M Fnord Wrote:That said, the Genre Directive is not and shouldn't be a shield against conflict. We're not building a dystopia, but at the same time we're not building a utopia either. Fenspace as a world was intended to be space opera and adventure fantasy. Think of it like Star Trek, the original unreconstructed stuff: for every episode where the crew solved things nonviolently, there was an episode where the solution required Kirk to punch a dude. Conflict is part of the genre, we can't just toss it aside."Conflict" doesn't need to mean "violent conflict," though. Consider Gargoyles - there's a vast difference between how often Goliath and Xanatos were in conflict with each other, and how often they came to blows.
And I didn't say we should get rid of the violence altogether. I said the current stories were "too heavy on the violence" - there's a whole spectrum of ways to show conflict, and we're focusing on a narrow subset of that spectrum.
Anyway.
I'm going to try this "reduced violence" idea out in my stories, see how well it works, maybe keep it going if it works well. I'm not going to force anyone else to write the way I want to write.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012