If there’s one kind of question guaranteed to make me roll my eyes, it’s one about guilty pleasures. You don’t need to feel guilty about the art you enjoy. There are things in life about which a person should feel guilty—kicking puppies, making small children cry, supporting fascists—but liking a particular kind of art or story or character or movie or song is not, generally, among those things.
And yet there’s a thing I love that I’ve been feeling squirmy about. I don’t feel guilty, exactly, but I feel self-conscious and dorky and then feel guilty about feeling those ways, which maybe transforms into a feeling that’s a cousin to a guilty pleasure? It’s in the same general vicinity, at least.
See, I finally watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and found myself forced to admit that I love paladins. And I really feel like I’m not supposed to say that in public.
Honor Among Thieves aside, I’m not speaking about paladins in the strictest Dungeons & Dragons sense here. I’ve read the rules; I know that traditionally they have a lawful good alignment, or fealty to a chosen deity. I’m a fan in a looser sense. What I mean is do-gooders, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Do-gooders. Champions. Stinky, annoying, rule-following (except when the rules are wrong) heroes. I could not feel more uncool for confessing to this. It feels like announcing that I’m a boring person who only likes simple, happy stories, when that is the furthest thing from the truth. (Well, I might be boring. Let someone else be the judge of that.)
Everywhere I turn, though, it’s redemption stories for troubled antiheroes and villains who didn’t mean to be bad; they just wanted all that power, you know, and no one else could be trusted with it. There is nothing wrong with these characters, obviously. I like them just fine, and sometimes even love them. There are just so many of them. And it’s easy to draw lines between the real world and the stories we tell in it—stories about troubled times and morally gray figures; stories about fighting back and using any and every resource to do so; stories that remind us that fights aren’t always won by doing the so-called right thing, by being flawless and proper and only punching the people who really, really deserve it.
But I don’t think a do-gooder has to be simple, or plain, or a stick-in-the-mud (though it’s kind of fun when they are, in some ways). Can we blame Tolstoy for this lingering idea that good, happy people are, like his famous line about families, all alike, and only the unhappy are interesting and different? Maybe a little. It’s a cultural idea that crops up everywhere, though, from the classic appeal of the “bad boy” to the simple fact that the Sith have better fashion sense than the Jedi. Being bad is sexy. Being good is boring. (Unless you have America’s ass, in which case exceptions are made.)
I can think of plenty of do-gooders in TV and movies, still: The crew of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Captains and Ms. Marvel. Buffy. Ahsoka Tano. But when I think of current books, I run into a wall. There are many reasons it’s hard to find readalikes for The Goblin Emperor: the worldbuilding, the elaborate systems and meanings of everything from clothes to names, the setting, the relationships. But it’s also Maia himself, a gentle, goodhearted fellow in a position of power that he never asked for. The whole book is about how hard that can be—how doing good, remaining yourself, in a massive system is a challenging and sometimes impossible task.
There are more of these books. Right? I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal tale about how one of the authors of The Expanse series said that it is about how annoying it is to have a paladin in your party. (I tried, and failed, to find the direct quote online.) I love this and I hate it. I love it for obvious reasons: James Holden’s entire story happens because he can’t leave a problem alone. Because he’s not shy about imposing his ideas of what’s right onto a universe that isn’t necessarily going to welcome them. But I hate it because I want to stamp my little foot and insist, Holden’s not annoying! Not any more than Naomi is, or Bobbie, or anyone else trying to do the right thing in complicated circumstances. What starts out as a simple stubborn do-gooder willfulness grows into something just as complicated as the things that drive Avasarala or Amos or even Inaros.
Goodness isn’t simple. Popular storytelling has gotten really invested in asking what makes a person bad, or what evil really is, or what drives people to do the dubious, morally dicey things they do—all good questions. Evil isn’t simple, either. Being a person isn’t simple. I just want more stories about people who keep trying to do the things they perceive as good, over and over again, trying and failing and falling and getting up and dusting themselves off and doing it all again.
Sometimes they’re trying to save the world. (I’m looking at you, hobbits.) Sometimes they’re just trying to get by on a new career path. (Sibling Dex.) Sometimes they’d rather be watching their stories. (Murderbot is totally a do-gooder.) Sometimes the only way for a person to make her own way in the world is by doing good for others—and making poor choices and horrible compromises—along the way. (The Library of Broken Worlds.) Sometimes they’re a queen trying to heal the PTSD her father inflicted on an entire country. (Bitterblue.)
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None of this means that characters don’t make mistakes. None of this requires perfection. Good intentions are one thing, but rarely enough. A do-gooder can and does fuck up and it is not the end of the world. Moral complexity is not the sole territory of the morally dubious. Being a mess doesn’t make you a monster.
And yet I still feel like I’m confessing something slightly forbidden just by admitting that I love the paladin-inclined. Like I need to keep insisting that no, really, my first love was rangers, and I love a troubled wizard who struggles with being good, and please, yes, give me your gloom-loving witches and extremely depressed necromancers, from Harrow to Rin Chupeco’s Bone Witch! All of which is true and not negated by the fact that sometimes I just want to be reminded that the do-gooders are busting their asses, too. Maybe part of this is a categorization and description problem: because being good isn’t cool, characters get described as messy or disasters when they’re just people who made a mistake or two. Am I really just asking for us to admit that nobody good comes by it easily? To wash away the stain of the rotten Mary Sue discourse and admit that characters can be good and good at things and still complex and troubled? Maybe that’s part of it.
Maybe I’m also just tempting fate. A favorite truth of the internet is that if you complain that there is not enough of a certain kind of book, you’re probably reading the wrong books or looking in the wrong places. Which means these books are out there, and the internet is hiding them from me. This is one of those times when I want to be wrong: Are my do-gooders out there? The complicated ones with the golden hearts and the dirty fingernails? The ones who follow the rules exactly up to the moment when they stop making sense? Starfleet officers of fantasy worlds? Let me at ‘em. I’ve got space in the TBR pile. Or I’ll make it, anyway.
