This article is by Christian Madera.
Early Fantasy literature, with its black-and-white morality, was very comfortable making statements about ethics. I’m using ‘ethics’ in a broad sense here: I don’t just mean questions about what a person should do in a difficult situation (though such questions are definitely a mainstay of Fantasy literature and merit discussion), but rather broader questions about how a person should be and how the world should be.
Recently, we’ve seen a backlash against black-and-white morality and a move towards so-called “grey” Fantasy. While I think it is very important to be cognizant of and think critically about the potential pitfalls of black-and-white Fantasy, I would argue that grey Fantasy is not without pitfalls of its own.