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Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 11:32 pm (UTC)
Well, what do you mean by Good Magic? Helping people? If so, then those who help people with their magic (i. e. Healers) are of course going to be seen as performing Good Magic. By the same token, those destroying people with their magic are going to be seen as performing Evil Magic. Whether those perceptions are absolute truths in the abstract is another question, but not necessarily a useful one (at least not to the characters involved in the books).

Some interesting things have been done along the lines of, doing this bit of magic here helps out this person or group of people, but it depletes another person or group of people, or the planet, or the gods. Most books I've read, even the bad ones, seem to push the idea that magic itself is neither good nor bad, it's what you do with it (one reason I find Mad King George's stated views on the Force migraine-inducing). I do suspect the good vs. evil divide that arises in the use has a lot to do with how many philosophies, religions, and civilizations of this world are based on this idea of two opposites. Naturally, that carries over into our art, of which literature is a part.

Your last paragraph would seem to indicate you separate people's natures from their actions. To a degree, I share that approach, in that a person's motivations for doing something may not be pure (pure good or pure evil), but who is deciding this person is good and this person evil? Who is perceiving their natures? Most of us only have other people's actions and words by which to judge them, in the real world. In literature, we get people filtered through the viewpoint character(s), or the uninvolved narrator. Sometimes we're left to draw our own conclusions, other times we're given very clear indications of what conclusions we are expected to draw, usually the same ones the viewpoint character is drawing. This doesn't mean there's no room for the character to be wrong, or for us to be wrong, but it's something to be considered when looking at "good" and "evil" in fiction.

Another thing is complexity in characterization. This character saves kittens and gives to charity and loves his family and volunteers at a hospital and goes home, reads names from the phonebook, and uses his magic to kill the people with those names. Is he evil? What's his reason for killing? What's his reason for saving kittens and giving to charity? This guy kicks puppies and gets into drunken fights every night and shoplifts regularly and can't open his mouth without insulting someone, and when he goes home, he reads names from the phonebook and casts protective circles so the other guy can't kill those people. Is he good? What's his reason for protecting people? Why is he kicking puppies and getting drunk and fighting? I've actually read a number of specfic stories and novels along these lines. So yeah, there's a fair bit of simplistic good vs. evil work out there, but the questions you're asking have been addressed, often at length.

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