Help with a macguffin/plot point?

It follows to siblings on opposite sides of a war* and ideally they're equally justified in their position.

I don't mean this to sound harsh or off-putting, but truthfully, that sounds really, really hackneyed. I'm hard-pressed to think of a way that that story could be told in a way that doesn't come off as a preachy sermon about moral ambiguity.

To get around that, I would suggest reframing your story as a question you would like to explore. Don't start with the answer and then try to reverse-engineer a story that would result in that answer (as you seem to be doing here). Pick a question that legitimately confounds you and write your novel trying to express that question in all its peculiarities, leaving the reader to come up with the answer on their own. Questions tend to beget more questions, which will naturally get you even more plot as you work to unpack the meaning of that first question. You can do a bit of gardening along the way to trend the story in the direction you want, but forcing the story into a preset mold can make your authorial presence and intent far too transparent and leave the reader feeling like they're reading an essay rather than a living story.

In this case, I'd start with the brothers themselves rather than the war they're on different sides of. What makes them see the world differently? What makes them see the world similarly? What could cause two brothers to diverge? That's a better place to explore, though it's still kinda well-worn territory so you'll need really exceptional writing to elevate it.

With regards to your actual question, though, there are all sorts of reasons that could be devised to push a general towards killing an entire town but I would caution you to avoid picking a strictly supernatural reason for this if you want to keep it ambiguous. If an entire town is about to become incurably murderous zombies, for example, there's not really much of a debate that could be had against killing them, now is there? The reader will give your general a pass because he's just operating under the rules of the world he's in. But what if he knows the town has harbored a great evil against his orders and he wipes the town from the map so no one else will harbor this evil? That's much more arguable. Again, though, your writing will need to be impeccable to pull this off because regardless of whether the reader agrees with the character or whether the character cries about what he's done or not, it's really difficult to sympathize with someone who's slain children in cold blood.

/r/fantasywriters Thread