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Where do you see the values conflict in "The Mahabharata?" Not necessarily disagreeing, but the values difference doesn't seem clear to me.

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The Mahabharata (at least) has values conflict.

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I have been teaching acting (and directing and writing) in Los Angles for over 30 years and now it appears cutting edge sociology (Robin Hanson and others) has come to overlap with my work, even to the extent its referring to “dramaturgy.” These particular theories on storytelling dovetail with a theory I arrived upon concerning charisma (briefly detail in my third book “You Can Act: On Camera”). The gist of my hypothesis is this: just as humans have an evolutionary predisposition to be attracted to average faces (koinophiia), what we call charisma is a response to someone we identify as having the ideal average for the values of our culture. We even refer to certain charismatic actors (Jack Lemon, Tom Hanks) as “an everyman.” I’ve articulated these values to include our ethics (Haidt’s five): fairness, loyalty, purity, authority and safety; as well as 7 character qualities: Consistency, Humor, Frugality, Adventurousness, Scope, Tempo, Vulnerability. In this way, the charismatic person demonstrates a close to perfect average for Humor between the poles of stuffiness and silliness, for Adventurousness between cowardice and recklessness, Purity, slobbiness and prissiness... you get the idea.

The charismatic psychopath is no exception. First of all, psychopaths are rendered in fiction in a way rarely seen in nature, but, even so, these people, with their clean conscious, can fully mimic adjusted values for an in group of which you are then made to feel happily part of.

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At one point they pretend to be orcs, and are swept up into a marching column.

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Per the description of that series "the novels focus on the adventures of a teenage boy named Eragon and his dragon, Saphira, as they struggle to overthrow the evil king Galbatorix", which fits in with the rebels-against-dystopia trend discussed above.

Your comment reminded me that if we use the age of writing rather than publication, Eric Rücker Eddison conceived of much of "The Worm Ouroboros" in 1892 when he was ten, but didn't publish until 1922. In keeping with the trend Hanson discussed, it focused more on overt war, and was regarded as too amoral by Tolkien.

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"Eragon is the first novel in the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini, and illustrator John Jude Palencar. Paolini, born in 1983, wrote the novel while still in his teens."

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Western fanfiction (and my guess mostly girl fanfiction) Chinese fanfiction in Qidian often have very different morality or Japanese fanfiction in syosetsu

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Excellent article. We can seldom discern what is a real trend and what is a temporary diversion while we are in the midst of it, but this seems plausible and has some support. Covert war is more individual, which may be preferred in our era. Overt war is about leaders as heroes. The covert gives a place and opportunity to the less-powerful to be heroes.

I have read speculation, and have offered the theory myself, that today's internal and social justice warriors are resentful that they don't have the actual danger of 60's civil rights protest, and so demonise their opponents so as to feel larger themselves. Yet your guess may be closer, that they are signalling that they _would_ be that courageous if they had to.

As for Maria's comments, yes, women's fiction is different, as has been true since Austen, Bronte, and Alcott, if not earlier. Some people like that, and one would think that would move us in their direction. Yet the extreme cultural conflicts and demonising of opponents occurs among women as well today, perhaps in equal measure. Ironically, one of the battling sides claims to be against battle, and in favor of the "personal relationships, cultural exploration, and problem-solving" school instead.

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I know, I've written a few myself, but I was trying to think of popular examples of stories like the ones Robin listed so we can discuss specifics rather than make hazy generalizations.

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Young people share massive amounts of stories in online communities.

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S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders is the only example of a popular YA fiction work written by a teen that I can think of, but that's from the 60s rather than "our days" in some present-sense. I've neither read it nor seen the film adaptation, so I can't compare its themes to those written by adults (or at different time periods). I know Jane Austen wrote "Love and Freindship" when she was young, but that's mostly been dismissed as juvenilia.

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What is the exception?

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As I recall, Frodo is, with one exception, engaged in covert warfare only in the sense that submariners are.

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Interesting points about YA literature. Do you know how YA themes have been changing, from Harry Potter to our days? I should have specified that by "young people's fiction" I mean fiction written BY young people (tweens and teens to twenty-something), not FOR young people.

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My experience with young people's fiction is rather different. What they seem to love more than anything is to set their stories in a nasty dystopia. Libraries now have dystopia aisles. Their dystopias don't even have to make sense. They just need to be clearly bad and really entrenched, so that when the heroes fight the power and make any gains, teens cheer them on.

My non-expert diagnosis is that young people don't know how to picture a meaningful life without some actual villain that needs defeating. If all their homework would add up to a blow against villainy, it would all seem worth it. When you ask them if they think the actual world has villains, they say nebulous things like "the corporations" or "the polluters" or "sexism" or "the one percent," but it's never "my parents" or "the principal of my school." They want to join a movement - and some do - but the smarter ones realize that there isn't one that they can believe in. So they get their fix in fiction, where they vicariously join the fight to take down the dystopia. They want a reason to abandon all their comforts and routines and "do something that matters," and sometimes they will even admit that they fantasize about everything turning awful, so they could finally have the chance to unveil the hero inside them. (And of course fantasize this. That's why there's a dystopia aisle.) But for now they grudgingly accept rides to lacrosse practice from their helicopter parents.

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