![]() Life is rough. It’s tough. It’s full of pain and hurt; of people hurting each other and inflicting pain, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in ways unimaginable. But life is also beautiful. It’s full of wonder and moments of unimaginable love. Sometimes, when too much bad, too much pain, too much evil seeps into our lives or news or social media, it’s hard to see all that good. Moments like those are when we need catharsis. Something, some activity, some medium that allows us to process and dispel all that negativity so we can bring ourselves back to equilibrium. So, we can face the challenges of our day with resiliency, vigor, courage, and hope. Evil has been around for a longtime. If you hold any biblical faith, it’s been around since dang near the beginning, which was an awfully long time ago. Humans encountered evil first in the Garden of Eden and the fall of man; it then perpetuated itself through the murder of Abel by Cain, and things have pretty much been downhill since. As a species, we’ve been dealing with evil and the pain it causes for a long, long time. By necessity, we’ve developed various types of catharsis to keep ourselves stable, to vent off steam, to bring ourselves to equilibrium. Art, literature, comics, video games, throughout history we’ve developed a means by which to process out the bad and let the good in. It's hard![]() We do this because it’s hard to fix evil, especially when it disguises itself as something good or something in the “gray area”. It’s hard to see evil sometimes, or it’s there but we don’t want to acknowledge it. Then, even when we do see it, how do we fix things like human trafficking? Or drug addiction? Or abuse, or whatever evil thing it is that we know is there and we know exists everyday but feel powerless to eradicate. When we feel the pressures of evil overwhelm us, we kill orcs. Yes, kill orcs. We kill trolls and goblins and dragons before they all had thoughts, feelings, moral agency, and aspirations to open a bed and breakfast. The tropes of orcs, trolls, goblins, evil creatures who are simply and absolutely evil by their very nature didn’t exist so we could paint a race onto them. They existed to simply be evil. Simple, and pure in the darkest of senses. It's hard to destroy human trafficking. But it’s easy to kill that band of orcs who took an entire village captive. It’s hard to destroy abuse, but that witch in the woods who keeps luring children to a torturous death is flesh and blood and can be stopped. Moral Agency?![]() The new trope of traditionally evil creatures being given moral agency is fine and all. Sure, a goblin could run a charity for burn victims, I suppose. But sometimes, you just want to kill the guy who’s causing the burns to begin with. In a world where it’s hard to see evil, and harder still to fight it even if you can see it, the catharsis of tabletop roleplaying games should make things easier for us. It should be an easy release of the bad, instead of a facsimile of the same life we’re trying to escape from. Evil should be clear, easy to see, and uncomplicated. The WHY isn’t always necessary, certainly not from a storyline perspective. Sauron is evil. Pure and simple. He wants to destroy the good in the world; it’s that simple. Yet somehow, we still enjoy the Lord of the Rings trilogy and find it to be an engaging story, even when the evil is far off and evil simply for the sake of being evil. It's okay, nay, a good thing to have evil creatures who are evil simply because that is what they are meant to represent. It’s a good thing to have clearly defined, uncomplicated evil. So that we, the heroes, can destroy them in our minds and find a catharsis to our everyday lives. So the next time we encounter evil in the real world, we’re in a better state to face it.
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