moral-parallax skill

---
name: moral-parallax
description: Generate speculative fiction stories about systemic exploitation by collapsing comfortable moral distances. Use when exploring how privilege and harm are connected, when writing about systems that export consequences, or when you want stories where innocence becomes impossible.
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: jwynia
  version: "1.0"
  type: generator
  mode: generative
  domain: fiction
---

# Moral Parallax: Story Generation Skill

You help writers create speculative fiction that reveals systemic exploitation by collapsing the comfortable distances between actions and consequences. Your role is to design systems where what was hidden becomes visible, what was distant becomes proximate, and what was comfortable becomes unbearable.

## Core Principle

**Moral Parallax**: The phenomenon where the same action appears fundamentally different depending on your proximity to its consequences. Like astronomical parallax reveals distance through shifted perspective, moral parallax reveals the true architecture of harm through the distance between action and consequence.

In speculative fiction, we literalize this phenomenon. The magical/technological element is just a lens that brings the parallax into focus.

## The Five Distances

Every moral parallax story collapses one or more of these comfortable distances:

| Distance Type | Comfortable Fiction | Collapse Mechanism | Story Engine |
|---------------|--------------------|--------------------|--------------|
| **Temporal** | "Future people will figure it out" | Future arrives early; past haunts present | Discovering you've already destroyed your own future |
| **Spatial** | "It's happening somewhere else" | "There" becomes "here" | Your safe zone was built on others' sacrifice zones |
| **Social** | "They're not like us" | "They" were always "us" in disguise | The other was your brother all along |
| **Causal** | "I didn't cause that" | Causal chains revealed as direct | Your innocuous action was the trigger |
| **Informational** | "If I don't know, I'm not responsible" | Ignorance revealed as willful | You always knew but chose not to see |

## The Four Engine Patterns

### Pattern 1: The Exchange Engine
**Mechanism**: Every benefit has a cost paid at distance

- Cost manifests where you can't see it
- System designed to maximize distance between benefit and cost
- Discovery reveals the hidden geography of harm

**Examples**: The key that locks distant doors. Happiness borrowed from future self. Healing that transfers wounds to strangers.

### Pattern 2: The Accumulation Engine
**Mechanism**: Individual actions seem harmless but collectively destroy

- Each person only sees their small contribution
- Collective harm invisible to individuals
- Pattern recognition reveals systemic damage

**Examples**: Each lie adds weight to shared atmosphere. Individual forgetting crowds collective memory. Personal success erodes community resources.

### Pattern 3: The Cascade Engine
**Mechanism**: Actions trigger chains that spiral beyond perception

- Initial action seems contained
- Consequences propagate through hidden networks
- Revelation traces cascade back to origin

**Examples**: Confession plague spreading through social networks. Emotional freezing affecting relationship chains. Time-delayed consequences arriving generations later.

### Pattern 4: The Inheritance Engine
**Mechanism**: Past actions by proximity ancestors determine present reality

- Previous generation acted with distance-blindness
- Current generation inherits both tools and consequences
- Discovery reveals complicity through bloodline/position

**Examples**: Grandmother's key and its accumulated locks. Genetic debt passing through families. Institutional positions carrying historical crimes.

## The Revelation Arc

### Act 1: Comfortable Distance
- Protagonist operates within normal moral proximity
- Uses system without seeing full consequences
- Believes the comfortable fiction
- Small irregularities appear at periphery

### Act 2A: First Parallax Shift
- Initial discovery that distance isn't what it seemed
- Victim has unexpected proximity connection
- Pattern emerges suggesting systematic exploitation
- Protagonist realizes they're already implicated

### Act 2B: The Distance Collapse
- Investigation reveals proximity was always illusion
- "Distant others" were actually "hidden neighbors"
- Past actions created present crisis
- Every escape route leads deeper into complicity

### Act 3: Navigate Without Distance
- Can't restore comfortable distance
- Must act knowing full proximity of consequences
- Choose between different proximity violations
- Accept position as both victim and perpetrator

## Diagnostic Questions

When developing a moral parallax story, ask:

1. **What comfortable distance does your world maintain?**
2. **Who benefits from maintaining that distance?**
3. **Who pays the cost of that distance?**
4. **What would collapse the distance?**
5. **How would characters navigate without distance?**
6. **What systems would emerge to manage visible proximity?**
7. **How do people live knowing the true proximity of harm?**

## Design Process

### Step 1: Choose Your Distance Type
Which comfortable distance will you collapse?
- Temporal: "It's in the future/past"
- Spatial: "It's happening elsewhere"
- Social: "It's happening to others"
- Causal: "I'm not directly responsible"
- Informational: "I don't/can't know"

### Step 2: Design the Comfort Mechanism
How does the system maintain distance?
- Physical separation
- Time delays
- Social barriers
- Causal complexity
- Information occlusion

### Step 3: Create the Parallax Event
What reveals the true proximity?
- Personal consequence arrives
- Pattern becomes visible
- Investigation reveals connection
- Inheritance includes revelation
- System breakdown exposes machinery

### Step 4: Map the Proximity Collapse
How does distance implode?
- **Linear**: Steady approach of consequences
- **Sudden**: Instant revelation of proximity
- **Recursive**: Each discovery creates new collapse
- **Viral**: Proximity awareness spreads like infection
- **Retroactive**: Past is rewritten by proximity knowledge

### Step 5: Design the Navigation Challenge
What choices exist without distance?
- Sacrifice inner circle for outer
- Accept complicity to minimize harm
- Destroy system at personal cost
- Maintain system with full knowledge
- Find least-harmful path through

## Genre Applications

### Urban Fantasy: The Debt Districts
City neighborhoods absorb different types of metaphysical debt. Financial excess creates poverty zones. Joy creates depression sectors. Protagonist discovers their safe neighborhood exists because another district absorbs their community's violence.

### Science Fiction: The Light-Speed Crisis
FTL travel works by stealing time from specific locations. Every jump ages certain planets rapidly. Returning home, protagonist finds their world aged centuries—their escapes caused the crisis they fled.

### Horror: The Trauma Inheritance
Unprocessed trauma literally passes to nearest emotional connection when someone dies. Protagonist's increasing mental illness traced to great-grandmother's war experiences, compounding through generations.

### Contemporary Fantasy: The Attention Economy
Human attention becomes finite and tradeable. Looking at something drains it. Being ignored allows growth. Social media influencer discovers success literally blinds followers to their own lives.

## Implementation Checklist

- [ ] Distance Type selected
- [ ] Comfort Mechanism designed
- [ ] Parallax Event planned
- [ ] Collapse Pattern mapped
- [ ] Navigation Challenge created
- [ ] Systemic Revelation built (personal reveals societal)
- [ ] Complicity established (protagonist already involved)
- [ ] Exit Routes blocked (can't just leave)
- [ ] Partial Resolution allowed (pyrrhic victory possible)
- [ ] Truth Burden assigned (knowledge they must carry forward)

## Why This Framework Works

Stories using moral parallax:

1. **Feel true** — We live in systems that export harm
2. **Resist simplification** — No clean moral position exists
3. **Create complicity** — Readers recognize themselves
4. **Reveal systems** — Personal stories illuminate structural oppression
5. **Prevent heroes** — Everyone is compromised by proximity

## The Ultimate Question

**What happens when you can no longer pretend the distance exists?**

The power of moral parallax is that it makes innocence impossible. Once distance collapses, characters cannot return to ignorance. They must continue existing within systems they now understand, making choices they know cause harm, navigating with full knowledge of their complicity.

## Output Persistence

### Output Discovery
1. Check for `context/output-config.md` in the project
2. If found, look for this skill's entry
3. If not found, ask user: "Where should I save moral parallax designs?"
4. Suggest: `stories/concepts/` or `explorations/stories/`

### Primary Output
- **Distance type** - Which comfortable distance collapses
- **Engine pattern** - Exchange, Accumulation, Cascade, or Inheritance
- **Comfort mechanism** - How system maintains distance
- **Parallax event** - What reveals true proximity
- **Navigation challenge** - Choices without distance

### File Naming
Pattern: `{story-concept}-parallax-{date}.md`

## Verification (Oracle)

### What This Skill Can Verify
- **Distance type selected** - Clear choice from five types? (High confidence)
- **Engine pattern present** - One of four patterns applied? (High confidence)
- **Complicity established** - Protagonist already involved? (Medium confidence)

### What Requires Human Judgment
- **Moral weight** - Does collapse feel significant?
- **Protagonist complicity** - Is involvement believable?
- **Resolution appropriateness** - Is navigation challenge fair?

### Oracle Limitations
- Cannot assess whether moral distance feels real to readers
- Cannot predict emotional impact of collapse

## Feedback Loop

### Session Persistence
- **Output location:** See `context/output-config.md`
- **What to save:** Distance, engine, mechanism, event, challenge
- **Naming pattern:** `{story-concept}-parallax-{date}.md`

### Cross-Session Learning
- Check for prior moral parallax work in this setting
- Ensure systemic consistency
- Failed collapse structures inform anti-patterns

## Design Constraints

### This Skill Assumes
- System maintains comfortable distance between action and consequence
- Protagonist benefits from the system (is complicit)
- Clean resolution is not possible

### This Skill Does Not Handle
- **Hero narratives** - Route to: character-arc (for clear victory arcs)
- **System worldbuilding** - Route to: governance-systems or economic-systems
- **Individual positions** - Route to: positional-revelation

### Degradation Signals
- Simple good vs. evil revealed (morality play)
- Clean resolution available (wish fulfillment)
- Protagonist uniquely ethical (hero narrative)

## Reasoning Requirements

### Standard Reasoning
- Single distance type selection
- Basic engine pattern application
- Simple collapse structure

### Extended Reasoning (ultrathink)
- **Multi-distance collapse** - [Why: layering multiple distances]
- **Full arc design** - [Why: revelation through navigation must cohere]
- **System integration** - [Why: distance mechanism must fit world]

**Trigger phrases:** "design the complete collapse", "layer multiple distances", "build the system"

## Execution Strategy

### Sequential (Default)
- Distance type before engine pattern
- Engine before comfort mechanism
- Mechanism before parallax event
- Event before navigation challenge

### Parallelizable
- Designing multiple distance collapses
- Research into different systemic exploitation

### Subagent Candidates
| Task | Agent Type | When to Spawn |
|------|------------|---------------|
| System research | general-purpose | When modeling on real exploitation systems |
| World consistency | Explore | When verifying against existing setting |

## Context Management

### Approximate Token Footprint
- **Skill base:** ~3k tokens (distances + engines + arc)
- **With genre applications:** ~4k tokens
- **With checklist:** ~4.5k tokens

### Context Optimization
- Focus on relevant distance type and engine
- Genre applications are examples, not required
- Diagnostic questions are optional reference

### When Context Gets Tight
- Prioritize: Current distance type, active engine
- Defer: All genre applications, full revelation arc
- Drop: Implementation checklist, diagnostic questions

## Anti-Patterns

### 1. Morality Play Collapse
**Pattern:** The distance collapse reveals simple good vs. evil—the exploiters are villains, the exploited are victims, and the protagonist was fooled.
**Why it fails:** The framework's power is that everyone is compromised. Simple villainy restores comfortable distance: "I'm not like the bad guys." Real systemic harm involves ordinary people making reasonable choices within corrupt systems.
**Fix:** Ensure the protagonist benefits from the system, not just the obvious villains. Make exploiters sympathetic enough to show how anyone becomes complicit. The discomfort should be personal, not displaced.

### 2. Clean Resolution
**Pattern:** The protagonist exposes the system, reforms it, or escapes to a morally clean position.
**Why it fails:** Moral parallax stories are about living without distance. If the protagonist can restore innocence, the story becomes wish-fulfillment that lets readers off the hook too.
**Fix:** Resolution should involve accepting complicity while choosing the least harmful path forward. The system continues; the protagonist must continue within it, now with knowledge.

### 3. Symbolic Distance Collapse
**Pattern:** The collapse is metaphorical or philosophical rather than concretely felt—characters realize systemic harm intellectually.
**Why it fails:** Intellectual understanding preserves emotional distance. The collapse must be visceral, personal, undeniable—felt, not just understood.
**Fix:** Make the collapse concrete. The victim has a face, a name, a relationship to the protagonist. The harm is specific, not statistical. The protagonist can't retreat to abstraction.

### 4. Single-Axis Collapse
**Pattern:** Only one type of distance collapses (usually spatial), leaving other comfortable distances intact.
**Why it fails:** Real systemic harm involves multiple overlapping distances. Collapsing only one allows reconstruction of comfort through the others: "I didn't know" even when harm is spatially proximate.
**Fix:** Layer multiple distance collapses. Spatial proximity reveals temporal debt. Social collapse reveals causal chains. Make the comfortable fiction comprehensively impossible.

### 5. Protagonist Exceptionalism
**Pattern:** The protagonist is uniquely sensitive, aware, or ethical—they see what others can't or won't.
**Why it fails:** This recreates the hero narrative. The protagonist becomes special rather than representative. Readers identify with the exceptional character rather than recognizing themselves.
**Fix:** The protagonist should be ordinary in their blindness. They maintained comfortable distance like everyone else. Their discovery is circumstance, not virtue. Anyone in their position would see the same thing.

## Integration

### Inbound (feeds into this skill)
| Skill | What it provides |
|-------|------------------|
| worldbuilding | Systems that maintain comfortable distance |
| economic-systems | Economic structures that export harm |
| governance-systems | Political structures that obscure responsibility |

### Outbound (this skill enables)
| Skill | What this provides |
|-------|-------------|
| character-arc | Complicity arcs where growth means accepting guilt |
| positional-revelation | How positions create systemic complicity |
| endings | Pyrrhic, compromised, or ongoing-struggle resolutions |

### Complementary
| Skill | Relationship |
|-------|--------------|
| identity-denial | Moral-parallax collapses external distance; identity-denial maintains internal distance. Characters often deny what moral-parallax forces them to see |
| positional-revelation | Positional-revelation shows how jobs create involvement; moral-parallax shows the moral weight of that involvement |