Maintaining Scope Of Violence In Your Story's World

Maintaining Scope of Violence in Your Story's World

I saw an interesting discussion in the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit, commenting how a player's immersion was broken when a version of the player character, known as "The Dark Urge", is apparently to blame for a particularly brutal murder and yet the companion characters don't turn on him/her/them immediately. The commenter was baffled given the brutality of the killing. Yet many replies pointed out that other members of the party are also murderers or tapdancing on the edge of committing atrocities, not to mention other mitigating circumstances that it would be spoilers to go into.

This got me thinking about scope of violence in genre fiction and how, on top of all the other difficult jobs the writer has before them, establishing what level of violence is "commonplace" vs "shocking" can be a surprisingly delicate process.

(Cut for length. Includes references to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, John Wick, and NBC's Hannibal in an exploration of how to establish the scope and scale of on-screen violence. TW for discussions of violence against children in shows like GoT and HotD, though it is largely in abstract terms.)

I'm reminded of "House of the Dragon" (HotD) which, I must confess, I found to have rather patchy and uneven writing.

One moment in HotD that I found rather dissonant, shall we say, was when a child of the nobility loses his eye in a brawl with other children. His mother, an aristocrat, is understandably horrified and enraged. However, some of the threats she makes to equally powerful Houses over the incident feel, dare I say, disproportionate to the event, given that her threats could lead to the world as she knows it being plunged into civil war, all over what amounts to a tussle between children, albeit one that ends in a particularly gruesome manner.

On the one hand, any modern mother likely would completely freak out at such an appalling injury as a lost eye from a knife fight between children. That would be a major shock to a modern community, where such violence is quite rare. And in fairness, the aristocrats of the world of "Game of Thrones" and HotD by extension are largely insulated by their privilege from the day to day violence we see portrayed in the series. If anyone was realistically going to have a modern response to a child's maiming, it would be the sheltered daughter of a noble house with regards to her beloved child.

However, as understandable as her reaction might be to modern viewers and to those who take into account her sheltered upbringing, in my mind, the show's narrative wobbled there in terms of establishing the level of violence that is considered commonplace in the world of HotD/GoT. In the first season of Game of Thrones, we famously saw a child pushed out of a window, permanently disabled and left in a coma for months, and while this is a major event that creates a great deal of tension and conflict, ultimately the family after their attempts at individual revenge the fact is they can't start a civil war over this single event. So in a way we're sort of left with: this is just a thing that happens that we have to suck up and deal with, even if certain individuals might wish to and continue to pursue a personal vendetta. Couple that with commoner children being murdered and the deaths going completely unremarked upon by wider society, we're left with the impression of a world in which brutality, even brutality against children which would grind a modern community to a halt, is simply an ugly and relatively common part of life. A life with so much ugliness and personal violence that it really almost gets lost amidst all the other horrors.

Which makes the HotD mother's reaction feel... disproportionate. Not in relation to her child's suffering, which is entirely understandable, but her view of what retaliation constitutes a proportional response comes across as hysterical. Too modern. Children are horrifically injured in the GoT/HotD world all the time. Frankly, by comparison, a lost eye is almost minor compared to a loss of mobility in a rigorously martial world, access to which Bran lost with his fall. We don't get as good of a set up of what the conflicting morals of this world are, we don't get the comparison between commoner and noble children as clearly as in GoT, we don't really get all the conflicting views of "When is it normal to start a civil war over a child's injury?" - the sense of scope and scale of violence and how we and the characters are supposed to react to it... wobbles.

Along these lines, I've also pointed out that in shows like NBC's Hannibal, the show is scrupulously careful about not really referencing global events like wars. In my mind, there's a simple reason for that. Your average drone attack on civilians in the Middle East kills more innocent people by accident than Hannibal Lecter has ever killed in his entire murderous career. Compared to weapons of war, one murderous serial killer is barely a rounding error in terms of death and human suffering. So the show has to remain almost claustrophobically intimate so we never get confronted with the "So what?" of the individual death and human suffering Hannibal and the other serial killers bring about on a very close, personal basis. The horror style is meant to force us to imagine ourselves if we were the victims (or the killer) in these incredibly intimate murders. If our suffering was writ large. If every individual death was massively significant. But this is in contrast with real world mass casualty events which would dwarf many times all of the deaths in the Hannibal show combined.

As a final example, the moment the first season of "True Detective" lost me was when the value of a single life also wobbled dramatically. The conceit of the show is that a single murder, or a half dozen at most, murders of young white women is worthy of a major, multi-year investigation. Yet when the investigation inadvertently leads to an outbreak of violence in a predominantly black community, shown almost immediately to kill more people (in front of their children, even) than were lost in the entire murder spree of white women that's being investigated, the show didn't seem to care at all. Individual white female victims were worthy of a breathless investigation into their untimely loss, but twice that number of black people killed in an outbreak of violence directly linked to the investigation didn't even seem worthy of commentary or reflection at all. The value of a single human life was no longer consistent. If these deaths aren't worthy of justice, then why should I care about the few individual deaths being investigated?

As with any measuring of scope in fiction, it's very hard for the author to do alone. It really is an instance where an outside pair of eyes is incredibly valuable.

But things to keep in mind while crafting a narrative around violence is just how much are readers or viewers supposed to be alarmed by individual acts of violence. It's common and indeed necessary for modern media to establish the rules of its world. Even stories nominally set in "our" world actually do almost as much worldbuilding as any fantasy tale in this respect. In a cop drama where each episode is built around a single murder, we need to inhabit a world where a single murder is worthy of dozens of people spending time and resources bringing the killer to justice. In such a world, a mass casualty event of several deaths should be shocking. To this end, like in NBC's Hannibal, it's probably best to avoid mentions of mass casualty events caused by war or natural disasters.

By contrast, an action film like John Wick might place less value on individual deaths (beyond the motivating deaths of a single dog, which is thoroughly commented on within the story as feeling disproportionate and therein lies much of what makes the plot so unique. I'd argue it is also the cutest dog ever born, but I digress). We're not going to see a lurid headline, "John Wick murders 26 local men in cold blood, read about this tragic loss along with quotes by their devastated wives and children on page 6". To a certain extent, the violence there is meant to be just shocking enough to thrill, but we're not meant to get too invested in the details of the actual body count.

And, to go even more extreme, in war or disaster movies, we see or have narrated that thousands have died at a time. Again, to go back to Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon, one reason it's hard to see the mother's reaction to her child's maiming as anything but a bit disproportionate is because we see with such brutality hundreds if not thousands of men, women, and children dying directly or indirectly as a result of war. While it's understandable that a mother would burn the world down for an injury to her child, we're not well placed to agree with or sympathize with her reactions on the broader scale, in terms of retribution that would lead to war, against a backdrop of brutal mass casualty events in the thousands where even more families are devastated and more children injured or killed.

As a final, positive word on the Game of Thrones universe, the early seasons of the GoT were actually very good at controlling the audience's reaction to the scope of violence. Namely, the Battle of the Blackwater sticks out in my mind. The world of GoT is so grounded in the mud, in ugly, personal but intimate violence done with hands or blades, otherwise rudimentary weapons, that the first time we see an explosion on a near-modern scale feels as genuinely breathtaking to modern eyes as it might have to the Medieval-eseque eyes of that world. Yet there are movies chock-full of explosions where the explosions lose impact and importance, become background noise, because they're simply one of many. By rigorously tamping down and limiting the scope and type of violence to largely hand to hand combat, Game of Thrones set up a moment where modern warfare-style explosions are awe-inspiring. Against that backdrop, the appearance of fire-breathing dragons on the battlefield is also arresting, though their capabilities would likely be dwarfed by a modern fighter jet and many viewers of GoT would be familiar with films where the scope and scale of violence is much bigger and more explosive. It feels big in GoT because the scope and scale has been so small to that point.

Once you as a writer have established the modernity of your violence, the scope and scale of it, the average body count, the importance of a single human life, it's important to stick to it. If a character has a differing view, then they should be noted as having it by the narrative. A grizzled war veteran might shrug at a small town murder investigation of a single individual, but a sleepy town might lose its mind over it. In the modern world, the lives of children are put on the highest pedestal, but once you establish in your world that some children's lives are of lower value, then showing a mother act with an understandable modern sensibility of horror and outrage still needs to be commented on so we understand where her reaction falls within her society, especially if it's in contrast. That is what teaches us how to watch and appreciate the narrative choices as they're meant to be appreciated.