirty rotten bastard said I suck. Oh wait, that was me.

Well, for the record, I am working on the SF novel. And I'm not really obsessing over the bad critiques. Okay, maybe a little tiny bit. Just a bit. But I've found a few good critiquers, so onward!

Let's leave aside the SF novel for now, and get back to Alexandra Quick. I just got a long, long review from MadYak on fanfiction.net. The kind of long, long review I love that are full of praise and criticism. The last couple of people to go on at length about how much they enjoy the AQ series and all the things I am doing wrong were Miles2Go and tealterror0, and they both wound up as betas. So be careful when eviscerating my writing, I might ask you to read more of it!

Anyway, MadYak's comments went over ff.net's character limits, so he PMed me the rest. I'm going to reproduce some of it here. These are mostly the criticisms, so bear in mind he had a lot of positive things to say beforehand. But there were some specific points I wanted to discuss.

Perhaps more importantly, it's incredibly annoying that she continues to be just as reckless, all the way up and through the fourth book, despite the sometimes brutal consequences that should have taught her caution by now, in spades. You've rehashed enough how she thinks she's in control when she has the slightest grip on a situation and doesn't intend for things to happen differently, but it's starting to get old. Note that she, yet again, somehow comes out alive from two different encounters with John, despite him being a capable and amoral killer.

I have been hearing this a lot, often enough that I'd be taking it seriously even if I hadn't already been moving in that direction. Yes, recklessness is part of Alexandra's nature. ("Troublesome's reckless, ruthless and bold....") But there's a fine line between recklessness and stupidity. Alex will be smarter in book five. Which is not to say she'll stop being reckless. But she's starting to become aware of her limitations. She's had enough painful lessons that she knows being reckless can get people hurt. If not herself, then someone else.

This, however, brings up something of a contradiction. For every reader who grits her teeth when Alex once again pulls some dumb stunt and gets away with it, there's someone who wants to see her continue being indomitable and irrepressible and a little bit dangerous. If Alexandra became really smart and sensible and thought things through before doing them, she'd certainly get in less trouble and danger and she'd probably get more done. But she wouldn't be Alexandra. Also, she wouldn't have succeeded at so many of the things she has accomplished if she'd taken the time to think them through before doing them.

Now, part of MadYak's objection is not just that Alex is reckless, but that she's reckless and then gets away with it, seemingly with the benefit of too much luck. Well, if Alexandra seems to get away with being stupid by virtue of being lucky, that's definitely a failure on my part; writing your heroine out of a corner by fiat is bad writing. I'm not sure I really agree, though. After all, one of the things other readers have pointed out (a common element they like in my AQ stories) is the fact that Alex doesn't get away with everything, and in fact, fails quite often and is severely punished for it. AQATTC is really the last book where she didn't get a hammer dropped on her in the end. At the end of AQATLB, she loses Max. At the end of AQATDR, she sees another girl, a "friend," die, and her own life is forfeit in seven years. And at the end of AQATSA, she was expelled from Charmbridge — which some people said was unfair, but most said was inevitable if not long overdue. So she doesn't exactly get away cleanly.

But, let's talk about heroism.

Also on the menu concerning Alex is her moral attitude. One of the things that I admired most about her in the beginning was that she was surprisingly willing to bulldoze over others objections when she needed to accomplish something. However, it seems more and more that she's destined to become the classic self-sacrificing hero who will commit no moral wrong and find a clever solution where no one but herself is harmed, which I absolutely loathe. I'd absolute prefer a determined protagonist who's willing to make some hard moral choices for something she believes in. I actually wanted to hit my screen in disgust in book 3 when Alex chose to sacrifice herself instead of happily chucking Darla's guilty ass to the Generous Ones. From an adult perspective, Darla is a little girl who makes bad choices in a bad situation while trying to save her sister, and her youth makes us want to spare her. From Alex's perspective though, this is a *peer* who has repeatedly attempted to kill Alex or someone Alex cares about for Darla's own gains. Just because it was all to save Mary does not excuse that. But instead of showing the slightest bit of self-preservation, she decides to be a moral paragon (at 14) because the girl who was trying to kill Alex and her friend doesn't deserve to die. The squeaky clean goodness continues in the fourth book when she steps outside the wards to save Larry Albo, of all people, endangering her own life due to his stupidity and desire to poke his nose where it didn't belong to harass Alex. On the other hand, I thought Alex was right to stand up to Mary and give Mary the chance to curse her, because Alex's reasoning was pretty sound. I don't really mind Alex having some morals - just please give her back some fangs and stop having her be the hero and sacrificial goat for others' problems.

The morality vs practicality issue is probably my biggest problem with the series so far. Abraham and Diana are both good examples of the practical side, both of whom I respect (although I do wonder at the justification behind Abraham's methods, but I'm betting that'll pop up in the future). Alex and her friends are understandably hesitant about causing anyone serious pain due to them being children, but they're leaving the age (mentally) where it fits, in my opinion, since Alex and her friends have been exposed to more than the other students. Alexandra especially has seen the darker side of life and should be realizing that she's not going to accomplish anything big without stepping on some people on the way, sooner or later. Thankfully, you're having her become more capable magically, but she needs some ruthlessness to back that up. To be fair, I'm pretty certain you'll have a lot more reviewers that want to see Alex be that perfect hero than what I'm proposing, but I really just can't stand archtypal hero protagonists.

Okay, so this is probably going to boil down entirely to a matter of taste. While I disagree with you that Alex is a "moral paragon" or "squeaky clean," you are right that she has a heroic nature, with a strong element of self-sacrifice. Underneath the self-centeredness and the recklessness and the arrogance and the occasional fantasies about "Dark Queen Alexandra" in book one, Alex is (right now) basically a good person who loves her friends fiercely, even if she doesn't always treat them well.

This kind of ties back to my SF novel because there are people who will tell you things that are exactly the opposite of each other — and neither of them are necessarily wrong! I gather that MadYak would like to see Alex be more of an anti-hero, or a dark heroine.

I promise, at a later time you will get a hint of what Alex is really capable of if she takes off the gloves and says "The hell with having morals." I definitely would like to show her having fangs. But I won't tell you that you have seen the last of the self-sacrificing hero, because she is self-sacrificing and heroic, as much as she is reckless, ruthless, and bold.

So, about Darla. It certainly would have been ruthless of Alexandra if she had just thrown Darla to the Generous Ones and said, "Take the bitch." And you're right, from a fourteen-year-old's perspective, that might have seemed entirely justifiable. But — while that might have pleased the readers who want to see more of a grimdark heroine, I don't think most people would have liked Alex if she'd done that. I wouldn't have liked her.

I place a heavy weight on moral choices and consequences. I got some flack from rheymus for saying that killing is serious business and that most people balk at it — even killing someone who deserves to die. This is, it seems, a philosophical difference of opinion. If Alex kills, it will be a big deal. If she becomes someone who can just (lethally) drop bad guys without hesitation, she will be an entirely different person.

I think Alexandra is a long way from doing no moral wrong, but the big wrongs, like murdering people, or letting them die because she doesn't like them? If you loathe heroes who consistently look for clever solutions when presented with a choice of evils, you probably aren't going to find Alexandra's future development any more satisfying.

Like I said, though, different people ding me for different things. MadYak admires Abraham Thorn for his practicality; rheymus is always on me about how he's a terrorist more evil than the Confederation, no matter what the Confederation is up to.

I like the debate, and the different viewpoints, and of course I wish everyone liked Alexandra just the way I write her, but evidently different readers want different things and I'm not going to satisfy all of them.

(Which is why I am obsessingpreoccupied with critiques of my SF novel...)

Also, I believe you have a problem with word bloat/filler. While your stories flow very well from scene to scene, it only flows that well because you almost never jump from important scene to important scene, and you tend to add in a lot of extraenous information that isn't always needed, like mentioning a few classes Alex is taking between scenes or something similar. I've already started skimming these bits as a result. I'll admit that it does do a good job of making for a casual pace of school life and it does disguise the important bits and pieces when its something minor that becomes important later. However, it also is sometimes a chore to read. Not sure if you should change it or not, but that's my thoughts on it.

Yeah, guilty as charged. And flow and pacing is a lot more critical when I'm writing something that isn't fan fiction.

Thanks for your comments, MadYak!

[Poll #1864938]


(I assume it goes without saying that poll results will in no way affect what I'm actually going to write...)

Comments

Empathy and selfishness

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

So, I pretty much lean more towards tealterror0's way of thinking than yours.

It seems to me that you basically accept human nature as some sort of utilitarian evolutionary greater good, therefore justifying selfishness as more "human" than selflessness. I strongly disagree, and by disagreeing, I do not mean that I am selfless or that selfish people are automatically wrong and bad or that I have any reasonable expectation that any significant portion of the population ever will give up all of their luxuries in order to alleviate the misery of the less fortunate. Or that if given a choice between saving my spouse or a random stranger, I would make a careful logical decision based on whether my spouse or the random stranger was more likely to provide a greater net good to humanity.

But. I think it would more moral for me to do all those things. Maybe not realistic. But we should try to do what is moral, even if we know we will fall short. Utilitarian arguments fail for me because they can always be reduced to might makes right: "I have the power to make this decision, therefore I must be inherently more entitled to make it for my own benefit."

You seem to be saying that anyone who even tries to elevate empathy above self-interest is basically weak and probably self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool. I really, really don't agree.

So in that sense, to say that Darla's decision was admirable because it's "wrong" to value someone else's life above your own or to choose a stranger over a loved one (or rather, to decide that sacrificing a stranger to save a loved one is not a morally respectable choice) just doesn't resonate with me. I understand what you're saying, I just disagree with it.

Alexandra really, really wanted to give Darla the obol. She couldn't do it because she knew she'd be committing murder, and that would have been wrong even if she could have come up with a hundred reasons why Max deserved to live more than Darla. I like to think, if I had a choice of saving a loved one if I were willing to kill some person I don't know, or even someone I don't like, that I would not do that because it would be wrong. (Obviously, I am not talking about self-defense situations, like where I have to kill someone who is threatening a loved one in order to save them.)

On a broader, evolutionary level, taking your argument to an extreme, empathy is a negative survival characteristic and therefore it should eventually be bred out of the human race. Besides how much that makes me shudder on a visceral level, I think it's scientifically wrong. There are a lot of benefits to empathy, not just in terms of personal enjoyment, but in terms of improved cooperation, ability to interact positively with other members of your species, etc. Yes, in specific situations empathy might not be an asset in improving your personal survival odds, but I think there's a strong argument that a more empathetic person has a greater chance of living longer and spreading his/her genes than a sociopath (which is what you wind up with when empathy is completely taken out of the equation).

Re: Empathy and selfishness

[madyak2.livejournal.com]

It would be more moral to do as you said at the end of the first paragraph, yes. The crux of this issue is that you try to force yourself to conform to a higher standard than you really live by because you believe it is right. And you just admitted yourself that it's not realistic.

And it's not so much that empathy cannot override your self-interest, just that it should only override it to a certain point. Last night at work (temp job as a motel desk clerk), I had to serve an angry, aggressive man who was rude from the moment I laid eyes on him and looked about 10 seconds away from getting into a fight with me. While filling out his paperwork, I overheard him threaten to 'slap the shit' out of the woman he was with, who returned quickly to their vehicle. Right afterwards, a younger, attractive young girl (compared to myself and Angry Man) came in, and Angry Man was suddenly sweet and charming, both to her and myself. Once Angry Man left, I made a point of warning Sweet Young Girl that she should probably keep her distance, explained why, and she thanked me and left.

While I thought about warning her, it occurred to me that I had no reason to do so for myself. In fact, it could backfire quite badly if Angry Man finds out, as it could endanger my job or cause Angry Man to pick a fight with me as revenge. But I realistically weighed the likelihood of that happening (pretty unlikely) vs. the odds of this girl ending up raped or something similar (not unlikely, given Angry Man and the fact that its happened before at that workplace). My empathic reaction against that girl possibly getting raped was much greater than the small risk to myself, so I tried to help her. But if I had walked by an alley later and saw her getting raped by that man, I wouldn't have charged in to save her. He outweighed me by a good 40 pounds and had at least 4 inches in height advantage. He also had that wiry, mean look to him that told me I really didn't want to get into a fight with him. I was unarmed, and he looked the type to possibly be carrying a gun or a knife, while I am out of shape. If he did have a gun or knife, I'd likely be dead very quickly. So I would not charge down that hypothetical alley to save her. I do not consider that cowardice, just healthy self-preservation. And I would not consider anyone who did in the same circumstances brave, I would consider them stupid. I would, however, call the cops. I'd also shout and at least pretend to head towards him, just to try to scare him off. But that's it.

This is what I'm talking about when I'm emphasizing the importance of selfishness. Pretty much all of your characters except Alex fall into the acceptable range of selfishness/empathy for me. Only Alex falls into that extreme empathic range which makes her a moral paragon (imo), because you set the bar for her into something you think she *should* strive to be due to her being the hero, unrealistic by your own admission. I find that just as abhorrent as the sociopath, who has a complete lack of empathy.

That said, by this point I feel we've all probably said all there is to say on the topic, so this'll be my last mini-blog about it that doesn't address anything specific. But cheers for a interesting, civil debate everyone.

Re: Empathy and selfishness

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Without going down the rabbit-hole of arguing about specific hypothetical situations ("What if the woman in the dark alley was your daughter? What if the guy was smaller than you and you think you could take him, but you don't know if he's armed? Isn't calling the police a degree of selflessness too, since the guy might get out on bail and then come after you?") I'll point out that there is a difference between saying "This is moral and therefore you should do it all the time" (which is unrealistic) and "This is moral and therefore it should be your goal" (which is not). So if I value selflessness over selfishness, that doesn't mean I think it's reasonable or realistic for anyone to be selfless all the time. Just like most of us value honesty over dishonesty, but hardly anyone expects everyone (or even themselves) to always be completely and utterly honest.

You admit yourself it's a matter of degree, but seem to think I am taking a binary approach.

Also, selflessness and empathy aren't just Judeo-Christian values. Pretty much every society has encouraged them, regardless of religion or lack thereof. Even Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Mongols and other notoriously warlike cultures espoused them, just carving out exceptions and rationalizations for why it didn't apply to "enemies" (and in practice creating societies where actually conforming to any kind of humane standard of behavior was a negative survival trait).

Re: Empathy and selfishness

[madyak2.livejournal.com]

If it had been my daughter, I would have gotten involved. Risk vs reward to me, basically. There are things worse than death, and knowing that I stood aside while my hypothetical daughter was raped is one of them. Standing aside while its a hypothetical stranger? Not so much. By the way, I tend to find specific hypothetical situations very useful in a discussion like this, simply because it cuts out most of the ambiguity present in any discussion due to word perception when you're discussing complex, general concepts like this. See our my response about what is a sociopath as an example of my point.

I wasn't saying that selflessness and empathy are only Judeo-Christian values, only that they are heavily emphasized in Judeo-Christian cultures, which are pretty much all English-speaking countries. Thus, it applies to pretty much everyone in this thread and yourself, which influences the writing of the story.

I disagree that "every society encourages them." While technically true, it's the degree a society promotes them that matters. In Judeo-Christian cultures, selflessness and empathy are pretty exclusively seen as a positive and there's really no trait that's emphasized as much, except perhaps faith. In other cultures, things like bravery, viciousness, rigid politeness, etc. are prized more.

I don't think you wrote Alex to be perfectly moral, it's just that I think she is moving more and more towards the extremely selfless end of the scale. As I said before, I find extreme selflessness as repulsive as extreme selfishness. That said, I'm well aware that this is your story and that our views on this differ. I just had to attempt to sway you to my views since I want my enjoyment of the rest of the series to continue.