There aren't many stories without morals, simply because humans will project them onto the story whether the author intended that particular moral or not. Also, the bleed over of the creator's own morals will automatically mean that events will be portrayed or presented in a particular way. It would take a really objectivist approach to have a story devoid of any kind of moral, and then, it its own way, that would be a moral in itself.

Morals and Themes are hard to talk about when you actually sit down with people and discuss. The problem is you're gonna find a lot of "death of the author" talks. Lets take Joker for example, There are plenty of people that don't believe Joker has a Moral or a Theme because it saying "too much" and its message is "muddled and confused."

Now I can go on a several paragraph rant of how both sides see the film but imma just summaries so I don't waste peoples time. Basically someone can look at Joker and get the message "be nice to people" "take mental health seriously" However there are other people who see a confused narrative as Arthur feels like the only one who is having it rough, while also seeing that the entire town is seeing unrest with its current state of government. These folks usually say something like "maybe it wanted a moral but it didn't succeed so it doesn't have one."

The point i want to make is: When it comes to people we like to see patterns even when they don't exist. So even if the author didn't want a moral Death of the Author exists, and where the Author made a story that means nothing to them, they could make a story that means the world to someone else who has experienced life in a diffrent way. The opposite also occurs where an Author my want to make a moral. However clear that author may have tired to make that message some people just wont be able to empathize with the Author's story or life and sometimes you'll get the people who say "I just don't get it."

I think you can have stories without morals, simple short stories about every day life or so. But someone will always be able to inject their own morals into your story because their life might be diffrent then yours.

I personally am not a fan of writing that claims to have no message. I think it's either ignorant of the fact that every decision you make about what is in or not in a work is innately political, or a cowardly way of avoiding responsibility for the content of your work. I'm fine with people having different opinions on that and enjoying what they enjoy, but that's honestly how I feel about it.

I remember when I was doing my Games Design MA, I was in lectures with all the other Design MA students, even though Games Design as a discipline has very little in common with things like Pottery or Fashion, but there we were. One day, our guest lecturer was a sculptor. She made these big statement pieces of conceptual art, for example when commissioned to make a sculpture to go near a place that sells sausages, she made this big ugly, garishly coloured fibreglass statue of a pig skewered on a fork (she got paid tens of thousands of pounds for this), because she "thought people don't really think about where their food comes from. They forget that a sausage was once living animal". Okay, I thought, I think it's a shallow statement for a piece of work designed to go in a farming area where everyone is very aware of this, but okay, go off...
But then she said, "I don't make statements with my art, I only make observations. I'm just an observer of people."
Now that.... I took umbrage with and straight up asked her at the questions part at the end of the lecture, "you say that you're just an observer, but don't you think making a piece of art about something is a statement?" She couldn't give an answer. She just brushed it off with an "Oh that's an interesting point hmm..." Wow, it sure is nice to make huge sums of money making art and when people praise you to own it, but if somebody criticises it to be able to easily disown it as having no meaning, huh? It's the artistic equivalent of saying something edgy and problematic with absolute sincerity and if people react badly saying it was "just a joke".

I don't believe it is possible to make a piece of art that doesn't say something about what you or your culture values or believes should be valued or should be seen as relateable or laughed at. By saying you're not making a statement, you are implicitly making the statement that you endorse the status quo, whether of the real world or of existing tropes of fantasy and sci-fi and do not want to face your own biases and assumptions.

I will acknowledge that yes, a lot of the work of teenagers will inevitably have very flat morals and messages that may feel embarrassing to read, which is due to a lack of experience and deeper knowledge of the world due to still learning about it. So often teenagers writing stories with morals do make things with statements like "Bullies are bad and deserve violent revenge" or "This character who is totally not based me at all, they just happen to share all my opinions and interests, is treated with undue cruelty by the world", or "hurting animals is always bad and so we should just release all captive animals immediately without considering any ramifications." ....so yeah, in work by many (NOT ALL! One of my fave books, Frankenstein, was written by a teen and it is astonishingly deep and clever!) teenagers, just a snapshot of a person or place can come across as far more sophisticated writing or art, because it just requires describing, and if the snapshot shows poverty or despair, framing that in a work alone to bring attention to real human suffering can be an easier way to make a deep statement than trying to awkwardly describe a lesson or solution with limited knowledge of the problem. You see, as soon as you make art about a thing, the fact that you chose to make the art about that thing IS a statement about the value and meaning of the thing.

The absence of a war is a choice to focus on other things, that those things are more important. Hence a moral decision. I agree with @KRWilliams

Sometimes this means no conscious choice was made. There are things about which I have no opinion (like the emoticons). Someone here argued the other day that, too, is an opinion. I disagree because an opinion requires analysis and I literally had not considered those emoticons until then, but even if I didn't know there were any such things as emoticons in the universe, I was still making a moral choice to focus my limited stress/opinion energy on other things besides the aesthetics around me.

Writing content with a lack of moral ironically makes everything soley about the creators perspective and not the content or its audience. So a moral is inevitably going to reveal itself, just a lot less valuable.

If you want to know about the author personally it is useful. Otherwise it is a waste of content.

When you dont create a purpose, life will assign one ultimately.

Slice-of-life is a whole genre that usually doesn't have a single message. Same could be said for most coming-of-age stories (Tom Spanbauers books are great examples of absolutely meaningless coming-of-age stories). Of course there's always dots you can connect like "prejudice=bad" and try to make a message out of nothing, but it's not like stories without message/meaning are rare.

Take H.Hesse's Demian. It's the story of Emil Sinclair and his friend/mentor Max Demian, and while Demian challenges the opinions and thoughts Emil carelessly throws together (he's a pretentious twat who absorbs the opinions and ideals of one of his university professors for like 2/3rds of the book), there's really no clear agenda, or point, to any of it.

Also a great example would be The old man and the sea, where it's just a few hundred pages of the musings of an old man who has no other company but himself.

Strories don't need to teach you anything to be good, or thought provoking.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Respectfully disagree, especially on the idea that a coming of age story has no moral or meaning. Coming-of-age stories are all about reaching maturity, and how the character grows as part of that process. The very name "coming of age" evokes cultural ceremonies that celebrate some milestone considered by a culture to be a marker of adulthood and being able to marry, vote, fight as a soldier etc. Every coming of age story is about a lesson that the character learns that transitions them from a child to an adult, and so is a commentary on what the writer thinks is the important thing that differentiates childhood from adulthood. That may be a loss of innocence or ignorance, it may be the lesson that sometimes it's necessary to fight or kill or to take responsibility for your family, kingdom or the world, or to travel far from home and your parents etc. etc.

Slice of Life stories similarly pose themselves as simple fluff without commentary, but everything you put into one says something about what the creator values. Whose life is it a slice of? Who is the point of view character? Are the problems they run into framed as wider social issues or their own failings? Who do they end up romantically entangled with and how is that framed? Who is presented as a viable romantic partner? Does the tone of the comic present certain events as traumatic or funny? (ie. a guy just walked in on a girl changing her clothes. In many shounen manga slice of life comics like Love Hina, the girl will react violently and this will be framed as funny. But in another slice of life, say, one by a woman, this could be presented as a terrifying and very vulnerable or embarrassing experience.)

Ie. Let's imagine a slice of life comedy about a straight white girl who lives in the UK, romantically entangled with two straight boys. One is also white, and he's a sporty party boy who gasp! is cheating on her! and the other is a shy, bookish asian boy who is too shy and sweet to say he fancies her but he totally does and also he's actually secretly ripped. There is only one LGBT character and it's the protagonist's campy gay housemate who loves fashion and is constantly bringing home different hot boys, but he's always there to dole out emotional truth. In the end, girl ends up with cute asian boy after party boy tries to force her to do drugs at a party and he defends her and drives her drunk arse home.
This isn't meaningless. There would be so many statements in this hypothetical comic being made about white women being emotionally pure victims in need of protection from a knight in a shining car, about asians being nerdy, shy and studious, about the true value of a guy as a partner being his physical fitness, about gay people being campy horndogs only viable in comic relief roles and existing to listen to the problems of women and give sage advice etc. etc. Hell, just the fact that the comic focuses on relationships could be read as "relationships are an important part of the human experience." a statement most people would agree with, but a statement nonetheless.

What you choose to make art about is a choice. Making fluff is absolutely fine and I have no ill will towards anyone who does... but what you choose to put in your fluff is still an ethical and political choice, as is how you frame it. Being a writer or artist will always come with responsibility.

Honestly, that is all so pretentious I have no desire to respond to any of it.

Nah. It's just decent talk on the craft of writing or creating something. I wouldn't say it's pretentious at all.

@darthmongoose - I agree with a lot of what you've written in this thread. I rarely see people actually getting to grips with craft talk on the forums, but you've raised some pretty interesting points about slice of life and how WHO slice of life focuses on is a moral statement in itself. It gave me something to think about for sure.

Dude, garfield is like, nihilism to at T

Oh I know there is but the thing is people here have said there is media that is pointless without a moral lesson yet some people can even find some moral lesson in something like Garfield is kinda proof that nothing is truly pointless.

Yup. There is nothing that is without a moral somewhere.