One of my favorite characters on the new Battlestar Galactica was Gaius Baltar. His fate at the end of the series has me divided. On the one hand, I'm kind of pissed that a character who comes off as such a weasel found redemption, and wonder if someone that, on the surface at least, came off as only concerned about himself throughout the entire series deserved to "find Earth". This is the guy whose first thought is to call his attorney when he finds out he inadvertently caused the genocide of the human race, after all. On the other hand, just because he thinks of himself first, doesn't mean he doesn't consider the lives of others eventually. There's a powerful scene early in season 4 in which the atheist Baltar prays for the life of a dying boy, offering up his own life, and you can tell its genuine: he isn't doing it for the benefit of those around him (he thinks they're all sleeping).

Anyway, his behavior made me look at myself. When the 9-11 attacks occurred, I was waiting to go to boot camp (I'd been meant to go five days before, but my date got pushed back.) Watching those planes crash into the WTC, the first thing that went through my mind was "Holy ****, I'm going to war". It wasn't until later that I started to think about the thousands of lives that were lost. Does that make me a "bad person"? Maybe, but I don't think so. After all, it didn't stop me from shipping off when I was supposed to. I could have called the recruiter at anytime and said "Nope. Changed my mind." I went through with it, and eventually had the best four years of my life.

All of this has affected my writing, of course. One of my goals in revising my work has been to make villains less villainy and more people with their own agenda, not necessarily "evil". In some cases I'm actually trying to go so far as to convince the reader that the antagonist might be justified in his intent. At first I thought this might deprive me of the "punching bag" moment, when the hero opens up a can of whoop ass on the villain. Then I remembered my favorite moment of Return of the Jedi when Luke goes berserk on Vader and beats him into submission. That's a great whoop ass moment, but because a part of us likes Vader, and understands what happened to Vader, it adds another layer to the whole thing.