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Originally Posted by Raynor
There is nothing wrong with recognising that evil characters pose greater challenges in stories, and greater challenges in stories make them more interesting. However, such a recognition is not in itself an equivalent for justification of deligthing in evil. Moral integrity requires that one's actions, ideas and feelings are consistently compatible with what one considers morality. Any such inconsistency, on whatever level, is, by definition, immoral. One has the free will to do whatever, and one may tolerate one's natural propensities, but that doesn't make every action and every propensity moral, just because they are enacted or tolerated.
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But in the end a story is entertainment, & as I stated we are dealing with fantastical characters in a fantastical setting. Of course, applicability comes in - to the extent taht the reader wishes - but my own feeling is that one cannot make judgements about a reader's morality based on which characters they prefer or support. One may enjoy seeing Elves hacked apart by Orcs simply because one finds Elves annoyingly smug & think they deserve all they get (which I don't actually, but I accept some readers may).
One cannot simply project Middle-earth onto our world & apply the standards of good & evil in that world to our own - who are the Elves & who the Orcs in our world? How can one relate the secondary world to the primary so precisely as to be able to make such judgements as 'If you like the Orcs you must also like rapists & murderers' or 'If you side with Melkor you must be a neo-Nazi'. It simply doesn't work. Primary & Secondary worlds are too different, character's motivations & desires in the Secondary world cannot be simply projected onto human beings in the Primary. Taking LotR as a guide for moral behaviour in the 21st Century is bound to be a failure, because the Primary world is a whole lot more complicated than the Secondary one.
Tolkien never accounts for the existence of evil in M-e - in the sense that we are never told why Melkor chooses to rebel. Tolkien simply tells us that he 'rebelled'. In fact, one gets the feeling that he couldn't explain it at all - he needed an 'evil enemy' & stuck one in & told the reader - 'He's evil'. We have no real sense of why Melkor does the nasty stuff - which allows the reader to invent all kinds of justifications, even to the extent of thinking he may just possibly have had a good reason - or at least that he rebelled because he didn't want to be a servant, & wanted to do his own thing - why did Eru give him free will if he wasn't to be allowed to use it? If I gave you a million dollars & then commanded you only to use it as I dictated you might well be tempted to see my 'gift' as worthless & throw it back in my face.
In other words, I can see the argument that Eru is the power mad dictator & Melkor saw the whole thing as a laboratory for Eru's 'experimentations' (or his 'Art') & decided he would have none of it, & sought to wreck the whole silly thing. Its an argument. Hence, if a reader takes that approach I would not declare them 'immoral'. They are judging characters in a story & their attitude to 'evil' acts in the Primary world may be entirely different.
And this thread is asking about some readers support of the 'evil' characters in M-e, not their support of evil people in this world.