I just watched The Night Porter. A pretty amazing film, and one of the most surprising things it does is make you kind-of sort-of sympathize to some extent with Nazi war criminals who are going on trial, or are about to, in Nuremburg. For once they weren't just treated as total villains with no redeeming humanity. I mean, they weren't nice people for sure, but they were to some extent forced to do what they did or themselves become the victims in that horrible war machine. And the writer/director (I forget her name and am too lazy too google it just now) was accused of making a film that wasn't feminist enough... One brilliant point made in the film is the idea that a hundred thousand horrible murders that are known of only in an abstract way, as numbers on a statistic sheet, don't sway the jury nearly as much as one living eyewitness who was actually there in the prison camp and can tell their story. That puts a human face to it and makes it come alive. I mean, the Nazi officers weren't presented as great people or anything, not by any stretch, but you can see that in some regards they're human, and you understand their motivations for wanting to not be executed for what they did in wartime. Masterful storytelling and brilliant filmmaking.
I'm not sure about the author's obligation, but maybe a "good" story, fictional or not, sheds light on reality in some way. The "moral of the story" kind of tale is just a simplistic single scale framing of this "light shedding". Perhaps the Joker (I'm thinking about the Dark Knight here, as I've not seen the film) makes for a good story because he sheds light on fear, and the logical strategy of somebody who would pursue creating it. By that logic, perhaps stories that are written with more subconscious patterns are more appealing because the author isn't trying to consciously apply his best approximation of what the world is like, but "just following the story".. but it's still echoing some kind of wisdom.. A wisdom he may not even believe himself. This idea upsets the escapist in me... the attempt to say that "D is really a badly written O" oversimplifies reality. Anyway, enough rambling..