He turned it around so that the story actually criticized Scrooge’s actions as some power-mad imperial dipshit, and showed how that attitude basically made everyone turn away from him and transformed him into a lonely, bitter old man. Which… is something, and it certainly works in terms of his story, but. Again, this business becomes a plot point for the character development of the imperialist. The concern doesn’t really lie in his actions upon others; it lies in his own suffering.
I mean. Every decision we make is in some way an ethical statement. The system that we operate in, and the actions that it encourages, shape the actions that we take and the way we think about those decisions. Every game system is an experimental proposal of a worldview, to which the player subscribes through participation. So, it seems reasonable to question the ethical proposal put forth by a game’s effect on the player’s reasoning.
I disagree heavily, or at least, if true, you reduce the word “ethical” to meaninglessness. Whether I pick the purple shirt or the white shirt to wear in the morning is not an ethical statement, neither is whether to eat pizza or Chinese for dinner - this is despite whatever externalities the capitalistic processes it took to deliver these things to me caused, as long as you maintain that ethics ought to be qualified by intent.
I understand that in a rough way you may mean that overexposure to Minecraft might cause some kind of ethical bleed to the player, such that they begin to see the real world as exploitable like the Minecraft world. That’s not impossible, I just think it’s unlikely given how explicitly it presents itself as different from the real world. There’s no ecosystem, none of its elements are codependent, and there are an infinite amount of them to satisfy the player’s needs (just keep walking).
Carl Barks/Don Rosa produced some of the best comics when they weren’t doing stuff like this. I don’t want their work to be remembered for this and would love for this sort of stuff to be buried forever.
I don’t know, maybe I’m exasperated by the short-sightedness of ‘everyone in the past was shitty in many ways through our modern moral lens, they must all be remembered only for the things they did terribly’
This sort of shit was passively overlooked and/or given the “it was a product of its times” excuse for years, though. The recent-ish trend of being more willing to excoriate casually bigoted attitudes in spite of good artistry, as opposed to the other way around, is a great & healthy thing even if it it swings “too” hard the other way at times. Better than the alternative.
Every example of a good Carl Barks comic doesn’t need a racist Carl Barks comic as a counterexample. Nor does every example of a racist comic need “but he made good not-racist stuff too!” appended to it as a disclaimer.
I think utilitarianism is a good way to go for this particular question. Whether a work, or an artist’s body of work, ought to be studied or discarded by a modern audience can be determined by weighing the bad shit against the good shit, with “good shit” weighted by the particular audience’s interest in full-spectrum knowledge of the artist or medium in question and “bad shit” weighted by the particular audience’s sensitivity to potential triggers.
I think it’s because: re: looking at guys like Harry Potter Lovecraft is that they helped conceptualize and lay the groundwork for an entire kind of fiction - but were never really taken to task for their beliefs at the time because of the time period. to me it reads more like people looking at a historical figure for are they all and really thinking hard about how seriously we weigh what they contributed, and how it might have been shaped by their awful beliefs.
I agree that it does (and probably should) differ on a person to person basis. I feel like a terrible person’s works being celebrated by the people he hated benefits him more than it hurts him, particularly while he’s alive. Because late capitalism and royalties and all that (if that really applies to the time period Wagner lived in). Worse than dying is being forgotten, and (imo) that’s the biggest fuck you.
But yeah, separation of an artist from their art is a nuanced discussion that doesn’t have one correct answer.
