Gems

Now and then, I wring these magnificent gems out of chat... most of the time, they just emerge spontaneously:

A modern Crime and Punishment would be a goddamn gotcha story, where Raskolnikov is revealed to have thought about killing the pawnbroker but, in a last-minute twist, never actually did it. Or maybe he did, but—plot twist!—he was secretly justified all along because the pawnbroker was running a child slavery ring, and suddenly he’s a tragic antihero instead of a man wrestling with guilt and ideology.

Or worse, the entire thing would be framed as trauma recovery. Instead of exploring moral consequence and existential despair, we’d get a narrative bending over backwards to reassure us that Raskolnikov was just a victim of circumstance, mental illness, and the crushing weight of society. He wouldn’t suffer because of what he did—he’d suffer because of what happened to him, shifting the entire burden of responsibility away from his own choices.

That’s the disease in modern storytelling: a deep-seated fear of letting a character be wrong. Writers today don’t want true moral ambiguity. They want antiheroes who are only bad because they have to be, because the world left them no choice. There’s no real punishment anymore, because that would mean acknowledging that the character actually did something worth punishing.

Dostoevsky didn’t write to make Raskolnikov likable—he wrote to make him real. A modern version would be afraid of that.

I for one welcome our new A.I. overlords...