On Killing

[Guy]

There are also cultural factors to take into account. Maybe warrior cultures like the Vikings, Mongols, or Maasai didn't view killing with the same uneasiness modern Western society does? One can only project so much of our modern sensibilities into people from the past.

This is a good point. Historians call it presentism - grafting the values and beliefs onto cultures where those values and beliefs didn't exist. For many of those cultures - and for some still existing - might makes right and to the victor go the spoils. Simple as that. I know a guy who was in the airborne. He was stationed somewhere in North Africa and could clearly watch the goings-on in a village adjacent to him. He was under very strict orders not to interfere with anything that happened in that village. He watched one woman walk up to another and snatch a broom from her. The other woman went to her house, came back with a machete and hacked the broom thief to death. He said this experience taught him just how cheap human life is in the third world. One of the official reasons Rome held gladiatorial games was to remind people that the empire was built on blood. The thought was watching actual bloodshed kept the Roman people strong. Mercy was considered weakness of character. As far as Vikings and Germanic tribes went, if you weren't willing to fight for something you didn't deserve to have it. The accepted way for a young man to make his way in the world was through conquest.

I don't think PTSD was as big a factor for knights as it is for us. The belief was that the knight existed because God created him to fight. He was fulfilling God's purpose for him. This is not to say they never experienced PTSD, but I suspect it wasn't as big a problem as it is for contemporary soldiers. Nowadays we have a somewhat neurotic approach - we train soldiers and Marines to be professional killers, all the while telling them how wrong and horrible it is. Moreover, while we spend a great deal of effort and money in training them how to go from civilian to military life, we do nothing to help them reintegrate back into civilian life. I heard somewhere that, after taking fathers, merchants, and craftsmen and teaching them to be warriors, the ancient Israelites would, after the battle, separate these men from the rest of the population for several days of ritual cleansing, which took warriors and taught them how to be fathers, merchants and craftsmen again. I always thought that was a very wise approach for any culture that didn't have a permanent warrior caste.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Just to give you the opposite side of the coin. I got this review on Wildling a little while back (one star of course) and felt seriously isturbed by the sentiment. To set the scene my MC kills a man. He has to to save his comrades from being enslaved and killed by said man. But he did it by shooting him three times with arrows, causing him immense suffering, following which the man fell in the fire and burnt himself half to death and died screaming - and in a manner reminiscent of howthe MC had seen other people like him die. My thought since I try to be a moral person and I like my MC therefore to have some sort of moral core, was that he might feel some sort of guilt or shame for this act. This is the review I got back:

" - I hate books where the character shows an unreasonable amount of guilt for either protecting themselves or other by killing their attacker. This shows poor writing skills to us such a contrived emotion to drive the story line. People who survive an attack feels relief not guilt."

I'm sure everyone is different in how they would respond to having killed someone. And judging from this review I'm also sure that everyone is different in how they would expect others to respond in a given situation.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Devor]

" - I hate books where the character shows an unreasonable amount of guilt for either protecting themselves or other by killing their attacker. This shows poor writing skills to us such a contrived emotion to drive the story line. People who survive an attack feels relief not guilt."

I'm sure everyone is different in how they would respond to having killed someone. And judging from this review I'm also sure that everyone is different in how they would expect others to respond in a given situation.

There are studies which try to identify how people feel, and in situations where it's unambiguously self-defense, "relief" is actually quite common..... at first. Relief is what you feel when all those stress hormones achieve their purpose and start to drop out of you. The bigger divergence happens afterwards because that's when your chemicals start reacting to your choices, your beliefs, your worldview, instead of the adrenaline rush of the moment. How do you weigh the life of a killer against the life of your family? That's far more up to you, and the choices you've made, and continue to make, than many people realize.

As for killing on the battlefield, I do want to mention one thing . . . . a soldier might join the army to fight for his country or because of his values or because he was poor or because he was forced to by a draft or for any number of reasons, both good and bad. But a soldier doesn't kill and die on the battlefield thinking about those things. And it's not usually about saving your own skin. A soldier kills and dies thinking about the guy killing and dying next to him.

When I think of impacts of death being badly portrayed in fantasy, I don't think about killing the bad guy. I think about losing the guy standing next to you, and how quickly that's shrugged off. There are many ways to cope with killing on the battlefield. It's much harder to cope with that kind of loss.

And that goes for the bad guys, too. Does the evil Dark Lord keep losing his minions to a handful of heroes? He's going to have a revolt on his hands.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

I loved one of the Brienne scenes in Feast of Crows.

Spoiler: on-topic stuff that hasn't happened in the GoT show yet

She killed three men, and proved to be efficient at it, but she broke into tears after the battle. She had never actually killed before.

Since I started the series with the show, then started reading from book #3, I didn't realize Brienne had never killed. She killed two of Renly's kingsguard (Rainbow Guard in the book) on the show. I haven't read the first two books, but based on her reaction to killing in book #4, I'm guessing that she didn't actually kill anyone in Clash of Kings.

Anyway, Brienne's one of my favorite fantasy heroines. I actually felt proud of her to see her very human reaction to taking a life. She's not the only one of GRRM's characters to do that, but I hadn't really noticed what Jaime, Tyrion, Dany, etc. were going through regarding guilt over killing (or certain killings) until reading that Brienne scene.



Note: I haven't read the Brienne-Jaime scene in book #5 (which I suspect ends on a what-the-hell-just-happened note), so if you reply to me, please don't discuss book #5. Especially the little involving Brienne.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

@Psychotick, I hate reviews that say, "I hate books like…" If he's going to give your book a low rating, the least he could do is write about how the character's guilt in your story didn't do anything for him, not lump it in with all stories that do that. It sounds like your hero felt guilt, and the reviewer read that part and said, "wuss." Then he closed the book.

STEALTH EDIT - I didn't mean to double post. I guess I hit "reply" to my own post instead of "edit." Whoops.

 

[Feo Takahari]

When I think of impacts of death being badly portrayed in fantasy, I don't think about killing the bad guy. I think about losing the guy standing next to you, and how quickly that's shrugged off. There are many ways to cope with killing on the battlefield. It's much harder to cope with that kind of loss.

Heh, I've written something like that, too.

Spoiler: Spoilered in case nobody cares

This was with Royce, the same character who got a medal for saving his commander. He was off active combat duty after losing his eye, but they hadn't gotten the chance to evac him out yet, so he was still on the front lines when the lab boys screwed up. Their fancy new superweapon didn't just kill a bunch of enemy soldiers--it metastasized and flattened most of the western coastline. Royce's squad was in a low-lying area and ducked the initial blast, but only Royce and his commander had any sort of shielding from the secondary energy wave. It's a pretty nasty death if you're unshielded, basically the magical equivalent of radiation poisoning.

There's a point in the storyline where the protagonists are exploring a haunted orphanage, destroyed by the same superweapon. The ghost of the caretaker lectures them all the while, describing how the orphans lived, how they died (in quite graphic detail), and her plans for revenge. But when she tells them they've never suffered anything like that, Royce starts swearing at her, then tells her his story. This marks the first time he actually opens up about what happened, and he does it solely to prove that she's an idiot.

 

[Xitra_Blud]

Well, my characters are vampires so they really don't give a care, lol But when I do have human characters kill, I try to put some emotion in it, depending upon the character, of course. I believe that killing someone effects people differently, an example, killing someone would be less emotional for a sociopath than someone with a healthy functioning conscience. But I always try to go into my character's head regardless of who they are and let you see what they think and feel.

 

[Guy]

A soldier kills and dies thinking about the guy killing and dying next to him.

Another good point. Fear of failing one's comrades is a huge motivational force.

Someone, I think it was S.L.A. Marshall, did a study on combat soldiers in WW2. He found that only about 20% could make themselves take deliberate aim at an enemy soldier and fire. The rest would either just fire their weapons, deliberately aim too high, or occupy themselves with other jobs. The U.S. Air Crops discovered less than 1% of their fighter pilots accounted for 30%-40% of downed enemy aircraft. Even when faced with men trying to kill them, most soldiers couldn't deliberately take a life.

When I was in high school my American History teacher gave us an assignment to interview a war veteran. None of my family had fought since the Civil War, so I looked to others. There was a retired Air Force general in my town who had been with the Flying Tigers, Wiltz Segura. I interviewed him and discovered what it was like for him the first time he had human targets in his sights. He said they were flying patrol in the Chinese mountains when they saw Japanese troops ferrying supplies across a lake. They started their run to strafe the Japanese and he thought to himself, "Those are people down there." But, he stressed to me, this was after Pearl Harbor. His next thought was, "No, those are japs down there" and opened fire.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Another point to keep in mind is the amount of killing and the effort involved in the act itself. There may well be a difference in the psyches of a Viking who kills three or four men with an axe & a modern soldier who can kill hundreds with a voice communication.

Nowadays, we have people in positions where their actions can kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. In WW2, allied bomber crews had psychiatric issues at a rate much higher than other branches of service.

 

[psychotick]

Hi LS,

I'm sure you're right, but that's not what bothered me about the review. I've had unfair (in my view) reviews before. But this one sticks a little because I keep wondering what someone who could say such a thing is like. He hates the idea that people feel guilt? To my mind that means he either doesn't like or understand guilt - which would be true of someone bordering on the sociopathic end of the spectrum, or he has a particular hatred of guilt which would be true of someone who suffers guilt for some reason.

Either way this review showed me two things. First there are people out there I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. And second that everyone is different. More different than I would believe. I found the OP's link insightful, but I have to wonder if I personally found it insightful because it runs along the lines of what I already believe? It may be that just as there are many people who would feel the same way, there may be just as many who in the same circumstances would feel nothing - and who might even be angered at the thought that they should feel something.

To add to that there have been studies done of sociopathy which suggest that as many as 4% or 5% of people may fall within this umbrella. https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg...ed565c232781537f8525700200571f5e?OpenDocument

Cheers, Greg.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

If you want to read a good book on the study of sociopaths, I recommend "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout.

The research suggests that 1 in 20 people exhibit some level of sociopathic behavior. It is a very interesting read with a lot of real world illustrations. It also paints an accurate picture of a sociopath.

 

[ThinkerX]

There are also cultural factors to take into account. Maybe warrior cultures like the Vikings, Mongols, or Maasai didn't view killing with the same uneasiness modern Western society does? One can only project so much of our modern sensibilities into people from the past.

'Those not of my clan/tribe are not really people, hence killing them is not really murder.'

Which works until they do become 'people'.

And yes, those who are already sociopaths would have far fewer 'complications' when it comes to killing.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

Hi LS,

I'm sure you're right, but that's not what bothered me about the review. I've had unfair (in my view) reviews before. But this one sticks a little because I keep wondering what someone who could say such a thing is like. He hates the idea that people feel guilt? To my mind that means he either doesn't like or understand guilt - which would be true of someone bordering on the sociopathic end of the spectrum, or he has a particular hatred of guilt which would be true of someone who suffers guilt for some reason.

Either way this review showed me two things. First there are people out there I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. And second that everyone is different. More different than I would believe. I found the OP's link insightful, but I have to wonder if I personally found it insightful because it runs along the lines of what I already believe? It may be that just as there are many people who would feel the same way, there may be just as many who in the same circumstances would feel nothing - and who might even be angered at the thought that they should feel something.

To add to that there have been studies done of sociopathy which suggest that as many as 4% or 5% of people may fall within this umbrella. https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg...ed565c232781537f8525700200571f5e?OpenDocument

Cheers, Greg.

I'll hold back some of my thoughts to avoid inadvertently starting a political discussion. I agree 100% that there is something terribly frightening about you if you can kill guilt-free. I wouldn't have a problem if people separate kill-or-be-killed situations from slaughter-of-the-innocent.

Teaching at inner city schools, this topic has come up between me and teens on several occasions. In one conversation, I was talking to some kids in the in-house suspension room. One said you have to have a lot of [guts] to kill a guy. He was referring to those who assassinate in order to prove themselves in a gang. (This was a kid who did not approve of that life. He called those people "try hards"–those who will do ANYTHING to prove they're man enough to… well… do what they're told.) I told the kid I found it cowardly that three guys with guns would take out two unsuspecting targets. I said it takes something to kill, but it's not [guts].

I also saw how teens growing up in these neighborhoods deal with something they know getting murdered. They choose words carefully, blame the victim, and basically don't say anything they don't want the killer to hear. The victim was a student on mine. So was the killer, I have reason to suspect. (I accepted a job in another district in January, so he's not in my classroom anymore.)