Done With Dignity

So, here's one thing I never thought I'd put on my writing blog: WARNING: GLEE SPOILERS AHEAD! And Mistborn...

I'm a big Glee fan and have watched all of the episodes and the season finale related to something I was thinking about over the weekend. So if you haven't seen the season finale and it matters to you, don't read any further until you've seen it.

Don't...

Stop...

Believing...

Okay...

more...

spoiler...

space...

There, that should be enough, I think.

So, over the weekend, I was doing a beta job for someone's novel. It was the last 20 or so pages of their manuscript and in the middle of this segment, one sixteen-year-old character professed their love for another. I immediately wrote in my comments that while this was pretty much expected of the YA genre and high schoolers these days, it was not set up very well and was unnecessary in my opinion. One of the things I liked best about this section was that the other character did not reciprocate it.

Compare this to the season finale of Glee. All season long, they've been leading up to the Regional championships against their much-more-acrobatic-and-daring rivals, Vocal Adrenaline. Since "New Directions" creamed the competition in spite of cheating at Sectionals, we were all on tenterhooks to see if they'd go to Nationals. The last three episodes of the season established them as the moral victors and impossible to beat. And...they didn't win. They didn't even place. I admired the show for that. I cried unpredictably at the scene where they sing "To Sir With Love" after talking about what that experience has taught them this last year. It was great.

So, finally, look at Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. At the end of the first book, the classic hero dies, leaving the evil overlord still in power and his allies to eventually mop things up. Gutsy, Brandon. It was fantastic. So was the rest of the trilogy, but I remember rereading that just to make sure I didn't get that wrong.

I have to wonder how many people have thought of defying convention in such ways before. After all, George Lucas explained the stormtroopers' ineptness as "Only good guys shoot straight." Everyone knows that good wins out in the end. Everyone from Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, Achilles to Aragorn would agree. Aristotle would argue that the good guys are the ones who escape with their integrity intact and few heroes actually do fit that criteria, but no matter what, truth will out, love overcomes all, etc. etc. Even in Breaking Dawn, yes, there's a huge threat, but it all works out in the end. That kind of disappointed me, to be frank.

So, I have really no qualms about conventionality, but the thing is, it now requires a lot for me to think that it's being done with dignity and without the ever-present triteness.