Note: This is not meant as a slap at anyone who's been following the story that I've also pretty much ignored. I've long felt that at least the first of those two statements is true though. Drama is understandable, unpredictable and exciting; it's the thing we look for in most of our fiction. Thing is though, folks, the reason it's OK to get vicarious thrills reading about Little Nell and wondering if she lives or dies is because SHE'S NOT REAL! If she dies, no real children are going to starve because she's not there to be a breadwinner, no real young beaus are going to descend into a death spiral of drugs and hard living because they can't go on without her, no plague epidemics will depopulate entire REAL continents because she wasn't there to discover the cure. It's just a story, and none of the fictional characters suffering, however poignantly the author conveys it, is actually EXPERIENCED by anyone.

That's the problem with the ubiquity of "reality TV" and "ripped from todays headlines" stories: They reduce real pain and suffering to mere entertainment, and the worst part is PEOPLE WATCH IT! How much even of the news today is REALLY news, rather than another human interest drama that allows us to feel good caring for five minutes about people in a tragedy before we get Dave with the weather? People we didn't even know we cared about until the news told us, people we'd have otherwise never thought of once. It's our answer to the arena; no one's entertained by actors pretending to be gladiators wearing blood packs. When Dateline's telling us about some conman they found who married and murdered for money, or Law and Order is changing the names in the latest kiddie porn sting, we aren't just watching an entertaining story anymore, we're deriving entertainment and pleasure from the pain and misfortune of other human beings. Who's the psychopath there...?