[Edited to add that I am the author of the above piece, not sure if that is clear from the rest of the comment]
I fully agree with your first statement and disagree with the second. I think maybe some of this is a disagreement on the goal of stories: I really don’t like morality plays where I feel like the author is trying to tell me what to believe. I much prefer stories of flawed people ending up in terrible places or doing terrible things that force me to figure out for myself where the protagonist went wrong. This is, of course, a personal preference and not something that’s “true” or “false”.
But I guess more to the point I don’t think that the typical person will find themselves convinced to join EA just because somebody in a story did good EA things. I think the path to changing one’s worldview is long and complicated and comes more from tricky thought-provoking discussions than directly absorbing the worldviews of fictional characters.
I find it very unlikely that this story would lead anybody to think that buying mosquito nets will lead you to commit this protagonist’s actions. But, at least anecdotally, I’ve found that this story starts conversations about why the protagonist is wrong and what we as ordinary individuals might or might not owe to people dying of malaria.
[Edited to add that I am the author of the above piece, not sure if that is clear from the rest of the comment]
I fully agree with your first statement and disagree with the second. I think maybe some of this is a disagreement on the goal of stories: I really don’t like morality plays where I feel like the author is trying to tell me what to believe. I much prefer stories of flawed people ending up in terrible places or doing terrible things that force me to figure out for myself where the protagonist went wrong. This is, of course, a personal preference and not something that’s “true” or “false”.
But I guess more to the point I don’t think that the typical person will find themselves convinced to join EA just because somebody in a story did good EA things. I think the path to changing one’s worldview is long and complicated and comes more from tricky thought-provoking discussions than directly absorbing the worldviews of fictional characters.
I find it very unlikely that this story would lead anybody to think that buying mosquito nets will lead you to commit this protagonist’s actions. But, at least anecdotally, I’ve found that this story starts conversations about why the protagonist is wrong and what we as ordinary individuals might or might not owe to people dying of malaria.