Massive spoilers for multiple stories below!

While writing this past chapter of Consequences, I had a goal in mind, and judging from the feedback I’ve gotten so far, I seem to have achieved it.

One of the difficulties of life that stories often obfuscate is that there’s very rarely a clear-cut case of one person being right and another being wrong. Stories can nakedly display morality and messages, and weirdly, a lot of people in modern media literacy look for this “objective morality” in a story and see it as an author’s own declaration. I remember being particularly nervous writing And Ophelia Blinked because all three of the main characters in that story were complete jerks, to varying degrees. I was worried some people would see my views as flagrantly anti-woman, as if Randy’s eventual victory was inherently just or earned. Indeed, I did get a few responses about “Randy getting his, and the bitch getting what was coming to her,” and that made me more sad than anything.

Consequences Chapter 10 is not designed to have a clear-cut moral. Rather, chapter 10 was designed so that a reader would take someone’s side if they could empathize with their situation. I’m not even sure if my other stories often have explicit clear-cut morals; Adam certainly sometimes reflects that doing option A is good and B cowardly or bad, but that only makes it right to him, it doesn’t necessarily make it right, period. In this chapter, I kind of present a dichotomy; Team Adam or Team Nicole? Is Adam a jerk that thinks he’s the good guy that had it too good for too long, or is Nicole kind of controlling their relationship and always setting the stakes, whether she realizes it or not?

I mean, when I spell it out like that, it gets a little more obvious, right? It’s both. But people seldom care about that. Blame is a very powerful force. The people who commented on the story, and likely people in general, are obsessed with who is more wrong, as that’s who the reader feels they get to blame. I got a comment telling me, “I know you’re just trying to paint Adam as the bad guy, but he’s the real victim.” I got an email declaring, “You’re really trying to make me side with Adam, but Nicole is right for getting angry at him.” I can’t help but smile. Two people are so sure I’m intentionally trying to mislead them or something, when all the while, it’s them convincing themselves that the person they side against is “painted as the one in the right.”

You can learn a lot about your own morality by writing and reading stories. I know who I personally side with more in this story, but to be frank, I see the frustrations of all parties involved, even Athena. I don’t think I could write this story correctly if I only saw Adam as reasonable. If I only operated with one moral compass, the morals would be way more explicit and the story would be way more boring.

To that effect, one piece of advice for the 1% of my viewers keenly interested in gleaning my “intended” meaning from my works: I don’t think it’s worth it. I’m seldom that interested in weaving my own beliefs so explicitly into a character. I’d rather you read the story and make your own decisions about who’s in the right. I’m trying to write my stories to provide you that opportunity, and this obsession with “the way it’s meant to be interpreted” or “how Bashful is painting the characters” will just make the story a little worse. So go at it with your own perspective. I may be writing Consequences, but it’s your story. I’ll talk to you all next week.