I think stories can tell you a lot about the culture that produces them.

I am coming to appreciate the need for evil to reveal good. We live in a world of opposites. Indeed, opposites are what help us to understand the world around us. We know up because we can fall down. We appreciate sunlight because we have the night. Health matters immensely because you can get sick.

And 'right' or 'good' becomes very clear when you are confronted by the reality of evil.

I've been thinking about the stories my kids have been reading. They have been working their way through one of the many series that retell fairy tales. At least the different series our family have read use the same basic formula. You have siblings who live in this world but love fairy tales and know all about them. Somehow they end up whisked away to the land where fairy tales are real. As the kids actually meet the different characters and learn their stories, they realize the way we tell fairy tales is wrong. Details have been changed. 

The true story is always much more complicated, nuanced, and usually gray.

Even the characters are changed. Snow White may or may not be such a sweet princess. Cinderella may or may not be such a kind daughter. And as for the villains… They almost always all have backstories that give them ample reasons for their destructive ways.

All of a sudden, evil is not so easy to see. The bad guys may actually be good guys in disguise (think of the musical Wicked). 

On the one hand, it is good to recognize that the person who hurt you may not be evil. They have hurts and wounds of their own you don't see. We need to learn sympathy and compassion for others.

On the other hand, when evil becomes nuanced, so does being good. All of a sudden doing the right thing changes based on your perspective. Things aren't black and white anymore. Maybe doing the right thing means doing what looks wrong.

In these stories right and wrong look similar. It can actually be harder to tell the difference.

I think stories can tell you a lot about the culture that produces them.

Those are a few things I've noticed about the stories our culture is producing. What about you, Dear Reader, what do you see in our modern stories?