Morals and messages

I've read lots of stories, watched lots of movies and tv shows, and played lots of video games which tried to teach a moral or spread a message, with varying degrees of success. Some of them make it a part of their story, while others seemingly arbitrarily shove them in under a pretense of character growth or actualization. And some of those messages are universally accepted, while others are a bit... less so. I have seen my fair share of love and friendship messages, as we all have, but I have also seen a number of stories about the environment, religion, and even some darker subjects like Stockholm syndrome and terrorism.

Now, to some extent, the author's opinions on a number of topics are inevitably going to bleed into their writing. After all, an author writes what they know, what they think, and what they believe, even if they don't mean to. Through the ideologies of their main characters, to the insanity of their villains, they're making some kind of statement about what is good and what is bad. You have to in order to give those characters and their actions any sort of credence. After all, there is no action without motive, even if that motive is not immediately obvious. And I am no exception to these things. I certainly have my beliefs on what is right and what is wrong, how to act in a number of situations, and what is better for people and for the world. And a great number of those beliefs translate into my writings.

But I think that there is a point where you go too far in it. A good example of that is a series which, for a time, I thoroughly enjoyed called Maximum Ride. It was a mixture of ideas from a number of the author's stories, which mixed together to create a very intriguing tale. The main character, Max, was just a girl who had had wings fused on to her back, and her story was about finding a place in the world, and trying to get back at those who had committed the experimentations upon her to make her into the half human, half creature that she was.

Unfortunately, I lost interest when Max learned about Global Warming, and began to speak directly to the reader about how they needed to go out immediately and do everything they could to stop it. Max literally lectures you about how terrible of a person you are if you are not fighting right now to be stopping it. Regardless of your stance on global warming, I think we can agree that we don't need a fictional bird woman going out of her way, disrupting her own story, to lecture us on it. It's not that she didn't acknowledge the fourth wall in the rest of the story, but this was blatantly breaking it.

I think, if you really want to tell a message, there are ways to do it. Subtle ways, even. Ways that make the reader think and acknowledge what you are trying to tell them. That's what the old folktales did. That's why they had morals, instead of messages. They made their moral be what resolves the story, rather than just a point along the way. I hope that's not a lost art.