Boiled Frog Fictions

Sometimes you reach the end of a novel, movie, or TV series only to find that your favorite character is a bit of a wrong’un. They didn’t become immoral; they were dodgy all along, but you just didn’t notice or let it slide. The moral temperature kept rising and rising until now, like the proverbial frog, you are boiled. (Just a metaphor: if we’re going to eat other animals, let’s at least treat them humanely.)

Fictions like these are high risk—legions of confused fans will express outrage and disappointment, or worse, profess to have “learned” terrible things—but maybe they are also high reward. Could they be the literary equivalent of a reductio ad absurdum? Could they provide a kind of Rorschach test for us? Could they cultivate better mental habits, nudging us in the direction of epistemic modesty? Maybe next time, we’ll be quicker to jump out of the pot. Or better yet, maybe we won’t hop into it in the first place.