Mediocre white men and their inflated confidence have been a popular topic since Sarah Hagi’s famous 2015 tweet. In Ijeoma Oluo’s 2021 book on the topic, Mediocre, she describes the phenomenon like so:
I am not arguing that every white man is mediocre. I do not believe any race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity. What I’m saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.
We have many ways to examine white male mediocrity within our stories. We could look at the overrepresentation of white men or examine the way audiences treat white male characters in comparison to others. However, I’ve chosen one lens in particular.
Below are five of the many big-budget stories that tell us white men should triumph even when they don’t deserve to. Each story openly acknowledges the great flaws or misdeeds of a white male protagonist, yet takes it for granted that the audience will root for him anyway. And in each story, the white male character is either excused for causing harm to a woman or given a glorified role that a more deserving female character or character of color could have filled.
Content Notice: Discussion of rape and a near-suicide in fiction.
1. Jim, Passengers
In this thankfully controversial scifi romance, Jim and Aurora are in cryosleep for a 120-year voyage to a new colony on a distant planet. Something goes wrong on the ship, and Jim’s pod wakes him up 90 years early. While all of his basic needs are seen to by the ship’s automated systems, he has no way to get back into cryosleep. He’s destined to be alone on the ship for his entire life.
Then Jim sees Aurora sleeping in another cryopod and decides he wants her. Because there is apparently no privacy in the future, he’s able to watch interviews where she explains just how much this voyage means to her. She’s planning to visit the colony and then take another voyage back to earth, making her the first writer to travel 250 years into the future.*
Because Jim wants this hot woman he’s never met, he decides to wake her, thereby robbing her of her dreams and forcing her to spend the rest of her life alone on the ship with him. The ways this movie tries to make his choice more sympathetic are just as gross as the choice itself.
First, the story presents Jim as simply unable to control himself. He tells himself he’s not going to do it because it’s deeply wrong, only to find himself inexplicably at the cryopod doing the thing he resolved not to. Later, he tells Aurora he “tried not to” wake her up. Well he did his best, but boys will be boys, amiright? These types of justifications are designed to absolve men of responsibility for their own choices and put the burden of avoiding assault on women.
Second, Jim nearly dies by suicide before he sees Aurora. Besides the issue with using suicide as a quick storytelling device, it’s common for men to threaten suicide to control others, especially their partners. In Mediocre, Ijeoma Oluo describes the numerous messages she’s received from white men insisting that they’re going to kill themselves and claiming it’s her fault for advocating for equality. While this movie is less blatant, it still makes an implied threat: if Jim doesn’t get to kidnap this woman for the rest of her life, he’ll end his own.
Next, the movie presents a sequence that can only be enjoyed by viewers who sympathize with Jim and who want Aurora and Jim to end up together. Aurora doesn’t know Jim woke her up, so once she begins coming to terms with her situation, she starts a relationship with her kidnapper. They have adorable scenes of sharing hobbies, going out to dinner, and chatting with the robotic bartender, Arthur. And then there’s the sex scenes, of course.
It’s Arthur, not Jim, who tells Aurora the truth. Aurora is horrified, and so begins another sequence designed to give Jim enough punishment to absolve him. But the only way this could possibly work is if viewers already sympathize with him. Because the two characters end up together, Jim’s choice to control Aurora pays off for him big time, no matter what temporary discomfort he has to go through. Her anger is the cost of doing business.
When Jim’s life is in danger, viewers are supposed to want him to live. They are expected to feel relieved when Aurora begins to forgive him. Then when the two discover a way to put one person back in cryosleep, viewers are supposed to cheer when Aurora decides to stay with Jim instead of following her dreams.
Leading up to the climax, another person is mistakenly woken from cryosleep. Played by Laurence Fishbourne, Gus is an experienced Black crew member who figures out what’s going wrong with the ship and what needs to be done to fix it. Then, after he tells Jim and Aurora, he promptly dies from 612 disorders. No, I’m not kidding. These disorders were apparently caused by his cryopod malfunction, yet Jim was somehow spared the same fate, proving with 100% certainty that this scifi universe has no god. I guess the filmmaker didn’t want a qualified Black guy around to steal the glory from a white kidnapper.
Instead of insisting that Jim couldn’t help himself, the filmmaker had numerous ways to actually make Jim’s choice better. For instance, Aurora could have been a crew member he woke up thinking she could put him back in cryosleep. Or he could have had a reason to believe she didn’t actually want to go to the colony and would enjoy a life of quiet luxuries on the ship. Instead, the filmmakers assumed that his crime would be overlooked simply because he is the white male lead.
2. Liam, Teen Wolf
Teen Wolf begins as the main character, Scott McCall, is bitten, making him a new werewolf who’s relatively powerless. Since this show uses outdated theories about wolves, Scott evolves into a more powerful “alpha” werewolf in season three. In the setting, being an alpha is a magical leadership position, and only a bite from an alpha can turn humans into werewolves.
Unsurprisingly, Scott’s arc in season four is learning more about leadership. As part of his arc, he needs a new beta werewolf to look after. But having a beta that’s kind and cooperative would make things too easy for Scott. So season four introduces Liam, the young white guy with a serious temper problem. He was expelled from his expensive private school after he destroyed his coach’s car in a rage. Why? Because the coach benched him for bad behavior.
After a ridiculously contrived sequence where Scott has to save Liam from falling to his death by biting him, Liam and his temper become Scott’s problem. Naturally, Liam makes it frustratingly difficult for Scott to keep him from killing people during the full moon. But by the end of the season, Scott discovers that looking after Liam makes Scott’s own powers stronger.
Then season five rolls around. Liam’s girlfriend, Hayden, gets her own animal superpowers. Liam’s gay and Black best friend, Mason, learns about the supernatural and joins Team Good as one of the idea guys. And Liam tries to kill Scott. While Liam is being manipulated by a villain, it’s also quite clear that he’s easy to manipulate. Though he’s made progress on his temper, it can still lead him to make bad choices, especially once werewolf rage is added in.
Season six is the show’s goodbye. As Scott prepares to leave for college, Liam declares to Hayden and Mason that he is going to be the next alpha leader in Scott’s place. Hayden and Mason don’t appear to take this pronouncement seriously, nor should they, as they would both make better leaders. If superpowers are necessary, Hayden has them, and she’s much more level-headed than Liam. Mason is sociable and clever, just the sort that can keep up morale and hold a group together. On top of that, Liam doesn’t actually have the magical powers of an alpha.
Nonetheless, Liam’s arc for season six is his effort to become the next “alpha,” and viewers are expected to cheer for him as he does it. His obstacles in this arc are his own problems that he still hasn’t dealt with. For instance, he wants to be the next lacrosse captain now that Scott has graduated, but he disappoints the coach by not showing up at practice. Then Scott makes excuses for him.
I’m all for an arc where Liam learns to manage himself better, particularly since he has a canonical diagnosis of IED (intermittent explosive disorder). Emotional or organizational issues that cause him to miss practice are a worthwhile struggle for him to go through. But Liam should learn to manage himself before striving for a leadership position. Instead the show asserts that Liam should take on more responsibility simply because he is a white guy. And unlike Hayden and Mason, he is on the main cast – also because he is a white guy.
Only a white man would have a temper arc like Liam’s. If Hayden had a temper problem, no one would take her seriously as a threat; they’d treat her like she’s “feisty” instead. If Mason had a temper problem, he would embody a negative stereotype commonly applied to Black men, and he would be declared too unlikable. Even Liam’s basic character design shows his privilege.
The writers could have shown viewers why Liam was the right person to lead. Instead, they showed him embarrassing himself at every opportunity. That created more conflict for Liam, and they assumed that viewers would support him regardless of whether he’d earned it.
3. Scott, Ant-Man
In the 2015 Ant-Man, Scott Lang is a high-profile robber who’s just been released from prison. The movie describes only one of his crimes: a news-grabbing case where he broke into a corporate computer and refunded a bunch of money the corporation had unfairly taken from consumers. However, context makes it clear that he was a career criminal who specialized in tampering with technology and cracking safes.
After being released, he resolves to go clean but has difficulty finding work as a convicted criminal. That’s pretty sympathetic. What’s less sympathetic is that he takes another criminal job as soon as his first legal job doesn’t work out.
To cover for this, the movie gives him a young daughter, Cassie, who lives with Scott’s ex-wife, Maggie, and Maggie’s husband. Scott is eager to see Cassie after his time away. Defying all reason and laws regarding visitation rights, Maggie won’t let Scott visit Cassie until he gets his own apartment. Yes, Maggie is telling her criminal ex that he needs to get thousands of dollars real quick to see his daughter. Maybe she wants him to go back to jail?
So to see his daughter, Scott agrees to do the same thing that’s kept him from seeing his daughter. He breaks into a rich guy’s house, cracks the safe, and steals the Ant-Man suit. But as it turns out, the owner of the suit, Hank, actually let Scott steal the suit. You see, this was a test to see if Scott could steal the suit. Then Hank covertly watches as Scott puts on the suit, inadvertently shrinks to ant size, and gets thrown around aimlessly. Somehow this qualifies as passing another inept test.
Hank wants Scott to do a dangerous and illegal job: destroy a company’s shrinking suit technology before it’s sold as a weapon. In return, Hank promises to fix things so Scott can see Cassie. He doesn’t specify how* or give Scott any reason to trust him. In fact, Scott gets arrested for shenanigans with the suit, and Hank helps Scott escape. So Scott is only in more trouble because of Hank. Yet Scott thinks this is a quick path to being a hero in his daughter’s eyes. As Hank says to Scott, “The moment things get hard, you turn right back to crime.”
Then, despite Hank’s elaborate tests, it turns out Scott doesn’t have any of the skills he needs to do this urgent job. So Scott has to learn from someone who has these skills in abundance, and who could, in fact, do the job easily at any time. That’s Hank’s daughter, Hope. Viewers see Hope beating Scott up in combat training, controlling whole colonies of ants with her mind while Scott struggles to control a few, giving Scott detailed breakdowns on the enemy facility she knows intimately, and training him to use the ant suit that she is already adept with.
Hope is frustrated she isn’t doing the job herself, and, canonically, the only reason she doesn’t is that Hank forbids it. In another movie, she would just steal the suit and do the thing. But see, that would make her the hero of this story, and the unqualified white guy is supposed to be the hero. Please ignore how the story’s hero is actually less heroic than someone relegated to the sidelines. After all, she doesn’t count because she’s a girl.
If Hope had another role she needed to perform during the sabotage and Scott had just one essential skill Hope didn’t, his role would have been excusable. Better yet, what if Scott also had a history of doing jobs for the villain and felt responsible for stopping him? As is, Scott makes what looks like a deeply unwise choice to take on a dangerous job he doesn’t have the skills for.
And then the movie delivers an action sequence where Scott fights a villain he’s never met, but who Hope knows well. You see, Hope has been working closely with the villain. To prevent the suits from being weaponized, she’s decided to betray the villain and side with the father she resents. This means she is not only the most qualified to be the hero, but also at the center of the drama. Every aspect of this movie would have been better with Scott removed, but then the film wouldn’t have its obligatory white male lead.
4. Ed, The Orville
To create his own Star Trek fan fiction, Seth MacFarlane leveraged his popular comedy, Family Guy, to get Fox to pay for it. Then MacFarlane played the lead role of Ed himself.
In the first episode of The Orville, Ed is promoted to captain even though the promoting admiral says Ed hasn’t “inspired anyone with all that much confidence this past year.” To which Ed replies, “Yeah I know.” But don’t worry, there are extenuating circumstances. You see, this was all the fault of a woman. Ed’s now ex-wife, Kelly, cheated on him a year ago, after which he promptly divorced her. Obviously this means Ed’s not responsible for his bad performance, so it’s okay to give him life-or-death authority over a whole crew.
No sooner does Ed accept the promotion than he gives one of his own buddies, Gordon, an open helmsman position. He does this even though Gordon is, by Ed’s own admission, “checked out half the time.” Nor does Ed bother to look at the “excellent candidates” for helmsman that the admiral has ready for Ed to review.
Naturally, the first thing Gordon does after getting the position is drink alcohol on the job and disregard Ed’s order to stop. Then Ed fires him and appoints a helmsman who isn’t insubordinate. Just kidding, of course Ed allows his buddy to get away with this.
Next, Ed meets his senior officers. He tells an alien from a culture that doesn’t dance that “we’re going to work on you.” The ship’s head doctor is a Black woman who is clearly over-qualified. She says she took the position because she’s seen Ed’s record, and she thinks he’ll need her help. Unfortunately, she never declares Ed medically unfit so she can just take over command herself. Then the admiral tells Ed that Kelly, his ex, will be his XO.
This is obviously unrealistic and inappropriate, so Ed very reasonably objects. But MacFarlane really wanted this premise, so the show’s explanation during the first episode is that Kelly is literally the only XO available and, without an XO, Ed’s new promotion will be put on hold. On top of that, Kelly actually requested the position because she feels really guilty about cheating and wants Ed to get his promotion.
With all that in place, Ed now has a hot woman serving him who feels so guilty she will put up with all the abuse he throws her way. Meanwhile, she is polite, professional, and supportive. Viewers are meant to excuse the way Ed and Gordon harass and humiliate her.
At the climax of the first episode, Kelly comes up with a plan that saves the ship. Ed asks her to stay as his XO, admitting that she’s better at problem-solving than he is. Supposedly, some futuristic algorithm predicted Ed and Kelly had complementary skills, but there don’t seem to be any skills that Ed has and Kelly doesn’t. As the season continues, Kelly shows herself to be a more competent leader in every respect. This raises the obvious question of why she isn’t captain in Ed’s place.
Later in the season, the show answers this. Kelly was offered the position of captain but asked for Ed to get it instead because she felt so guilty about cheating. The show also reveals that when Kelly cheated, she was under the influence of a powerful alien sex pheromone, and, as Ed says, the sex wasn’t her fault. In other words, she didn’t actually cheat, she was raped. MacFarlane clearly doesn’t want to acknowledge this as rape, but that’s the story he created.*
This gives us fuller and more disturbing picture of how MacFarlane designed the story to exploit a competent woman in service to a mediocre man:
- Kelly is raped and blamed for it by both herself and Ed.
- Kelly’s supposed guilt is used to excuse Ed for his bad job performance.
- Even though Kelly still acts professionally after she’s assaulted and earns a promotion, she gives it to Ed, who hasn’t earned a promotion.
- Kelly lets Ed act abusively toward her while she is working because she blames herself for her assault.
- Kelly wins Ed over by being exceptional, and she becomes a love interest.
Similar to Liam, I have little doubt that MacFarlane made Ed look incompetent so he would be an underdog despite being a captain. Giving a leader character enough sympathy can be tricky, but in a situation like this, there’s an easy solution. Make him the captain of a ship that’s such a disaster no one wants to be responsible for it. That would even give MacFarlane the opportunities for crude comedy that he wanted. Instead, MacFarlane assumed that Ed didn’t need to earn his position, and that he would be excused for any misbehavior as long as there was a woman to blame.
5. Eddie, Venom
In the 2018 Venom, Eddie Brock is a hard-hitting reporter who advocates for the homeless and other vulnerable groups. At least, that’s what a montage of news reporting tells us.
Viewers first meet Eddie when his fiancee, Anne, wakes him up, delivers him coffee, and reminds him of an important meeting he forgot about. Eddie arrives at work, and an employee behind the lobby counter tells him that he “can’t park there.” Eddie just keeps walking toward the elevators with a flippant “no such thing as can’t.” For a guy that’s supposed to be cheering for the powerless, Eddie sure seems to delight in being more powerful than other people.
At his almost-forgotten work meeting, Eddie’s boss assigns him a big exclusive interview with Carlton Drake, a space CEO and the only person of color on the main cast. In repayment for everything the network has done for Eddie’s career, the boss asks Eddie to focus on Drake’s space program and not to “start your shit.” Eddie agrees, but apparently he doesn’t mean it. That evening he tells Anne he’s not going to do what his boss wants. Anne cautions him that success requires sacrifice, patience, and hard work.
Then Eddie breaks into Anne’s laptop and looks at confidential files from her law firm, which is defending Drake in court. He discovers a wrongful death lawsuit linked to pharmaceutical trials Drake is running. While it was wrong for Eddie to violate Anne’s trust by snooping on her computer, this information is pretty disturbing. So naturally Eddie starts a careful, long-term investigation to verify the allegations, gather evidence, and expose the CEO’s crimes. That way he can also conceal his initial source of information so Anne doesn’t get in trouble.
Wait, no, he doesn’t do that. Instead, he gives away everything he knows during the interview with Drake. After looking at his notepad frequently and struggling to form his thoughts into coherent sentences – you know, like prepared reporters do – Eddie brings up the lawsuit. The interview is abruptly discontinued.
Afterward, Eddie meets with his boss about the incident, clearly expecting to avoid any real consequences for breaking his promise. His boss wants to know what evidence Eddie has for the wrongful death allegations, telling Eddie “We don’t go in half-cocked based on a hunch. We do the work; we substantiate the accusations.” Eddie can’t provide evidence because he hasn’t done his homework. Then he’s shocked when his boss fires him.
Eddie’s behavior also gets Anne fired from her job. She leaves Eddie, telling him that he’s “pathologically self-absorbed” and that his “ego requires constant attention.”
This is a low point for Eddie. He misbehaved, he was punished for it, and now he needs to turn his life around. That’s all and well, but why should viewers root for him to do so? Other than Tom Hardy’s acting, we’ve seen nothing good about Eddie. His concern for the people being killed by Drake’s pharmaceutical trials might be enough, except stopping these deaths is less important to Eddie than his ego. Otherwise, he would have sucked it up and made pleasantries with Drake while secretly gathering evidence for a much more damning report.
What’s more, when a defecting pharmaceutical doctor comes to Eddie offering evidence of the deaths, Eddie tells her he’s done investigating. Why? Because this time, his hard-hitting journalism might actually cost him something. He tells the doctor that Drake is dangerous, citing that after interviewing Drake, Eddie lost his career, relationship, and apartment – as though Eddie weren’t responsible for any of that himself. Luckily, he decides to go creep on Anne next thing, so she can inform him of his own culpability.
The film also provides no reason why this pharmaceutical doctor would even want to go to Eddie with evidence. She feels that betraying Drake puts her life in danger, and Eddie has proven himself to be exceptionally bad at protecting his sources. After Eddie changes his mind about working with her, she even sneaks him into the lab to take pictures. Eddie isn’t a photographer, and it would be much safer for the doctor to snap her own pics with her phone.
The movie pivots when Eddie becomes the host for Venom, and the scenes people actually care about begin. But Anne stays on as the inaccessible love interest, so viewers are supposed to want her to take Eddie back, even though he violated her trust and got her fired. In fact, there’s even a scene where she plays host to Venom, and the joint Anne-Venom gives Eddie a kiss. Venom fades away from Anne’s face so viewers can watch an extended shot of Anne and Eddie snogging. Creepily, the kiss is Venom’s idea, which brings up questions of consent. Venom, if you want to kiss Eddie, you can just kiss him, okay?* Leave Anne out of this.
Over time, Hollywood has been making tiny efforts to improve representation for women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. However, they only do it in ways that don’t require straight white men to give anything up. That’s a big reason why marginalized secondary characters have gotten more badass, yet their stories still revolve around the mediocre white dude in the center.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Take a shot for every incoming “bUt ThErE aRe BaDlY wRiTtEn BlAcK aNd FeMaLe ChArAcTeRs ToO” comment.
Sorry, I’m afraid I can’t do that. If I did, I’d die of liver cirrhosis.
I sometimes suspect all those mediocre white guys who get to star in a story owe at least some of it to how many people still rely on the Hero’s Journey – they take the male hero as the default and most of the myths looked into in the book are from areas with mostly ‘white’ population, too, so the guy has to be white, too.
I’ve nothing against a mediocre lead, but there must be something about them which explains why they and nobody else in the cast should be the main character.
That’s a good point Cay. I often fall into the trap of picturing any of my emerging story heroes, as being in some ways, like me. (I am not exceptional, so when I can create those characters, they’re not the ones who I connect with first). After I build a diverse cast around the fairly blank person, I’ve found it incredibly helpful to ask the question you mentioned – ‘why should they be the one to solve the main problem?’ Maybe they aren’t the best person? Maybe I can amalgamate them with the person who is (and is probably more interesting)?
Anyway, asking this question early on has saved me so much headache and writing!
I have a similar problem. I also like “weak” characters (or, at least, characters who start weak) which puts me at odds with audience members who want OP heroes immediately.
But from what I gathered, the main problem with these five white dudes is not only that they lack extraordinary qualities, but that they also lack sufficient motivation. These five seem to lack any motivation beyond White Male Entitlement. Their motivations range from non-sympathetic (Jim, Liam, Ed), nonsensical (Scott) to non-existent (Eddie).
Contrast that to Steve Rodgers. Steve starts out with little to no extraordinary qualities, but his heroic motivation (he throws himself over a grenade while all the other military recruits run away) makes the audience cheer for him when he gets the serum.
Or, if you want characters with little to no redeeming qualities, consider just about everyone in Squid Game. Most of them lack moral qualities or extraordinary skills (in fact, the majority of them landed in poverty due to bad choices, including crimes), but the fact that they suffer such extreme oppression for their poverty makes us understand them, even as they join the titular murder games.
These five have none of this. They aren’t trying to save the world or avoid certain death, they’re just plain entitled. The one with the closest to a sympathetic motivation would be Scott Lang, but even there, the fact that his problems are so contrived earned him a spot on the list.
I think we have this cultural narrative that, if a white man isn’t the utter king of the world, this is a great injustice to be corrected. That’s why “Rise to Power” narratives are so incredibly common. Don’t get me wrong. I grew up on a diet of shonen anime and superhero stories, so, from-zero-to-hero stories are among my favorite “genres” overall. I just wish more authors gave their protagonists motivations beyond entitlement.
(Of course, stories where the character is super important right away also have a lot of potential. But, usually, these characters either start with a deficit in maturity or a deficit in motivation. That way, we can have all those “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibililty” narratives as we have them in Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther, or most incarnations of Spider-Man.)
Yes, all five of those characters have severe problems which mean they should not be in the stories. Which is exactly the problem: if those characters were not white guys, they wouldn’t be in the main character position in those stories. If they were not white or not men, they wouldn’t have risen to main character rank, because none of those stories is one built for mediocre characters.
There are quite some narratives which demand that the main character starts out mediocre or as an underdog. Yet, in those stories, the main character usually is doing the heavy lifting, becoming better than they were before. Often, there are serious personal stakes as well, which means there is a good explanation for why *this* character and no other has to be the main lead. It’s not that only they can save the day – there will be severe repercussions if they don’t do it themselves.
Personally, whether they should not be in the stories at all or just written better is subjective, if you ask me. Scott should have been cut from Ant-Man entirely, I agree, but Venom wouldn’t quite work without the “star power” of the comic figure being present. (Not that it works in its current form though. I didn’t like that movie.)
But that’s beside the point. My point wasn’t just that they are badly written, but rather that they are all badly written in a specific way. Basically, a lot of narratives are about white men struggling to gain something (almost always women, power, and dominance) for no reason other than that the story implies they are entitled to it. All five examples seem to fit the bill.
You can see this in how white men are never allowed to appear subservient to less privileged characters unless there are sufficient “extenuating circumstances” (he’s gay, he’s comic relief, he’s evil, he’s a senior or a child, he’s tragically disabled, he has a growth arc about rising to dominance later, etc.). It’s not even just about main characters. Liam from Teen Wolf and those controlling YA boyfriends show how this thinking influences side characters, too.
There might be other factors, but, personally, I think “Does he feel like an entitled douche?” is one of the most important questions to ask when one wants to avoid writing a Mediocre White Dude by accident.
I wonder if another inheritance from the Hero’s Journey might be that the hero is supposed to start off as someone fairly ordinary/humble, which then frequently gets conflated with mediocre.
That’s what I was thinking. I’m unfamiliar with everyone on the list except Venom and Ant Man. But from my point of view, Scott and Eddie are just two normal-ish guys without super powers, incredible wealth, or anything like that, but are put in extraordinary situations. This is so we, the normal people, can relate (or as much as we can by getting a shrink/grow suit or have a symbiotic bond with an alien).
I’m frankly surprised that none of these mediocre white guys are chosen ones, because that’s a very popular excuse for why some mediocre (at best) (usually) white (almost always) guy is the center of attention: because he’s the chosen one, so he’s the only one who can defeat the big bad or whatever, and the rest of the cast is reduced to supporting and praising mediocre white guy because he’s the chosen one and therefore the only person who matters.
Eddie isn’t chosen in fate terms, but he is the only person who can bond with Venom long-term without dying.
I watched the start of Passenger, and thought WTF! When they reached the scene where he woke her up, I had to turn it off.
Whenever you guys talk about actions being ‘beyond the moral event horizon’, for me this moment always comes to mind.
Absolutely felt the same way. The entire story is so gross and weird.
Frame story from Aurora’s perspective and it’s horror through and through.
Passengers, for me, is a real shame because it’s so easy to fix. If the story had just been changed so that Jim and Aurora BOTH woke up due to the pod malfunction – that Jim has nothing to do with Aurora waking up, but they both happened to be affected by the malfunction.
Also, I’m not sure how to handle Gus. Of course Gus dying the only a black character, but living Gus would likely have ended up as an Oprah-style Magical Black Therapist who fixes everyone’s problems. I think the ideal thing would’ve just been to leave Gus out and just have an AI tell them how many problems there are in the ship. The story just has two people, it can live with both of them happening to be white. An AI also could’ve added interesting snark to the movie.
What I’m trying to figure out is how we started assuming that the white man is the default state. My own suspicion is it has to do with how European cultures viewed the world based on religion, but I’m not really sure.
White is the default because Europeans have over time colonized quite a bit of the world and their (‘our’ in my case) culture has permeated everything. You can still see it in the business suit being the go-to for businessmen everywhere, even in climates which are not at all suitable for it. In African and African-American people straightening their hair, because it is more ‘beautiful’ like that. That is why the white character is the default.
When it comes to men – especially the European history has been a patriachal structure for a long time. The overwhelming majority of European myths and legends is built around male characters and so are modern stories which come from them. There is a reason why the romance genre (written and consumed mostly by women) is looked down upon.
Got any recommendations that go into that with greater detail? I’m looking for books, documentaries, that sort of thing.
Editor’s note: I’ve removed a comment because it pushed the idea that a lack of representation is primarily due to storyteller’s fear of being yelled at by activists.
This is a complex subject, but in regards to these particular examples, the lesson is that we shouldn’t have protagonists like this at all because they’re bad protagonists. They’re only given a pass because of their privilege, and if you take that away, it becomes obvious how bad they are.
It’s really disgusting for these (massive, rich, powerful!) companies and entities like Hollywood to try and play victim by offloading the blame for lack of representation, like “well we WOULD include female characters but our hands our tied, it’s all their fault!” Or you could, y’know, try to write better characters, be open to criticism, and stop being cowards who can’t take responsibility or a “””risk””” instead of falling back on more aggressively bland, mediocre white dudes.
the more I think about it, the more it feels like there’s a blog post in this, so we have something to point to if nothing else.
I feel like there is sort of a companion trope to the mediocre white guy in the ‘Candied White Guy’, a protagonist who would be widely considered absolutely unendurable, selfish, and self-righteous (in a bad way) if they were not white men, whom audiences either identify with strongly enough that the candy doesn’t bother them or whom audiences see as allowed to be uncomplicatedly praised and powerful in a way that marginalized characters are not. I’m thinking about examples like Kvothe from Name of the Wind and Quentin from The Magicians (the book, at least, I haven’t watched the TV series). These characters bothered me for the same reasons as the above, but one couldn’t rightly say that they’re mediocre because they’re so powerful. It’s more like they’re entitled to be the protagonist, in a way. As if not enough thought has been put into why the protagonist should be this character rather than any other.
This has been another installment of my Dumping on NOTW Column
Man I wish they would greenlight more TV/movie interpretations of new books rather than rebooting older series DX I want to see a high production show of The Fifth Season that would rip.
I have good news! Mostly. Broken Earth is currently being adapted into a series of films! https://www.avclub.com/n-k-jemisin-is-adapting-her-broken-earth-trilogy-for-t-1847040525
“Self-righteous (in a bad way)”
Self-righteousnes IS bad
I feel like there is sort of a companion trope to the mediocre white guy in the ‘Candied White Guy’, a protagonist who would be widely considered absolutely unendurable, selfish, and self-righteous (in a bad way) if they were not white men
Luke vs Rey. Both of them could fairly be overcandied in terms of how quickly they pick up Force powers, but only one of them gets called a Mary Sue, and she’s the one who at least only uses powers she has previous reason to know exist.
I think something similar goes on with Sisko and Janeway too, even though Sisko isn’t white. Husband and I are watching through all of Star Trek in order of stardate, and have been alternating Voy and DS9 for quite some time now. I really don’t think Janeway gets more candy than Sisko – both of them get plenty. Sisko is even explicitly a “chosen one”!
But only Janeway is called a “Mary Sue”, and Mythcreants only complain about her being over-candied, not Sisko. (No one is immune to implicit biases! Not you, not me, not even the Mythcreants crew.)
Going off what you mentioned, Travelers would have been way less creepy and better overall if Aurora had been an engineer instead of an author.
OK. Give me a second, I’m doing a full outline of a re-write.
Jim is a biologist, not an engineer in this timeline. He wakes her up not just because he is lonely, but because she may be able to fix his pod and and put them both back into stasis. How much of that is his actual reasoning, and how much of that is post-hoc justification, could produce lots of character drama.
“There were over a dozen engineers, some far more qualified. So why did you wake up me, the one attractive woman?”
[uncomfortable silence.]
“I thought so” [walks away]
Aurora takes up residence in the guts of the ship to get away from Jim, and Jim lets her. They avoid each other for a while, occasionally using the robot to pass messages. Jim admits he made a grave mistake, and gives her the distance she wants. Later on, the ship starts breaking down, and the two need to work together to save the ship. They discover that the corporation running the ship has been using it long after it was supposed to be retired, with Jim’s pod malfunction being the first of many likely failures that will eventually destroy the ship.
They eventually get the broken pods working again, but there is a problem. The two realize that the ship will not reach its destination without Aurora’s continuous maintenance. Aurora offers to let Jim go back to stasis and carry on by herself, but Jim decides to stay, unwilling to condemn her to the solitude he once experienced. The two decide to stay awake to protect those who remain asleep, despite knowing they will not survive to the destination.
So now Jim actually has an arc and learns a lesson, Aurora has more agency, and the thing overall is less creepy and better.
I’m so glad you did something with the corporation – that was barely more than set dressing in the movie. The reason the ship is breaking apart isn’t that the corporation built it poorly, but that it got damaged by a random astroid shower (?) and then the classism on the ship is just kind of there. I guess it’s just there to make Jim look like more of an underdog or something, but then it’s an element that’s totally abandoned and it hardly lends him sympathy given his actions in the rest of the movie. Like oh I’m so sorry you can only have one kind of coffee, can we please talk about the woman you kidnapped and basically killed.
That’s an excellent re-approach.
Major spoilers for Knives Out in second paragraph. Normally I don’t care about this, but this is one of the few exceptions in which it matters.
I think one key to this idea is the entitlement that goes into it. There is a sense of entitlement that is often taught to young white men and reinforced through media portrayals. If you see characters who look like you and are given power despite a relative lack of qualifications, you wind up thinking that this is how things should be.
I’d been thinking about how I might use a character like this as an antagonist of sorts, when it then occurred to me that it was already done in a rather similar context. Chris Evan’s character Ransom in Knives Out was an excellent deconstruction of this sort of character, largely because he had the appearance and superficial charisma of a likable hero but in actuality it was all a false front. His motive in the end really was just entitlement, feeling that it was his birthright to inherit his grandfather’s money.
There’s a subtle clue to it early in the film, buried in the sequences where the family as a whole is being shown as shit. Remember how they all say Marta is from a different country? None of them care enough to actually know where she’s from. But the country he says is Brazil. The rest of them at least know that her first language is Spanish – he doesn’t even have that.
There’s actually an even better clue that is nicely hidden in a way that we don’t notice. In the timeline we’re originally given, one of the witnesses indicated that the dogs were barking. When we see Marta’s flashback, she was able to pet the dogs so that they didn’t bark because they recognized her. So who were they barking at?
As Blanc points out, dogs are an excellent judge of character. They bark at Ransom the second he appears.
Yep!
Oh, wow. I knew the Orville was bad before, but, ye gods, that’s messed up. Why do people like it? It boggles my mind.
Also, unrelated, but I think I’ve discovered the candidate for the worst fairy tale ever. The other day, I was clearing out some possibly unwanted books to make room for new books, and found my copy of Grimms’ fairy tales. I idly scanned the table of contents, debating about whether to keep it, when the title “Eve’s Other Children’ jumped out at me. I was very curious to know what a story about Eve was doing in a book of fairy tales. Then I read it and was appalled. Here’s a seven sentence summary [instead of two pages]:
After the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Eve had twelve children. Six were sweet-tempered and beautiful, while the other six were ill-tempered and ugly. One morning Eve received word that God was coming to visit, so she hid the six ugly children and presented the beautiful children. God blessed them, saying ‘you will be a king, you will be a knight, you will be knowledgeable,’ and so forth. Eve wished then for the other children to be blessed, and presented them to God, and God blessed them, saying ‘you will be a farmer, you will be a shoemaker, you will be a labourer for the rest of your life’, and so forth. Eve was greatly distressed and protested, but God told her ‘it is right and necessary, for if there were no workers, there would be no rulers’. Eve asked for forgiveness and submitted to the will of God.
What. Is. This. There’s no information on where the story came from, much to my frustration. It reinforces so many messed up ideas that it feels almost like a parody, but it’s real, and I’m just kind of stunned.
People really believed that the poorer classes were poor because that was the will of God. I think it went with the whole “divine right to rule” thing. That is not the only folktale where it comes up.
There’s also a Grimm tale that’s straight up about how women are of the devil, so… yeah. This is why it was absurd when the Grimm tv show stated the Grimm tales were all true.
On the unrelated topic…
My winner for – I can’t believe I just read that – was one of the original Winnie the Pooh books.
It introduces Kanga and Roo to the neighborhood.
Rabbit and Piglet essentially want Kanga to ‘go back where she came from’, and to convince her to leave they kidnap and hide Roo!?!
I can’t remember the details of how this was supposed to work, but there are so many levels of wrong here.
My parents have a big book of old Norse myths, and there’s one story where Heimdall goes to Middle-Earth and, like, inserts himself into people’s marriages and presumably have threesomes with them (it’s a bit vague on details). In this way, he fathers the three “classes” of men – the lords, the free farmers, and the slaves.
The lords stem from Heimdall having sex with a beautiful, already rich couple, the free farmers from an okay-looking couple living in an okay house, and the slaves from an ugly couple with deep tans (slaves in old Norse society were of the same ethnicity as the lords and free farmers that owned them, but they’re obviously gonna be tanned if they do farm-work all day) who lived in some shithole.
Yeah, let’s just pretend that slavery is the natural order of things because some f***ing god made it so.
I also had a collection of fairy tales illustrated by John Bauer when I grew up. The pictures are really beautiful, but some of the stories are seriously WTF when reading them as an adult.
There’s this story about a changeling, which goes like this: A beautiful, BLOND and BLUE-EYED royal couple had a beautiful, similarly blond baby girl. One day when her nanny fell asleep in the garden, a passing troll was mesmerized by the baby’s blond beauty, and exchanged her for his own baby. When the nanny wakes up, she and the king and queen are shocked to find that the baby now has black, curly hair, brown eyes and brown skin (I shit you not!). They think the baby has come down with some affliction, and try all kinds of beauty treatments to make her blond and pale again, but her hair remains black and her skin golden/ochre-coloured, even though they manage to bleach it down from its original brown.
The troll mum is mad at her husband, because she preferred her original baby.
Anyway, the beautiful and very blond (did I mention that she was blond? You see, this is a very important part of the story, judging from how often it’s repeated in the text) grows up with the trolls and hates every minute of it. The troll girl likewise grows up with the human king and queen. She’s depicted in the illustrations as traditionally beautiful too, with carefully arranged black corkscrew curls, although she’s got a few locks that her maid never manages to brush out, so the best they can do is hide them underneath the neater locks. She’s also much wilder and rebellious than a good princess is supposed to be.
Eventually both girls have marriages arranged for them, but the human prince is shocked and intimidated by the troll girl’s boisterous nature, and the human princess is scared by her intended troll husband, who’s got fangs and all.
In the end they both manage to run away, and they eventually find their way back to their real families. The troll girl marries the troll guy and they’re happy together, and the human princess marries the human prince. The final scene is the human couple hearing the sound of the troll wedding in the distance, where they play drums and dance all night (because, you see, trolls also have a real sense of rythm and love dancing to wild drums!)
As an adult I re-read this and could hardly BELIEVE the amount of sheer racism that went into these trolls! Mythcreants have articles on PoC-coded non-humans, but… THIS! Just THIS.
If I were to give a charitable interpetation of that story, it’s that no job is more important than the other. After all, kings still need to wear shoes, so they need shoemakers to make their shoes. Knights need to eat food, so they need farmers to grow their food. CEOs need to use the bathroom, so they need janitors to clean their toilets. If it weren’t for “blue collar” jobs–if it weren’t for people building roads, cooking meals, or making deliveries–then “white collar” jobs could never get done. In fact, you could argue that all work is equally valuable, and thus everybody should be paid fairly for their work so they can meet their basic needs. But, admittedly, that is a modern reading of an old story like that, and I doubt that is the exact lesson that story was trying to tell.
Generally speaking, you are right – all jobs are needed and valuable.
It becomes more dubitable, though, when you keep in mind that the beautiful children get the top jobs – the ones with riches and less hard work – and the ugly children get the lower jobs – where you stay poor and work hard all your life. This is again the fairy-tale idea that beauty equals goodness and will be rewarded while ugliness equals badness and will be punished.
Ironically, the writers of Ant-Man seemed to know all this, since Scott outright admits that Hope is more qualified than him. And the fix would have been easy: just have the heist require two people with shrinking and ant control powers. Hank’s already not doing it because he can’t physically take much more of the shrinking, and there’s only one of Hope, so they need someone else.
One thing I will give the film points for, though: Paxton. The new husband of Maggie, stepfather of Cassie, and a cop who really doesn’t like Scott (because Scott is an irresponsible criminal) – so many films would have made him an asshole. Instead he’s a good guy, framed as having sound reasons to distrust Scott, but also very careful how he talks about him in front of Cassie, because he doesn’t want to wreck her image of her father.
Agree with your suggested fix, and also agree about Paxton. I hate it when movies try to make us sympathize with the male loser MC by having his love interest inexplicably date a horrible asshole.
I am unfamiliar with the first two, but the other three seem to fit the “loser hero” archetype.
I have never seen the appeal, but I think the idea is to try and take the most average guy possible (except he’s also “funny”) and make them the star.
Jack Black and Bill Murray seem to excel in these type of roles. Guys like them because they are incompetent, and I think they were invented so non athletic guys can identify with the hero due to the whole jock vs nerd thing dominated culture so deeply.
So we got average man making jokes and mean smart guy from the divide and I dislike both tropes.
I haven’t seen Passangers but I’ve seen SO many people going “why, oh why?” on the internet. Like why did he have to wake her up for creepy reasons? Why couldn’t she be an engineer, and he reasons that more pods might malfunction if he does nothing, but if he wakes her up, there’s a chance that she, with her particular engineering expertise, could fix the problem?
Since i watched CW’s Arrow i center my attention in the side characters, as protagonists end up being all the same for the most part (my favorite shows are Brooklyn 99, The Good Place, Persons of Interest and Legend of Vox Machina so far). I already disliked most of the list and watched the Orville for Kelly and the robot. Luckily Liam is not that important in Teen Wolf and you can spend that seasons hoping for Lydia’s burst of Power.
Playing the devil’s advocate role, imagine if we lived in an alternative timeline where Passengers, Ant-Man and Venom were headed by POC actors. The stories stayed the same. Would there be any story element to indicate these were created with white male protagonists in mind originally?
Personally, I couldn’t think of any element that would give that away. For example, Jim in Passengers get the girl despite all the despicable stuff he did, but if Jim was casted as a POC, then I would have blamed this flaw to the story’s setup opposing the Hollywood troupe of getting the pair together at the end. Not sure if I would have thought that this was because of having a white guy in mind originally. It is only a supposition we can make. It works for him simply because he is the protagonist. Similar arguments are made by those accusing of this or that character being a Mary Sue / Gary Stu when played by a POC.
Not trying to deny white privilege, but wondering if this could be a larger issue affecting most protagonists in big budget stories, where everything works at the end for the protagonist.
One aspect about this is that such mediocre characters would not be on screen if they were anything but white men. Someone in the higher echelons of the studios in question would have axed the stuff long before it was out. A POC or female character would never get to the point where they’d have such a story, because it would be seen for what it is: bad storytelling. Only with a mediocre white man, the bad storytelling would be overlooked because, hey, it’s a white guy, he deserves this!
Funny yet sad when you stop to think about that, really. For lack of a better term, it’s poor storytelling just because the white dude supposedly deserves better by default.
Okay I needed to share this thought because this article was what got Passangers on my mind, but my boyfriend and I were just talking about how that “movie” would’ve worked so much better as a psychological thriller video game where you play as Aurora in 1st person POV and you slowly unpick the truth of your situation through environmental story-telling while avoiding the discerning eyes of Jim who you just have this weird vibe from and always steers you away from any conclusive proof that you’re about to uncover. It ends with Jim as the final boss. No redemption! No mediocre white guy hero! He’s a villain.
That’s very neat. I want to play that.
I would just like to point out that the race and gender of the protagonists listed in this article are not the problem; the problem is the terrible writing of these films. Change these protagonists into women, trans persons, or minorities and you’ve still got a terrible film with an unlikable protagonist.
So, maybe look at these movies as bullets dodged for the cause of representation.
The only way to fix the problem of terrible protagonists is to not consume media with awful protagonists and tout good media to all and sundry. If movies with shoddy writing that star a charismatic white male actor start to consistently underperform in cinemas, then the main role will no longer be pre-cast for them.
Just my two coppers’ worth…
I don’t think the point is that these stories would be any better if the roles were played by minorities. The point is that the only way they get away with these types of lazy, bad stories is by casting mediocre white guys.
That’s exactly what I said.
;-)
Glad we agree!
I mean, if you did a movie like Passengers, but cast a minority/female/trans actor as the villain (Chris Pratt’s character), then you’d have a huge talking point for all the regressives out there about how such lead actors “cannot bring in the box offfice”, and “we’d best stick to the tried and true stars”, whilst completely disregarding the fact that the movie had an awful protagonist to begin with.
Bullet dodged, people. Bullet dodged.
That’s true — we agree! These movies definitely wouldn’t get made, period, if the filmmakers weren’t counting on some bland hunk to fill the role of protagonist. Which is almost a good thing in a twisted way, since they’re banking on the entitlement factor, and that wouldn’t exist with minority characters — so once people stop watching these crappy movies with mediocre white male leads, ideally this type of weak protagonist wouldn’t show up again at all. Who knows! A gal can dream.
(god even discounting all the other BS, Chris Pratt’s acting in Passengers is just sooooo bad — he has like two expressions)
My biggest problem with Orville is that it tried to be a generic comedy show that uses the Star Trek-esque setting as a playground just so that Seth could fulfil his Sci fi fanfic while using too many mordern jokes and commentaries(which aren’t even good, look at the third episode on season 1, LOOK AT IT!). It’s uncanny for a show being based on Star Trek being so much like Family Guy, I would rather have a Star Trek anime with a similiar as Legends of the Galactic Heroes, because it fits the world a bit more. It’s like getting Coffee but it’s filled with Salty bonbons.
As for the summary of Orville, there are in this analysis one inaccuracy:
Darulio when asked if the pheremones were active when he met Kelly actually never confirmed that she was under the influence of the pheremones the first time around, if it were, Ed and Kelly would be a pair. However their marriage was already fallig apart due to Ed being a workaholic in the past and having no time for her, her being the victim of sex pheremones would have not made sense within the story.
Having generic white guys as protag is there to create some relativity to the audience and his more save than having a protag from marginalized backgrounds. The problem is that the characters many of these stories are written very badly and only are there because they want to appeal to the standart demographic instead of exploring new ideas.
Honestly, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with having a main character be “mediocre.” The point of such an everyman archetype is to prove that a person doesn’t need to be exceptional to do exceptional things. You don’t need to be the strongest or smartest person to be great. You just need to be yourself.
On paper, it’s a good lesson. But, as you point out in this article, too often this lesson is taught to white men and only them, setting “white male” as the default. Everyone needs to learn that they don’t need to be great in order to be great. And, honestly, the world would be better off if that were the case. Meritocracy is a myth, after all.
The problem is not the mediocre character, but that you only always see white men in that role. You don’t get the same type of character played by a woman or a POC. They get away with choices which would never be accepted if the character were not a white man.
Just to be clear, in this article “mediocre” and “everyman” are not equivalent. These are specifically characters who do not deserve to succeed. Many stories have an everyman that is not mediocre.
I started thinking about the phrase everyman. I wonder if there’s a better phrase in the English language that conveys something similar? It seems that phrase could come across as sexist if women aren’t included.
I’ve got a couple in mind to replace that phrase: the normal person and the everyday person. If neither of those cuts it, then we’ve run into a limitation of the English language.
Average person would probably be closest in meaning to ‘everyman.’ Or one could use the term ‘everyperson’ instead of ‘everyman.’
I think I like the term ‘everyperson’ best of all. Thanks. New term on Mythcreants?
Could happen. I think if I used “everyperson” instead of “everyman” people would probably know what I was talking about.
Layperson, maybe?
Everyone-type?
The difference might be worth an article in itself.
For those of you looking for something different, here’s a short video I found on YouTube. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXWBuoYc8SI). For those of you still into Harry Potter, it is that series retold in short form, but from Hermione’s perspective. I like that retelling because Hermione won’t take crap from anyone.
hello there!
your local black reader speaking- was just wondering why the author of the article felt the need to capitalize the word “black” but never did it for the word “white”? it feels a little weird, and as a black person, it also feels a little uncomfortable too.
no hard feelings or anything, just wondering why that choice was made^^
Capitalizing Black and not white is purposeful and intended to be progressive. Let me get in touch with our copy editors and I’ll get back to you with more specific reasoning.
So here’s the reasoning. “Black” is capitalized to indicate a shared identity. This is consistent with the way ethnic groups are generally capitalized, and has been recommended by Black journalists and editors.
Whereas “white” is not capitalized because building a white identity is something white supremacists do, and capitalizing it could play into their hands.
Our head copy editor pointed me to the Columbia Journalism Review’s explanation, which has more details: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
Editor’s note: If you saw the rash of comments that suddenly appeared and then disappeared, it’s because a white supremacist troll found this article and went on a spree before I banned them.
I just did a 3-minute video assignment on something harmful in the media and who it disempowers. I remembered this post and went here for examples. Thanks, guys.