{"id":8792,"date":"2013-08-06T17:52:45","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T23:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8792"},"modified":"2013-08-06T17:54:47","modified_gmt":"2013-08-06T23:54:47","slug":"trope-tuesday-curiosity-is-a-crapshoot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/trope-tuesday-curiosity-is-a-crapshoot\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope Tuesday: Curiosity is a Crapshoot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"curiosity\"
Is there life on Mars? NOT ANYMORE!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Is curiosity a bad thing<\/a>?\u00a0 Well, it depends how genre savvy<\/a> you are.\u00a0 It seemed to work out pretty well for Alice<\/a>, but not quite so well for Pandora<\/a> (or the rest of the ancient Greek world, for that matter).\u00a0 Curious monkeys<\/a> seem to come out all right, and their constantly curious<\/a> counterparts also seem to do okay in the end, but anytime you run into schmuck bait<\/a> you know that things aren’t going to turn out well.<\/p>\n

The truth is, for just about every stock Aesop<\/a> warning about the perils of being overly nosy, you can find another one exalting it as a virtue.\u00a0 In fact, you could say that curiosity is a crapshoot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But what is curiosity exactly?\u00a0 The Merriam-Webster dictionary<\/a> defines it as “desire to know,” and “interest leading to inquiry.” As you can imagine, there are situations where this could be good or bad.\u00a0 Thus, what a story says about curiosity often changes depending on its genre.<\/p>\n

For example, in most horror stories, curiosity and nosiness are usually bad, leading the protagonists to go places where they shouldn’t<\/a> and uncover things that should never have been uncovered<\/a>.\u00a0 At the same time, a lack of curiosity<\/a> can also be fatal … in fact, a lot of things can be fatal in a horror story.<\/p>\n

In mythology and folklore, curiosity is often even worse.\u00a0 From Pandora to Eve, Psyche to the proverbial cat, curiosity leads to Very Bad Things.\u00a0 Perhaps this is because these kinds of stories are mostly tales of warning, passed on from generation to generation as a way to preserve our collective knowledge about the dangers of the world, rather than inspire us to go out and face them.<\/p>\n

(As a side note, there are a few exceptions in the realm of folklore.\u00a0 In the Bluebeard myth<\/a>, curiosity killed off all of Bluebeard’s previous wives, but combined with cleverness, faith, and friendship<\/a>, it saved the last one’s life.)<\/p>\n

In fantasy, curiosity is often a mixed box<\/del> bag.\u00a0 For example, take the hobbits: most of them are perfectly content to live out their lives in the shire, but the few who are inquisitive enough to venture outside end up saving the world in a way that the elves, dwarves, and humans never could.\u00a0 At the same time, it puts them through a great deal of pain, even after the world is saved–neither Bilbo nor Frodo are ever able to be content in the shire again.<\/p>\n

Curiosity, in other words, is complicated.\u00a0 It’s not just a quirk or a character flaw–it’s an underlying quality of the hero’s journey.\u00a0 Without curiosity, either of the world around him or the internal struggles within, the hero would be content to live out an unremarkable life.\u00a0 Certainly he wouldn’t have the capacity for the cleverness, guile, wisdom, and sensitivity that he needs in order to descend into the darkest dungeon, face his own nadir, and return with the elixir of life.\u00a0 Curiosity may lead to sorrow, pain, or even death, but it also leads to adventure.<\/p>\n

As a subgenre of fantasy, many of these issues carry over into the realm of science fiction.\u00a0 And yet, as a genre unto itself, science fiction has a distinctly positive view of curiosity compared to other genres.\u00a0 Science is nothing if not the primary process of human inquiry, where curiosity is not only a virtue but the<\/em> virtue, one of the most important aspects of humanity.\u00a0 Consider these words from Adam Steltzner<\/a>, one of the leading engineers of the NASA Mars Curiosity mission:<\/p>\n