And I guess it's the simplicity thing. Inner purity is straightforward, easy to understand and nonthreatening (the recent spate of fluffified pagan-magic romance novels greatly amuse me with that). Doing it the way you suggest is all fraught with irony and complications and heaviness.
By the way, Ambrose Bierce wrote a couple of things that work along those lines, and I think Roald Dahl did, too (of all people! But he's got a slew of lesser-known ghost stories for adults that are awesome). Folklore and traditional ghost stories tend to work more like that, too. I'm thinking of the pan-culture subgenre where various tricksters cheat the Devil/Death not because they're pure, but because they're just so damn clever.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
And I guess it's the simplicity thing. Inner purity is straightforward, easy to understand and nonthreatening (the recent spate of fluffified pagan-magic romance novels greatly amuse me with that). Doing it the way you suggest is all fraught with irony and complications and heaviness.
By the way, Ambrose Bierce wrote a couple of things that work along those lines, and I think Roald Dahl did, too (of all people! But he's got a slew of lesser-known ghost stories for adults that are awesome). Folklore and traditional ghost stories tend to work more like that, too. I'm thinking of the pan-culture subgenre where various tricksters cheat the Devil/Death not because they're pure, but because they're just so damn clever.