On Problematic Tropes

[rowyn]

I have a couple of conflicting principles that I don't know how to reconcile:

* Fiction at its best illuminates reality. This includes all genres, even the obviously fantastic and implausible. Fiction has the ability to make us understand one another better, to let us see through another's eyes. This is amazing and powerful and should be used wisely.
* Daydreams and fantasies are harmless fun. Fantasizing about things that are unrealistic, as long as you know that they're unrealistic and have no interest in making them reality, is fine.

There's no conflict between the two when one's fantasy is something socially-acceptable if impossible, like "having a telepathic bond with a friendly dragon".  Things where, if you could make them real, it wouldn't be particularly detrimental for the world at large.

But lots of fantasies are not socially-acceptable, nor a desirable/plausible reality. Twilight, for example, gets a lot of flak for its romance between a century-old vampire stalker and his 17 year-old love interest*. There's a novel I won't name about a romance between a Nazi concentration camp commander and a  Jewish prisoner that ends with him rescuing the internees and her converting to Christianity. Master/slave romances are commonplace.

I've named all romance tropes here because those are the ones I hear discussed. Maybe in horror circles they discuss whether their monsters are too monstrous or the events depicted too awful, and I just don't hear it. I hear occasional decrying of the Chosen One trope of fantasy, or more rarely, on the idealization of feudal societies and tyranny.

In general, I am talking about tropes that entertain but appear to do the opposite of illuminate: dehumanise, debase, disinform. Tropes that turn things that are devastating and awful in reality into light entertainment, or portray those things as acceptable and even enjoyable in the context of the story.

I believe in free speech, so obviously I think people should be allowed to read and write what they please regardless of whether or not I think it has merit. That part is easy.

But when I run into a trope that deeply offends me, I feel this conflict over whether or not condemnation is appropriate. How dangerous are fantasies? Does it make a difference if you draw on real history or use a fantasy world for the setting? (Eg, would the Nazi/Jew romance be less offensive if the same tropes were used in fictional countries with fictional religions?) How much does tone matter? I can't help thinking that tone has an impact, that some things are written as escapism and the author and readers are aware that it's Not Realistic, and that's different from a book written seriously. From one where the author's style suggests "this book is illuminating, resonant, true" and I am all D:

But I don't know. Maybe what I want is a bright line between someone's goofy dubcon fanfic and a mainstream novel glorifying rape, and maybe there can't be one. Maybe judging works case-by-case, and recognizing that what I think is offensive and repugnant may be someone else's harmless fantasy (and vice-versa) is inevitable.

I remain curious about how other people feel on the topic: Of the principles I opened with, do you find one one or the other unconvincing? If both are relevant, how do you handle the conflict?

* On this subject: I half-joked last month that 'I'm not saying it's not possible to write a good romance between a first-person young woman narrator and an ancient superpowerful male jerk. Wait, maybe I am'. But I remembered later that there's a book I liked which used this trope! N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. So yeah, apparently I judge based on execution as well, even when I feel strongly about the trope.

Comments

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I think intent matters, and as a result tone and skill can matter. If someone has fantasies about socially unacceptable things, it's often the case that it's not by choice, and condemning someone for it when they understand the distinction between fantasy and what is ethical or moral isn't right. So, when a work can skillfully approach this content without net damaging the... I don't know, fabric of social perception? Whatever it is. If it can skillfully approach that wherein the net result is something of value to people more than it is a negative influence, hey great. If the intent is decent but the execution is sucky/damaging, that's not so good. If the intent is to influence people toward ethically/morally unacceptable behavior, like a KKK manifesto wrought into an alluring story, we're getting into truly irresponsible territory. At that point, whether someone is good or poor at the execution and setting of tone might be less of a factor in responsibility and social worth, though maybe at that point you start measuring these things in level of threat.

It's funny... Just yesterday, a guy on the street snarled at me and told me to "fuck myself and go to hell, fucking 'spic." And I actually found it hard to be upset or offended because of how hilariously inept it all was... pretty much just an ignorant dude with some issues. I'd be way more offended and angry at someone who did their slurring in a subtler, shadier, more cunning way. Or who at least got my ethnicity right. X3 I could kind if see a parallel where fiction was involved.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I don't think I can get away from "tone matters", personally. It isn't in me to say that someone's BDSM master/slave fantasy is innately dangerous to society, even though real-world slavery is unredeemably awful. But I couldn't say "so that KKK manifesto/misogynist screed/whatever you wrote is fine", either.

And I am not going to draw the line in the same place that other people do, and I am just going to have to live with the standards being variable on this one. :|

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I see intent as mattering a lot. And this includes both received intent -- what the reader perceives as the message the work is intended to convey -- as well as actual intent.

A lot of what made the Nazi camp commandant/Jewish prisoner romance novel so goddamn offensive was the not-widely-commented-on frame: that the author was an evangelical Christian and that the love that brings them together is the love of Jeeeeezus (pronunciation to suit American evangelist) and they go on together to Convert All The Jews. Speaking solely for myself as someone of the relevant ethnicity (who lost a huge branch of his family tree in Dachau), that's the most offensive aspect of it -- not the dubious power dynamic or the romance element, but the cultural erasure message.

To take another example: "stories of female subjugation and in some cases willing collaboration in a patriarchal society" is a description that covers both John Norman's "Gor" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". Common trope, wildly divergent treatments -- and the key difference is the intent of the author.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

(Here via andrewducker).

This is pretty much my thinking as well. I have no problem with fiction that portrays morally dubious or obnoxious situations, relationships, etc, but I want it to be written in a way that conveys that I-as-reader am supposed to find this disturbing. That way, there's less risk of some asshat taking it as a manifesto statement, and I can still use bits of it as fantasy fodder if I want to. Showing that it's problematic doesn't prevent that - in fact, it probably enhances it, because when I have problematic fantasies, their moral ambiguity is frankly part of the fascination. It's my subconscious telling me there's something there that I haven't quite resolved yet, and exploring those fantasies while being aware of their problematic nature is often part of figuring out what resolution might look like.

[rowyn]

Oooh. That's a really interesting take on it! I must think about that more.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Heh. Most of my daydreams end badly. I seem to have a knack for imagining ALL SORTS OF WAYS my fantasy can go horribly wrong. My difficulty is in imagining happy endings that don't involve an obvious deus ex machina or at least some sort of all-too conveeeeeeenient development. (I consider the villain suddenly grabbing the idiot ball to be among such developments.)

I'm sure there's some sort of relationship between this phenomenon and my spending so much time GMing role-playing games.

Ahem. Anyway, I think one way of showing "the author does not necessarily advocate for this" is to have some character provide the reasonable voice of opposition ... and NOT make that character out to be some horrible-jerk-and-thus-his-arguments-are-invalid type.

I think some of the most compelling stories for me are ones where the villain has a pretty self-consistent argument ... and yet it's pretty understandable that the hero won't (or CAN'T) be swayed by it. The villain might have a compelling argument that he has been wrong, but if the villain's solution necessitates certain extreme "sacrifices" to carry out, a hero can be forgiven for opposing him anyway. This doesn't mean I never want villains to be evil by any means, and it doesn't mean that I honestly think that every villain is all that thoughtful. It just makes it more interesting for me than "Bwahahahaha! I am the wicked because BEING EVIL IS FUN! So there!"

Still, in some alternate imaginary universe where I would devote my time to being an author ... I think I would want to run my stories by a friend with significantly different experiences than mine, whose opinions I respect (even if I don't always agree with them), for a run-through to make sure I am not accidentally communicating that which I do not wish to. Am I spending TOO MUCH time articulating the villain's POV, to the point where a reader might mistake the villain for the tragic protagonist? Might the reader mistakenly think that I'm actually rooting for the evil Empire and think that blowing up peaceful planets is a reasonable way to maintain order in the galaxy?

I think it's worth getting a "sanity check" on stuff like this. I know what I'm saying -- or what I'm trying to say, anyway -- but that doesn't mean I have a good grasp on what someone on the other side is going to read into my work.

[rowyn]

When I was writing my initial post, I didn't want to go off on a tangent about how terrible I thought a particular example was, but: YES. The "Nazi commander/Jewish prisoner romance" concept is, by itself, so bad that my SO said "you can stop there" and you pretty much can. But having it be an "inspirational romance" makes it ineffably worse. It destroys any hope I might have that "this is a goofy fetishistic thing not actually meant to be a lesson applicable to the real world".  It's practically screaming "if you find yourself inexplicably attracted to a genocidal mass murderer, try to reform him. SURELY THAT WILL END WELL."

And THAT isn't even touching on the utter horror of taking a religious group massacred because of their religion and having the narrative say "I'll save you! BY CONVERTING YOU." NO JUST NO WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA EVER.

Ahem.

I think this was the one example on my list where I wanted to condemn the author for seeking publication and the publisher for printing it. Free country, yes you can say it, but that doesn't mean you SHOULD. But my father is Jewish (an atheist, mind, but still Jewish), and I expect that makes me take this more personally than I would if I were unrelated.

Anyway, I agree about received intent, which I think is a lot more important than the author's planned intent. If the author can't make their intended message come through in the narrative, it doesn't really matter what it was. The vast majority of their audience is never going to know about it. All they'll know is what was in the story.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I mostly agree -- but received intent isn't a constant; some readers will persistently miss the point even if you club them between the eyes with it nailed to the end of a baseball bat. Srsly, about 20-25% of readers are always going to misread the text, at a "mistaking the bad guys for good guys" level of fundamental misunderstanding, while about 20-25% will read it mostly correctly, and 5-10% will actually understand the hidden subtexts and sly messages and get all the easter eggs.

All one can really do is try to make it hard to get the point back-to-front; hoping people get the point is a losing battle.

(Source: bitter experience and > 20 published novels under my belt.)

[rowyn]

I am always tickled when people comment on the subtexts in my work. I'm all "Awwwwww you noticed! ♥" Because you can't just tell people it's there: then it'd be TEXT and not SUBtext. :D