What is Evil? Fantasy explores...

This sounds interesting and I've added the books to my 'waiting to buy?' list. The last comment in the quote is definitely worth pondering. "The Sundering series, on the other hand, is a kind of retelling of The Lord of the Rings from the perspective of Sauron. There are many key differences between the stories that make Godslayer's dark lord Satoris more sympathetic than Sauron ... Satoris has done nothing more terrible than building a city where he gives shelter to social outcasts, trolls, and the insane. Sure, he's depressed and prefers to live in the dark, but does that mean Satoris should be killed? And what's so great about the Shapers, anyway, since they were the ones who originally sundered the world and left to live on an island far from human shores? Why should mortals fight the Shapers' battles for them? It's fascinating to watch a fantasy novel grapple with these kinds of questions, since the genre is rather notorious for making evil so obvious that our heroes never have to question their motivations."
Banewreaker by Jacqueline Carey
The problem with making evil too obvious is that it ill-equips us to deal imaginitively with the real moral dilemmas when evil is not epically obvious but is embedded into ordinary life so as to be almost invisible; like the 'just doing my job' aspects of form-filling, track maintenance, etc that enabled the holocaust. Like, -dare we admit it?- the everyday decisions not to buy fairly traded goods, or to take unnecessary car journeys, or to accede in measures supposed to 'fight terrorism' but mostly preserve a world order for the already privileged? And of course because these things are so embedded in the way things are, it is hard to take them seriously enough to raise the moral energy to change our ways and it is hard to avoid them completely without alienating others and ceasing to function among our peers. So we are pitched into taking action to remedy somewhat things for which we are not fully or even mostly responsible individually and which can only exist as a function of collective actions and decisions and yet we prop up by our consent to continue to feed the system. And worse still, the withdrawal of our consent will prabably, on its own, not stop the continuance of the evils.
There's a good theological meditation on this in Alistair McFadyen's Bound to Sin. And I hope myself to do a bit of work on this linking it with 'Principalities and Powers'.

What to do? I think that we need to cultivate the wisdom of identifying the key things that we each need to begin with and embed those into our living and then take further stock at the same time we need to be cultivating the humility to see that we still are compromised even if working on it, so that we continue to relate to others in a compassionate and encouraging way without implitly [at best] or explitly making them out to be in league with the devil. It is a process and the only real sin is to refuse to enter the process of change and to judge others for doing it differently.

It would be great to see more fantasy that ditched the myth of redemptive violence, which relies on the idea that we can easily identify those who are totally evil and that by 'erasing' them we make the world a better place and peace and harmony will rise from the corpses of the evil slain.
AlterNet: What is Evil?: