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.
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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.