Who invented bad guys?

The ‘evil god challenge’

The free will defence: a good god vs the problem of evil

The problem with dead women

How morals influence if you’re liberal or conservative

Do spoilers actually ruin stories?

Everything is a remix: AI and image generation

A brief history of the devil

Dispatches from the ruins

Kurt Vonnegut: the shape of stories

When did stories become so centred on good battling evil? And why?

Today, popular storytelling is dominated by good-versus-evil paradigms – think superhero films, and the Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises. In these narratives, the moral future of a realm, galaxy or multiverse must be protected from groups setting out to crush its most sacred values. However, as the US writer Catherine Nichols details in this video, which is adapted from her Aeon Essay, these sweeping moral narratives are essentially absent in the folk tales and myths of the Western world prior to the 19th century. Consider, for instance, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Three Little Pigs and even the Iliad, in which the conflict is simply over the characters’ personal standing or survival.

Featuring narration from Nichols and direction from the US filmmaker Namir Khaliq, the short explores how the rise of nation-states propelled this narrative shift, resulting in many popular stories being reimagined to fit this new values-based paradigm that encouraged social cohesion. And, perhaps counterintuitively, Nichols makes the case that the result has been, in many ways, pernicious, favouring ‘simple partisan thinking’ in which morality is reduced to who’s on the good team and the irredeemables who must be stopped at any cost.

Director: Namir Khaliq

Producers: Adam D’Arpino, Tamur Qutab

Writer and narrator: Catherine Nichols

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What, if anything, makes an all-good god less absurd than an all-evil one?

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videoFilm and visual culture

Why do we crave the awful futures of apocalyptic fiction?

videoStories and literature

Are certain familiar narrative arcs inherently appealing?

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