On Problematic Tropes
Oct. 22nd, 2015 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynI 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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 05:04 pm (UTC)What conflict?
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 05:31 pm (UTC)Eg, say an author has a fantasy about how awesome master/slave relationships are and it'd be wonderful as long as the master was, y'know, a nice guy, or at least nicer than the average master. Oh and obviously some races are just MEANT to be the slaves and another to be the masters. And women are just NATURALLY subservient, so all of the ones in the story are super-happy to be enslaved. Even assuming that the author knows this fantasy has zero bearing on reality and would be horrible in any attempted implentation, should the author feel a moral obligation not to write and publish a book portraying it? Or is it "just a harmless fantasy" and so sure, go ahead and tell it?
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 06:04 pm (UTC)So, Elliot Rodger shot a bunch of people because he felt that the world owed him a girlfriend, and women NOT doing what he wanted was not how the world should be.
In reaction, a lot of guys said stuff like, "see, ladies? You'd better let any guy who wants to fuck you, or you could be next".
The idea that women should be naturally subservient to men is not a harmless fantasy, but an idea really held by many people, and it's toxic shlock that kills people.
And even IF the author "knows" their fantasy is just that, there will be people who don't, and read the story, and feel their worldview strengthened.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 06:42 pm (UTC)But in the more immediate, imagine a story about some heroic Rebels who commandeer a couple of Imperial cargo ships and fly them right into the twin Imperial Towers in the heart of Coruscant City in a climactic and self-sacrificial blow to the wicked Emperor. Sometime back in, oh, the 1990s, such a story might have found its place. Releasing such a story around 2001 or so would be most unfortunate. A reader might be forgiven for wondering whether the author was trying to make a Statement that wasn't originally intended, simply because of the context of events.
I view certain fantasies in the same light. Maybe it is indeed harmless that someone creates a hero who engages in a master/slave relationship, and it's all okay, because the slave WANTS it, even if the slave doesn't immediately realize it or ... something. But it's a charged enough issue that I cannot ignore the "meta" concerns. Is this just a harmless author's fantasy? Or could it be that the author actually thinks that this is a good and just arrangement that should work just fine in the real world, if only more people would come to the author's point of view?
Or what if the author is making a satire, employing a false narrator? There is the danger of the satire being taken as earnestness. Is Lolita's narrator to be taken at face value? Or, perhaps, you succeed in communicating to the reader, "This is a satire! This is not meant to be taken seriously!" but you make a little too compelling and heartfelt a case for the villain's point of view, such that a reader might wonder--wonder--where your sympathies truly lie.
My main excuse for not writing anything is because I simply can't commit myself to finish much of anything, and too often I wish to "have done" something rather than to do the hard work of doing. However, there are more than a few ideas I've had where I've thought it would be interesting to have a story that presented the reader with a protagonist believably meant to BE the protagonist, yet the undertone encourages the reader to be more sympathize to the protagonist--perhaps even root for him or her--and then at some point the story does a 180, and if you've been feeling that way, you're vindicated. And yet, I've wondered ... what if I make the false protagonist too convincing? What if the reader thinks I actually like this, and everything this disagreeable "hero" stands for, and gives up in disgust partway through, before I do the "big reveal"? Or, worse, what if the reader actually LIKES the hero (despite my attempts to make him dreadful), and is disappointed when things turn against him?
I could litter a story with disclaimers ("The author does not actually advocate this point of view being voiced by the villain!") and ... well, I'm sure it could turn into quite a mess anyway.
But if a writer discounts all of that and plows right ahead with a book full of fantasies that feature, say, the moral and physical and mental superiority of ethnic group X over ethnic group Y (even where X and Y might be fictitious groups), I might wonder whether this gives insight into the writer's views in Real Life.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 09:51 pm (UTC)The original stories were about ponies coming to Earth and telling humans that they all had to convert into ponies and have their violent impulses curbed, or die to a wave of magic that burned humans to ash. A lot of them were slice of life transformation fics, but some were about fighting the evil resistance that didn't want people to 'lose their humanity' and were willing to kill innocent ponies to prevent it.
Some people thought the premise was misanthropic because it was implying that humans were inherently violent, so it sparked a wave of response stories where the people that converted were not the same as they'd been before so the original people were 'dead', and the ponies were evil for wanting to 'replace' everyone, and the heroic resistance had to murder millions of ponies and converts in order to save humanity.
It's really, really hard to read one of the stories written by the people you don't agree with, because you're almost guaranteed to side with the antagonists and then they'll LOSE in stupid ways because the author really wants you to identify with the protagonists and this is the part where you're supposed to be cheering. x.x
no subject
Date: 2015-10-23 12:10 am (UTC)Ah yes. Warring narratives in shared-world fiction. Been there. Sadly, done that, too. :( Ack. (There's so much I wish I could conveniently "undo" in the past. Leave the present as-is, sure, but let me just edit out this or that stupid thing I did that really didn't add anything useful to anyone's experience.)
fighting the evil resistance...
Huh. This actually reminds me of a sci-fi story I read, as part of an anthology (and I can't for the life of me remember any useful titles -- or any useful keywords to find it via Google) where some aliens came to Earth, journeyed around, and one of their number was basically releasing gas/spores/magic-stuff/whatever that was altering all life on Earth to be mildly psychic in the very, VERY specific sense that if you hurt anyone, you would suffer a mental backlash so you felt the pain of the person you caused the pain to. And if you killed someone (no mention made here of whether it has to be done PAINFULLY), you would die as well. And this would bring peace to the world. And this psychic power is amazingly accurate at determining who is "responsible" for what, without any nuance in regards to, say, if it's an accident, or just how indirect your responsibility can be and you still get nailed for it.
And it all works, of course, there's nobody in this world who would be willing to personally die in order to take out a large number of enemies.
This didn't just affect humans, and it wasn't limited to harming humanity. So no meat. Carnivores are out of luck. Lions, tigers, bears ... wolves, house cats, dogs? Doomed. But, hey, carnivores = evil. We learned that much from funny-animal cartoons, right? (I wonder if the author had any idea whatsoever just how much of our ecosystem includes life forms that KILL other life forms, and how totally messed up we'd be with such a mind-bogglingly large mass-extinction event?)
I so wanted to run over those self-righteous aliens with a truck, or blow them up or something, when I read this in high school. My emotional reactions in high school were generally ... lacking in nuance ... but after more careful consideration, it would probably be the right thing to do for the sake of saving the planet (just for more rational reasons than I bothered to consider at the time).
Ditto regards either side of this "Conversion Bureau." From what you've told me, I don't think I'd want to root for anybody in that conflict. Whee.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-23 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-23 02:55 pm (UTC)Thanks -- My Google-fu is weak (as is my memory). I'm pretty sure I would have never figured that out on my own.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-25 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-25 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 06:42 pm (UTC)I'm willing to "forgive" a number of things. I don't expect authors to share all my values. My political and religious viewpoints are pretty unpopular in various circles. I shouldn't be too shocked if the author celebrates a worldview that's incompatible with mine.
I might still get a bit taken aback if the author seems to go a little too far out of his way to hold up persons nominally sharing my political or religious background as straw-man villains destined to suffer some violent Karmic fate to the presumably gleeful cheers of the audience. But even then, it's a book. No matter how insulted I feel by it, this is (hallelujah!) a land of free speech. The author has the right to write that book. I've got the right to grumble and grouse about it.
Trying to get to your point: I think it's perfectly all right to be offended, and to talk about WHY you are offended. I dare say you can even ... condemn it. To condemn it is not necessarily the same as saying, "And we must CENSOR it!" or "And we must PUNISH the author!" You can dislike it very enthusiastically, very vigorously exercising your right to free speech, and it's still NOT the same thing.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 07:42 pm (UTC)I feel weird trying to explain why one book's use of a trope will set me off but not another's. A lot of it really does come down "do I feel like the author is advocating for this terrible idea, or just writing about it?" Because the latter doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as the former. But what I perceive as "advocating" is squishy, and other people are very likely to disagree, possibly to an extreme degree.
The other thing is that I try not to conflate "this is bad" with "I don't like this", so I am reluctant to condemn things that I don't like. Even though it's sometimes appropriate, like you say.
... I am so incoherent on this topic. :D
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 08:36 pm (UTC)I mean, I can think about "morality tales" in which there's some villain who gets his way, and eventually he gets his comeuppance in the end ... but until then, things look awfully good for him. "Reefer Madness" supposedly started out sponsored by a church group (originally titled "Tell Your Children") and yet somehow it's got a strip-tease and all sorts of stuff that doesn't seem to be in there for purely moralistic reasons.
I think here about "Death Note," and how the protagonist -- I daren't say "hero" -- basically gets his way through the run of the series. Sure, something bad may eventually happen to him in the end, but he sure got to gloat and play "god" for a pretty long ride, and he's sure got his fan base. At some point ... okay, is he really the villain, or are we supposed to root for him and then lament his "tragic" end?
On the one hand, the author might focus on the brutality of a villain's crime so that we remember that and don't feel too keen to sympathize with him when things go against him. However, an especially long and graphic rape scene in a book ... okay, thank goodness I can skim over that, but past a certain point I might wonder why the author is spending quite this much detail and narrative on that. I do not want to participate in this, and that's what I feel like is happening to some degree if a story's POV focuses too much on graphic cruelty, even in the name of "showing the true side of evil."
But where's the dividing line? If we just totally hide and gloss over the wicked things the villain has done, it might invite the reader to sympathize with him, as whatever his "wrongs" are, they're out of sight and out of mind, and surely can't be worth the extreme cruelty with which the designated hero delivers retribution. (I've felt this way about a number of fan stories and sloppily-presented derivative works where the writer just introduces us to the heroes killing antagonists effortlessly and joyously without bothering to take the time to make sure that we're on board with the fact that these are, indeed, BAD GUYS and thus worthy of such treatment. I find it especially necessary if it's a story with an outlaw hero and law-enforcement antagonists; sorry, but as much as I realize that police powers can be abused, I'm not at the point where I see a cops-and-robbers situation and automatically assume "robber = good guy; cop = bad," so more effort is required to bring me on board.)
I don't think there CAN be a real rule for where to draw such lines, and "I know it when I see it" sounds pretty lame. If I run into something like this that makes me uncomfortable, I'll often back up and see if I can find some more context. In the days of Google, I've got a number of options. I might see what else the author has written. Is there a theme here? Or, are there statements by the author? I thought very differently of Lolita once I heard a reference made to the story in the context of an "unreliable narrator," and I learned more about Nabokov. But then (since it seemed relevant just now because I was trying to find an example of a "misunderstood satire") I read the history of some of his earlier works prior to Lolita, with very similar themes, and that made me uncomfortable again. (So ... I don't know what to think there.)
I might just be left with, "It's unclear, so I'm just uncomfortable with this." However, sometimes I'll find out that, yes, the author really DOES believe (thus-and-such is the way things ought to be) and is keen on letting this be known, thus driving out any ambiguity (and perhaps even embracing the controversy) -- but I wouldn't be able to tell for sure from just reading the story itself.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 06:46 pm (UTC)I lean more toward the first premise: art is communication. Art spreads ideas into people's heads. Difficult subjects can be tackled in art, and may yield interesting insights, but yeah, it can also be toxic fantasy.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-23 12:43 am (UTC)*ducks*
no subject
Date: 2015-10-22 07:32 pm (UTC)