I know, we'll put our one woman of color in an unrelated side story so no one will like her!
Despite what some people may tell you, storytelling tropes are not inherently bad. They’re just something that gets repeated often enough for us to give it a name. Plenty of them are very helpful to writers of all skill levels. But then again, some of them are just bad. Then there are the ones that go beyond simply being bad and enter problematic territory. Not only will they make your story worse, but they also reinforce harmful attitudes in real life. Let’s take a look at the some of the worst offenders.
1. Whataboutism
Whataboutism is the act of trying to excuse a bad thing you’re doing by pointing out an unrelated bad thing that someone else is doing. If someone asks why you’re burning down an orphanage, you say, “But what about that other guy who’s burning down a pet shelter?” The accusation might be true or might be complete fiction, but what matters is that it’s unrelated to what you’re doing.
This rhetorical strategy is often associated with Communist propaganda from the Cold War, but most countries indulge in it from time to time. The American right in particular loves it. That’s all bad enough, but when stories start using whataboutism, it becomes my personal problem.
In fiction, whataboutism usually occurs when an author wants to have something really horrible and shocking happen, but they don’t want to deal with the implications. So they have their characters do the terrible thing and then try to justify it by pointing out how other people have done something similar. If there are no convenient people or groups to point at, the author will sometimes just reference the general evils of “society” and call it a day.
This is a particular problem in dark stories, and it’s always frustrating. Someone in the story still does something terrible; it doesn’t matter that other people have also done terrible things, and the author acts like that’s all the justification needed. The story just moves on without ever addressing the problem. It feels like the story’s moral compass is broken, and it’s hard to take any satisfaction in whatever happens next.
That’s bad enough when you’re talking about topics like murder or arson, but it can get way more problematic. A particularly toxic strain is when authors try to use the horrors of colonialism to justify aliens destroying Earth. The victims of colonialism still live on Earth in these stories, and now they’re being wiped out because of the crimes committed against them.
What to Do Instead
The first thing to understand is that it’s fine for a character within the story to use whataboutism, as long as their views are not given authorial sanction. How do you stop that from happening? The best way is to have other characters point out how wrong this view is, especially the protagonist or a trusted secondary character. It’s also important to make sure the whataboutist’s views aren’t justified by events of the plot. Their views should be clearly wrong by the end.
If you’re using whataboutism to justify the actions of characters you like, you probably need to tone down their actions or give them a more compelling reason. If your sympathetic vampires kidnap humans to suck their blood, don’t justify it by explaining how humans also kidnap each other. Instead, make it clear this is something the vampires must do to survive, and then show how they’re very careful to only kidnap domestic abusers and corrupt politicians.
Finally, it’s always possible to construct scenarios where it is actually relevant to compare the wrongs done by two characters or groups, like if your protagonist is deciding which heir to the throne they should support. This is not whataboutism; it’s weighing the pros and cons.
2. Innocent Patriarchs
The story of a female protagonist tormented by her older female relative is a staple of many fairy tales. Often the tormentor is a stepmother, but not always. Sometimes you see aunts, governesses, or even the heroine’s biological mother in the abuser’s role. This trope isn’t inherently bad, but it gets gross fast when combined with a highly patriarchal setting and a living patriarch.
In this type of story, you have a heroine who not only lives in a world where men have all the power but who is also constantly abused by her older female relative. At least she has a kind father she can talk to. He provides contrast to that evil stepmom, and he is probably the one who taught the heroine to do cool things like horseback riding and sword fighting.
Except there’s a problem here. In extremely patriarchal settings, the father* has total power over the household, and yet he does nothing to stop the abuse. It would be easy, since no one can say no to him. This makes him at least complicit, if not an active abuser himself. Usually, this problem is left completely unaddressed. On the rare occasion when it is addressed, the author offers some excuse about how the father is either henpecked by his abusive wife or just clueless about whatever goes on in the world of women.
This is really harmful for a few reasons. First and foremost, it reinforces the stereotype that a woman’s real enemy is other women. Beyond that, it lets men off the hook for the role they play in patriarchal power structures, often treating them as large children who just don’t know any better. So, it’s sexist in both directions. Amazing.
Authors most often use this trope from force of habit, as far as I can tell. Our misogynist cultural lexicon is full of terrible stepmoms, so modern storytellers recreate the trope without thinking. Sometimes, it’s also employed in an attempt to make patriarchal settings seem more palatable, as strange as that sounds. Sure, men have all the power, but it’s really other women who are keeping our heroine down.
What to Do Instead
If you’re looking to put a refreshing twist on a stale classic, your best option is to make the patriarch abusive and let your heroine seek refuge with their older female relative. Not only is this subversion surprisingly rare, but it makes a lot more sense. The stepmother doesn’t have the authority to simply end the abuse, but she provides what cover she can with her limited influence.
If it’s absolutely essential that the protagonist’s tormentor be a woman, then you’ll need to either make your setting more egalitarian or show how the tormentor is actually a tool of patriarchal power. In a reasonably egalitarian world, the evil mother has all the authority she needs to torment her child, no fatherly approval required. At the same time, patriarchal systems often empower women to hurt other women, but that can be more complicated to depict. You’ll need to show how even though the patriarch never dirties his own hands, he’s still creating an environment that makes the abuse possible.
3. Empty Progressivism
As progressive values spread further and further into the mainstream, it’s no surprise that more storytellers want to reflect those values. On its own, this is a good thing. More progressive stories inspire a more progressive world. But sometimes it isn’t that simple.
You see, actual progressive values require moving past old ways of doing things. That’s why they’re called progressive. This makes people uncomfortable, and often the easiest path is to claim a progressive stance but then not follow it up with anything of substance. That way the storyteller can get their kudos, and the story can rake in progressive cash at the box office, all without offending any bigoted sensibilities. Everyone wins, right?
Except no, not at all. It’s bad enough for progressives when a story doesn’t reflect our values, and it’s even worse when it claims to do just that but then doesn’t. Now we feel insulted and lied to. And to put a cherry on top, bigots will still be mad that a progressive value was even mentioned! They’re just that sensitive to anything that challenges their worldview.
In fairness, it can be difficult to spot empty progressivism. The far right loves to lob accusations of “tokenism” and “virtue signaling” at any story with a woman or a hint of melanin, and we don’t want to buy into that ugly worldview. So how can we tell the difference?
The defining feature of empty progressivism is when the story promises to be more progressive than it is. Sometimes this is really obvious, like when a character just outright states that this story doesn’t subscribe to patriarchal values about women’s capabilities, even though it clearly does. Plus, these statements often deride women’s more traditional roles, which is just disrespectful.
Another common manifestation is adding a marginalized character to a story even though the cast is already full. The storyteller isn’t willing to lose any of their privileged characters, so they add marginalized characters and either give them nothing to do or send them off on unrelated side quests, guaranteeing that the audience will hate them.
What to Do Instead
Let’s say, as an entirely random example, that you’re adapting a fantasy story about thirteen dwarves, a hobbit, and a wizard going to get treasure back from a dragon. The cast is nothing but wall-to-wall white dudes, and you know that’s going to turn some audiences off. You could add a single elf lady who has nothing to do with the plot, but that won’t help anything. Instead, you need to actually change the identities of existing characters. Make the lead dwarf a black woman. Put two other dwarves in a gay romance. The sky’s the limit!
That’s really all there is to it. If you want to avoid empty progressivism, you must commit to real progressivism. Yes, it will piss some people off. But those are the kinds of enemies you want to have! Many of our literary giants are remembered specifically because they were willing to piss off the regressives of their time, from Mark Twain to Zora Neale Hurston. Plus, there’s no data to suggest that annoying bigots will make your story sell worse, so you don’t even have to worry about that.
4. Authoritarian Apologism
Thanks to the global rise of the far right, authoritarianism is on a lot of people’s minds these days. There are many different flavors of authoritarianism, but at their heart they all boil down to the idea that those with power can do what they want and the rest of us should just shut up. That sounds bad, and it is, but it’s also very attractive to people with certain worldviews.*
What does this have to do with storytelling? While very few authors actively support authoritarian views,* it is disturbingly common to find stories that make excuses for authoritarianism. This is called apologism, and it’s nearly as bad as full-throated support. In fact, sometimes it’s worse because people don’t recognize it for what it is; they just come away from the story with their existing biases reinforced.
In modern stories, apologism often manifests in plots that deride traditional checks on power like news organizations, the rights of the criminally accused, and democratic institutions. You see countless stories about how the cops could have stopped a serial killer if it weren’t for those darned defense attorneys and how politicians just can’t get anything done because they must appease the voting populace. How inconvenient!
In fantasy, and sometimes science fiction, this more likely manifests as an obsession over who the rightful monarch is due to blood purity, though authors will sometimes go further. It’s not unheard of for a fantasy story to feature a king needing to put down democratic opposition to his rule and being portrayed as a hero for doing so.
The most annoying part of this trope is that in isolation, it can seem to make sense. There are real-life examples of a leader being stopped from doing good work by checks on their power and times when the clearly guilty escaped punishment through legal technicalities. But these examples miss how terrible it would be to swing in the other direction. We don’t often talk about all the times a politician’s worst impulses were held back by checks and balances* or consider how important the presumption of innocence is, because those are our defaults.
What to Do Instead
For most stories, it’s best to simply avoid putting your heroes up against the institutions that are designed to check their authority. The antagonist for your divinely mandated monarch should be another divinely mandated monarch, not the democratically elected parliament. This is usually pretty easy and doesn’t cost the story anything.
If you want to go deeper, it’s possible to explore how checks on power can be misused, but that requires a much more complex examination of the issues at play. For example, you could write a story about how rich white people are routinely granted every legal protection, even when they’re clearly guilty, while poor black people rarely get a trial. That would be an examination of race and class privilege, not an embrace of authoritarianism.
From what I can tell, authors rarely use any of these tropes on purpose. They aren’t cackling to themselves about all the bad messages they’ve infused into their stories. Rather, problematic tropes usually crop up through unexamined assumptions of how stories should be told. That’s why it’s so important to think critically about our media, both as creators and as fans. We can do better than we’ve done in the past, but it will take effort.
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As far as 2 goes … I do agree with you on the general problem, which is older female relatives tormenting the heroine in a strictly patriarchal setting. But using the fairy tales is a bit difficult and here’s why:
Snow White has no living father and the same goes for Cinderella. It’s explicit, at least in all versions I have read, that their fathers are dead and their stepmothers rule the kingdom/the household – making them the ultimate authority figures. That is possible in European-Middle-Ages-type stories, because in the middle ages, widows could take control of their own life and, if they happened to be the widows of kings with no heir old enough to take the throne, often also the kingdom. In addition, in the middle ages, women had ‘control over all keys’ and were heads of the household – their husband had no say about that. So, perhaps, the middle ages weren’t that strictly patriachal. If we’re speaking about societies where women have no rights or freedom to speak of, things are different, of course.
With Snow White, what always struck me as more logical would have been her stepmother getting rid of her to keep control of the kingdom, once Snow White had reached marrying age. That’s far more logical than putting it all down to being ‘the fairest of them all.’ And, unlike Cinderella, there’s no suggestion that Snow White was mistreated (apart from having the huntsman set on her as an assassin and the assassination attempts by her stepmother later). Clearly, her stepmother didn’t spent much time with her or she would have realized how beautiful her stepdaughter had become – Snow White might be innocently unaware of beauty, but her stepmother is characterized by vanity, so she would recognize budding beauty when she sees it.
It’s interesting that stepmother of Snow White decided to kill her just because SW is prettier. In society, where woman has some power (hasve own property etc) there us no such motives in fairy tales. And only in case if woman get all from man she belong, her beauty become critically important. In my homecountry, women for a long time had their own right to inherit property from their mothers and thus we do not have stories about mother-dauther beauty competition, but have competition in workability.
Also, it’s true that in patriarchal societies elder women often become most obvious abusers of young women. But when showing this situation it’s important to show why this happen. Like Chinese mothers bind legs of their dauthers, they do believed they do best for their future. Or punishing one dauther for unwanted behaviour might be a desperate attempt to guarantee future of other children. It’s important to show that such elder woman-abuser is unavoidable part of partiarch system and they are also victims of this system.
It’s important to note, though, that the fairy tale of Snow White was written down by two thoroughly burgeois authors who have ommitted quite some stuff from the final version of their tales, such as Snow White’s originally blonde hair or Rapunzel’s pregnancy. Changing the power struggle for ‘being the most beautiful’ would be well within what they’d do.
The original version had the queen be Snow White’s biological mother, who personally abandoned her daughter in the forest. Also if we look at the regional variations across Europe, “Bella Venezia”, “Myrsina”, “Nourie Hadig”, “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree”, “The Young Slave”, and “La petite Toute-Belle” we see the common element of a mother or sisters jealous of a daughter’s beauty and plotting to kill her. In fact those stories stretch all the way to India, making it doubtful that the Brother’s Grimm scribbled out “father” and inserted “mother” over such a wide area.
In any case there’s no need to alter Snow White to fit; there’s a number of stories that fit the pattern of a daughter fleeing an abusive father: “Allerleirauh”, “The She-Bear”, “Donkeyskin”, “The King who Wished to Marry His Daughter” “the legend of Saint Dymphna”, “Catskin,” “Cap O’ Rushes”. If one takes a functional anthropological point of view, one might want to consider what function these sort of folk tales serve in instructing young girls.
I was merely pointing out that Snow White has no father who could have reigned her stepmother (or biological mother, I do see the touch of the Grimm brothers there, because they would have thought it unheard of for a biological mother to wish her daughter ill) in as suggested by point #2.
The jealousy feature is found in fairy tales a lot, but that might very well be attached to the fact that women were very much judged by their beauty – and in fairy tales ‘beautiful and innocent’ is very much a shortcut for ‘good.’
However, as the reigning queen during Snow White’s childhood and early adolescence, her stepmother (or mother in other cases) would have been the supreme ruler. That is what I wanted to point out. That I think the whole reason for killing Snow White couldn’t only be her beauty comes from my own view of the story as not being very logical about the reason for the stepmother’s homocidal plans. She would have been completely away from power again as soon as either Snow White reached a certain age or took a husband (depending on the laws of the kingdom in question), which makes a much more logical reason for me. But, of course, fairy tales are rarely about politics.
Yes, there are also stories of fathers who grew overly fond or were overly abusive of their daughters – worldwide, as it were. But most of them suggest sexual abuse rather than the abuse of the mothers or stepmothers (or sisters or stepsisters, indeed), which shows a clear difference. A lot of fathers want to marry their own daughters or at least sleep with them. Mothers and stepmothers tend to see their daughters as a threat to their own position (and sisters as a threat to a good marriage). That is the difference between abusive male relatives and abusive female relatives.
I have some thoughts on number 2.
1) you know it is possible for two female characters to not like each other and have nothing to do with sexism right? Girlhate can be a sexist trope, but two girls not liking each other (or an older women and a younger woman) isn’t inherently sexist. It’s can be accurate especially if they’re personalities clash or one is abusive.
2) abusive mothers & wives exist, and there are famillies where men are in charge but the wife can be abusive to her child, and he doesn’t care or doesn’t know(like in cinderella), or maybe he’s also being abused by his wife.
Not to mention that “young woman refusing to obey her father/an other male authority figure” is a cliché of hagiographic/Christian literature as well as a recurrent pattern in classical tragedy (both Greek and French at least).
Although not similar, there is a recurring theme in Fairy Tales and Mythologies; the old generation trying to wipe out the new.
Like with Cronus and his kids, The Wicked Queen could have had a fear of being replaced by Snow White. In the older, Pre-Brothers Grimm version of the fairy tale, the Queen was not just envious of Snow White but also hungry for immortality.
Several Psychoanalysts and Writers compare these youth-hating villains as Winter trying to prevent Spring from blossoming.
Also regarding this point: “On the rare occasion when it is addressed, the author offers some excuse about how the father is either henpecked by his abusive wife…” That can be a legitimate reason, as women can abuse their husbands and boyfriends even in patriarchal societies. The trick is to explicitly establish that he’s being abused and treat it as a serious narrative element, instead of just dismissing him as helplessly emasculated.
Maybe he and his daughter could connect over their shared experience of abuse and help each other confront their abuser. You’d have to do this carefully, since it could easily come off as a patriarch restoring his “rightful place” and saving his helpless daughter. An interesting angle would be if the daughter is mustering up her own power to rescue her father from an abusive situation along with herself, making her a more active agent. Of course, this would work best if the father respects his daughter as an equal and allows her to determine her own life once they’re no longer in an abusive situation — especially if the story’s setting is more egalitarian.
While I haven’t seen the movie, in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe Susan’s line was changed from the book. In the book, as he was giving children lethal weapons, Father Christmas had the line that wars are ugly when women fight. As opposed to being beautiful when men fight. It was also Lucy who said she thought she could be brave enough, and she had no response to the above line.
What he really meant was that men are more expendable, which is strictly true from a biological standpoint, but it’s hardly a good moral to argue in favor of or to build a society around. Made much worse by the fact that two of those “men” were adolescents(I think Peter was thirteen).
It seems like the problem in the film was that they changed the lines without changing anything else.
What this ‘war is ugly when women fight’ could also have meant (though your interpretation is more likely) is that women go all out when they fight – which is why most people would rather break up a fight between two men than between two women. Women fight without reservations, once they’ve decided to fight. Everything is fair, which is not how it often goes with men.
given the EXTREMELY well document ‘ugliness’ in real world history of warfare, I very much doubt women going to war would be any worse (or ‘better’, for that matter). Frankly, i’m sick of fantasy that pretends that war somehow isn’t inherently ‘ugly’ regardless. It is. Real life has shown this every darn time there’s a war (even if it’s not officially acknowledged as such)
warfare also really isn’t comparable to a fight between two (or a handful of) individuals, given the scale and motives of the conflict (‘i feel you wronged me’ vs. ‘we’re ultimately trying to kill each other because we have different flags/uniforms’) .
and by definition *anyone* fighting in war, where the goal essentially is to kill the enemy before they kill you, is “going all out”. someone is firing an assault rifle or trying to stab you with a bayonet, you’re not going to ‘hold back’ unless you’re an extremely committed pacifist and/or suicidal. and then there’s people wanting revenge for a slain friend, even if they were killed ‘fairly’ (meaning: in open combat). Understandable, yes. ‘holding back’ – no.
so to me, that reading makes the line even more absurd, in relation to warfare.
Quite some people deny that women have the capability to fight at all – but it is men who are trained to keep to certain rules when they fight (less of them these days), because they’re allowed to train to fight. Holding back is practiced by men in regular fighting such as bar brawls or fights over an argument. Women don’t keep to such rules, they are always using all at their disposal when they fight – which is why professionals who have to break up fights, such as police officers, are weary of trying to break up physical fights between women, but not when it comes to break up physical fights between men.
It’s true that in war everyone goes all out, because it’s a life-or-death situation. It’s also true, though, that women have been kept out of the fighting forces for a long time, because they were thought incapable of fighting or killing – both of which they’re not. There are other reasons (such as looking to the repopulation after the war, for which more women than men will be necessary), but those are not what people were talking about. It wasn’t ‘we’re going to need all of you women to have many children afterwards’, it was ‘you are too soft-hearted and you have no killer instinct, so you can’t fight.’
thanks for clarifying your statement. my wording probably wasn’t the best either.
My point was solely that the comment seemed to read as arguing that “women will make WAR (more) brutal or ‘ugly’, whereas so long as they’re kept out of it the MEN will behave like gentlemen” and the large number of real life atrocities even despite efforts to codify ‘rules’ of warfare, proves numbers of them don’t.
(and given it would be hard to ‘top’ the atrocities already documented througout human history of predominantly male-combatant warfare, the idea that women have to be kept out of it to *prevent* “worse” atrocity would be pretty freaking sexist, if someone did argue that.)
I stand by my argument that what goes on in a bar brawl, street fight or similar is a wholly different context to an army clashing against another army, when individual soldiers are trying to kill other soldiers whom they have never interacted with outside of that combat. That mindset is going to severely change how one approaches the fight, regardless of sex/gender.
>You see countless stories about how the cops could have stopped a serial killer if it weren’t for those darned defense attorneys
A Nightmare On Elm Street:
“the lawyers got fat and the Judge got famous, but someone forgot to sign the search warrant in the right place and Krueger was free.”
I always wondered how a lawyer could get rich defending a custodian. Maybe book rights?
Bloody Good Horror (http://www.bloodygoodhorror.com/bgh/in-extremis-a-legal-analysis-of-a-nightmare-on-elm-street) examines this in detail
Yeah that’s a good one. I guess this is before Krueger becomes a dream ghost?
I can’t see how he could actually get into a law dispute afterwards. It would be hard to make him attend a court hearing, once he’s that dream ghost.
Yes
The parents, upset at this miscarriage of justice, burn him alive
“And that’s why vigilante justice is bad, kids!”
For my fairy tale retellings, I have the wicked stepmother (or a stepfather, I won’t discriminate) have her secretly murder the Patriarch, in order to insure his money will go to her and her family, not to her stepchild.
In my retelling of Cinderella, the Stepmother is actually fond of Cinderella in a possessive, smothering and creepy way; Cinderella bears a physical resemblance to the Stepmother’s late firstborn daughter (who mysterious died under the Stepmom’s watch) and makes Cinderella her replacement daughter, much to the anger and resentment of the stepsisters. She keeps Cinderella in the house all day, never letting her go out alone or even leave, and she wants her all for herself. She treats Cinderella like a caged bird and a child, and also forces Cinderella to forget about her birth mother and family. The Stepmother would only get abusive when Cinderella is ‘misbehaving’. Ste Stepmother’s abuse of Cinderella is based on a real life Dysfunctional Parenting method nicknamed ‘My Baby Forever’, in which the abusive parent treats their fully grown child as a small child, ignoring their growing individuation.
The Stepmother is also working in a criminal business of illegal slave-trading and child/orphan trafficking. The stepfamily adopt Patriarchal authority, and the Stepsisters go to the extreme by adopting the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy as they care more about what men want from them then their own personal desires. The Elder Stepsister adopts the ‘Whore’ persona, which usually involves collecting lovers, partying, gambling and drinking, but also involves attending public executions and blood sport pits, manipulating men for her own amusement (as she cynically believes all men are slaves to their lust, be they a priest or a married man), hunting, exotifying men of color, groping underage boys, and has a slight homophobic problem (as she fears/hates gay men being immune to her charms and thus not easy for her to manipulate). The Younger Stepsister adopts the ‘Madonna’ persona, doing nothing all day but sewing and playing music and attending church service, but she’s terribly condescending, holier-than-thou, sanctimonious, preachy, judgmental, prone to hysterics and fainting spells, phobic of mice, and superstitious of witchcraft.
Cinderella on the other hand is neither of these women; she’s cunning, self-determined, self-motivated, and seeks to reclaim her true identity and family estate, all of which were stolen from her by her stepfamily. She also practices a form of ancestor worship, and is aided by the ghosts of her sister, mother and grandmother (a Triple Goddess figure). She wins the Prince’s heart with her beauty, intelligence, kindness, and sensuality, but she does not marry him at the end (that is left ambiguous), but she wins her family estate and restores what is rightfully hers.
I should also like to add that, although rare, Good Stepmothers in fairy tales really exist, most of them popular in Icelandic or Norse Stories.
Some of them would serve the role of a Fairy Godmother, usually by helping their stepchild/stepchildren with magic and resourcefulness. One Good Stepmother in a Norse Saga cried ‘tears of blood’ when the news of the death of her stepsons came to her, and she asked her biological sons to avenge them. This stepmother was none other than Aslaug of the Ragnar Lodbrok sagas.
One of the weirder examples of number four is the superhero roleplaying setting Freedom City, who has the villain Lady Anarchy, basically an avatar of “anarchy” in the sense of chaotic violence. It’s mentioned in her introductory adventure that her secret identity is ” infamous as a high-priced attorney to whom no client is too despicable to defend, be they terrorists, the basest demagogues, or homicidal ex-athletes”.
No-one points out that ensuring that terrible people get actual trials rather then just being executed at the whims of the powerful or beaten to death by an angry mob is actually both a pretty good thing and the opposite of the violent mob rule that she’s trying to promote but, you know, it kind of is?
You’re right. It is opposite. Maybe a better civilian job would be a corrupt official, someone who is harming the very systems that make civilization possible. A nobody in a secure government job but with access to a lot of things like an accountant. Bills would be paid late but she’d be by-the-book to a crazy degree that people decide to start cutting corners out of spite, or so lax with enforcing the rules (like health code violations) that people get hurt.
“send [the marginalized character] off on unrelated side quests, guaranteeing that the audience will hate them”
This is basically Rose in The Last Jedi. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “you hate Rose because she’s Asian and different!” No, I hated Rose because her story makes no sense, her quest influences the main story in basically nothing, and her preventing Finn’s sacrifice in the end is not cute, it’s infuriating.
Funny how specifically the two non-white characters in the movie were sent off in a pointless side quest…
I liked that quest, but it belonged in a different movie from the desperate stern chase.
IKR, what was the point of going to the gambling planet except to show the rich people were funding both sides of the conflict and do some good CGI and cute droid moments? It did nothing for the plot. Basically, it was filler.
It was Rocket Racoon saying, “I’m going to need that guy’s leg.” but taking up too much time and it wasn’t even funny.
Poe didn’t do much of anything either. He started a mutiny, and then the mutiny was undone and I just think Rian Johnson didn’t know what to do with anything from TFA.
For 2, I think a good way to show that a woman is the tool of the patriarchy is to make it clear that the patriarchs not only condone her actions but echo her reasoning.
“Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded” does this very well. Every female antagonist in the story is set up as merely doing the bidding of some powerful man, whether it’s the abusive new caretaker who was put in place by the male council or the headmistress who constantly impresses on her students that they have to always be biddable and calm so that they don’t disturb the men ruling the city.
That brings to mind the trope of the “princess being forced into marriage”, which I have been musing on a bit lately.
What if said princess was trained in political realities, and understood that these marriages were entirely for political reasons (to cement an alliance between families)? And that she knew that Marriage and Love are two separate things? And since Prince Hubby is probably going to have a couple of mistresses on the side, there’s nothing to say she can’t appoint her boyfriend/lover as “Master of the Hounds” or something like that?
That’s how it worked in quite some arranged marriages over time. He had his mistress somewhere nearby, she had a ‘riding instructor’ or other male household member to keep her company when he was seeing his mistress. Usually, the only critical point would have been that she waits until she has her first son, so the first child is definitly his (unless he’s not fit to father, in which case an astonishing number of men were cool with raising another man’s child as theirs).
I also think it’s a difficult thing to use ‘women committing atrocities on other women (or people in general) do so on the orders of a man’ in a story – it robs those female characters of their own agency. A female villain who is merely the tool of a male one is no real character, but simply a speaking, breathing object.
In reality, it happens often enough. Foot binding and female circumcision (which is really female genital mutilation) are both normally committed by women on their daughters or other female relatives, but they don’t happen to punish or subdue the other one (or because the woman committing them is sadistic by nature) – they happen because the women committing them think (or thought, in case of foot binding) that this is the only way their child/relative will have a good marriage to a wealthy husband.
4 – There was a Brooklyn 99 episode that portrayed defense lawyers as enemies of the cop protagonists because they got criminals off the hook. I was really uncomfortable with that episode.
Yeeeeep. That episode was not great. I’m willing to accept the premise that the 99 are idolized cops who don’t do all the gross shit so common in real law enforcement, but in that context they don’t have any reason to hate defense attorneys.
I’m so happy to see The Devourers referenced, I loved that book–but I’m surprised to see it called a whataboutism defender!
I definitely read it as a deep window into the minds of the werewolves, but not at all a justification for their actions. I take it you got a different message from it?
Awesome topic for a post btw, thanks for this one!
I’m glad you enjoyed the article! For the Devourers, the way I remember it, there are several scenes where the narrator is talking to Israel about werewolves, and when the narrator expresses disgust over the way werewolves murder people, Israel dismisses it with an excuse about humans doing the same thing, and the narrator seems to accept this argument.
This seems to be important since without that justification, the werewolves are clearly terrible and it’s hard to care what happens to any of them.
I think that the shapeshifters are indeed terrible, AND one has to consider what justifications monsters, both human and shapeshifter may come up with for their actions. What actions may be motivated by individual desire versus cultural imperative, and what may be considered a transgression on the personal or cultural level.
Its also important to not simply go by what an individual narrators said, but look at the consequences of the actions described in the narratives, and also remember the three narratives are in dialogue with each other. Where one narrator justifies their actions, remember what another narrator says:
“Those things you said before about my kind, that human men and women only war and rape. The worst thing about you is that you almost make me want to agree with you, with everything you say about my kind. But you’re not human. You’ve no right to say such things. I do, but I’ll never say those things. I am one woman. I am not all women. You bring out the bitterness in me. You bring it out like a fountain. All you do is make me remember rape and agony and hatred and forget every other moment in my entire life in which I loved. In which I loved my dear mother and laughed with her and marveled at her courage, at how much she cared for me. And I cried with happiness and not hatred and sorrow and fear. I’ve never loved a man in my life, but I am not fool enough to think that there are no men and women in this world that truly love each other and love their children together and did not conceive them through violence and pain. I will not be your human idol, your little goddess of suffering. I am not all human women. And you would do well to remember that while you devour and rape and preach and lament that humans will never love you.”
It is a complex, ambiguous and multilayered book, one that doesn’t really fit into the Saturday morning cartoon morality that characterizes a lot of urban fantasy. It asks questions while not giving easy, facial answers. But as the quote above shows, it really doesn’t engage in whataboutism.
I thought it was really refreshing in the beginning of Bodyguard when David, MC and police officer, disobeys his superiors because he wants to SAVE the life of a terrorist they’re gonna shoot down with a sniper. He keeps standing in the way of the sniper even though he’s ordered to step aside, and eventually the bomb is disarmed and the terrorist arrested instead of killed.
Like 99 % of the time when a police officer disobeys his superiors, it’s because he’s gonna kill and/or torture when they tell him not to.
Huh, maybe that’s why I love Ace Attorney series so much
I enjoyed that none of these were the tropes I see so commonly thrown around and examined; great article and great food for thought. :]
Yay, glad you liked the article!
On the other hand, drawing parallels between alien invasions and colonialism can work well. That trope dates back to The War of the Worlds, and Doctor Who did something slightly similar with the genocidal Daleks as Nazi analogues. But it only works if the point is “alien invasions and colonialism are both bad”, not “aliens colonising us is okay because we’ve already colonised each other”.
Very much in agreement.
Agree 100 %. War of the Worlds draw parallels to the Tasmanian genocide, which was pretty recent when the book was first published, but it’s VERY clear that the point isn’t to make the Martians look good; it’s to show how evil humans can be, doing this to their own species.
There’s also a parallel to the meat industry, since the Martians draw energy from blood transfusions from other species, and kill humans for their blood. But once again, it’s not in order to make the Martians seem okay, but to question our own practices.
I understand the political leanings of this blog, and it’s very transparent about them, which is appreciated. However, I’m starting to really get turned off by unsupported pot-shots at anyone with differing political views. Especially when articles falsely conflate different definitions of “the right” and falsely represent their values. For example, this article talks about the American right and the global rise of the far right as if they are the same thing. Normally in European politics the right is indeed authoritarian and conservative and the left is indeed socialist and liberal, both implying large government involvement. However, in America the left favors governmental involvement, more socialist policies, and liberalism in the sense of being open to new ideas and willing to discard traditional values. In America conservatism is connected to traditional (i.e. Judeo-Christian) values, while politically it is connected to libertarianism (the exact opposite of authoritarian). Because these two definitions of the right are so disparate, it is extremely disheartening when the ambiguity between them is used as a weapon to invalidate my beliefs. It also is frustrating when I’m trying to read articles about how to be sensitive to others and simultaneously being attacked for having different views of how governments should be run. Racist, sexist, and other types of hateful people are plentiful on both sides of the political spectrum, although I’m willing to concede that many of the most vocal are currently on the right.
Accusing the American right of loving whataboutism seems disingenuous, especially since attacking the opponent’s views instead of answering concerns seems to define political discourse in America right now.
I usually enjoy articles from Mythcreants. However, it bothers me that this article labels any people whose beliefs disagree with theirs as “bigots” and “regressives.” Creating a racist straw man which does not represent most right wing reader’s viewpoints and then saying it represents everyone on that side of the political spectrum is not the kind of thoughtful analysis I’ve appreciated from this site in the past…and it also violates the culture of respect that the rules for commenters seek to foster through forbidding the use of name calling.
As for number two…I just realized there’s a third way you can make the abusive mother figure/innocent patriarch dynamic work: by making the patriarch an abuse victim as well. Male abuse victims do exist, after all, and I imagine they exist in all times and settings, even patriarchal ones. And what they suffer from probably goes a lot farther than “henpecking”.
However, in order for it to work, you have to play it dead seriously. You can’t make any jokes at the male abuse victim’s expense, you can’t call him a sissy or imply that he’s weak or feminine, or even call him “henpecked”. Henpecked itself being a nasty word that implies that a man is lesser because his wife is emotionally abusive towards him. You also have to give the woman a real source of power over the man: like, say, make him secretly gay in a homophobic society and the wife knows and is using that as leverage in an especially cruel way. Or have the man be in a wheelchair and the woman uses that to make her more dependent on him, and possibly make him “sicker” in the process via poison.
In a strictly patriachal setting, though, it will be difficult to explain how the ultimate master of the household, who could have his wife flogged or otherwise punished for transgression, is actually abused by her. The point of #2 actually is ‘a society in which men have ultimate power over women’ – so the well-meaning father could order the abusive mother/stepmother to cease abusing the main character. In a more regular society, the father can be unable to stop the mother, but not in a setting where he has ultimate power about her life.
Does the father in your example REALLY have ultimate power over the stepmother’s life? Because I don’t think there are, or were, truly that many societies where the power dynamics were THAT imbalanced in the real world. Patriarchy, in reality, is not usually a ” man practically enslaves his wife” sort of deal, it’s usually “the wife is considered subordinate to the husband because of complex social, economic, and political reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the husband personally”. And whenever patriarchy is portrayed as the former, I find, it’s usually the result of White Feminism trying to “liberate” PoC women or some other racist nonsense. And besides, why would a sensible writer WANT to write a such deeply patriarchal setting anyway, if said setting wasn’t absolutely crucial to their intended theme/message? To me the inclusion of such a setting in the first place (without a substantial feminist message to back it up) speaks more to amateur, Fifty Shades of Grey-level quality of writing ability than any writer seriously trying to write a good story.
There are cultures where a man can easily dismiss his wife and divorce of her, which leaves her alone and without any support. Therefore, a man has control. And as you said yourself – there’s always the economic control. In strictly partriarchal settings, women usually don’t have the right to earn their own money and often can’t own anything – what they own, belongs to their husband. That alone gives a man control over his wife. And, yes, there are few cases where a wife isn’t worth more than a slave, even though she’s not considered one, although you’d have to go back quite a bit in history. Greek women weren’t in any good position, for instance.
Sorry, nope. This shows a misunderstanding to abuse that is really bothersome. This is akin to “she could simply leave if she wanted to”. As a survivor of female abusive (both psychological and sexual) it is never nearly as easy as you portray. I always had “the power to walk out the door”…however through years of gaslighting and negative reinforcement I was convinced that I wasn’t worthy of anything better and that I was *lucky* to have even the small amount of good interactions I had and that if I left I would be forever alone and worthless.
It doesn’t matter if it is a total patriarchy or not, abuse works on the individual’s belief and view of themself. There might very well be *no logical reason* that they are still being abused, haven’t stopped it, haven’t left… but abuse specifically works *inspite* of logic.
Sorry, seeing statements like this argument on the site just makes me have to say something. I swore when I finally did manage to get out of the years and years of abuse that I would speak up whenever possible about the subject.
It’s good to get different perspectives on things, so I’m glad you’re sharing your traumatic experience.
I wonder, however, whether a strictly patriarchal society would produce a woman who will abuse a man. The example here is a woman abusing another woman and the man – who has more power by society – being shown as benevolent, but not acting. Because of that, it has been suggested that he, too, is abused. But in a very strict patriarchal setting, the upbringing of both the man and the woman in question would have been different to our society. Women would be taught from childhood to submit to men, because ‘that’s the way its done’ – so it would be highly unlikely for a woman in such a setting to actually become abusive towards a man. Men would be taught that women are ‘beneath them’ and that they will always have other options, unlike the women – so it would be highly unlikely they’d accept abuse. Especially the powerful men mostly shown in such stories would have easy options to finding another wife and would know it. They might not strike back with brute force (although the medieval-type fairy-tale settings would suggest even that), but they would do all in their powers (a lot) to subdue a woman who crosses them. And, as said, it’s doubtful a woman would even try abusive behaviour towards a man in that setting in the first place.
A woman in such a setting abusing another woman is far more likely – since that would be abuse on the same level or even abuse of someone socially below her (children usually are not considered on a level with adults in every society and some might give parents or step-parents the right to abuse). This is what you can also see, for instance, in The Handmaid’s Tale where the Aunts break and train the Handmaids for their role (i.e. being repeatedly raped, then having their children taken from them) – women who are complicit with the patriarchy, mostly because they believe they do the right thing.
“It’s racist both ways.” Dang. But I really do hate when I see all those passive male figures in stories. Or passive anyone. Characters need to act! *epic music plays*
I don’t think making some of the dwarves black, women or gay would be a good idea in an adaptation. You’d really need a plot with more diversity to begin with. I know you guys don’t agree, but in some cases that just wouldn’t make sense either.
Does the plot depend on all dwarves being white, male, and straight? In that case you’re right. But if the plot doesn’t depend on it (hint: it rarely does in my experience), there’s no problem with changing ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference of characters for whom it doesn’t matter.
A funny thing in these discussions in general is that people always ask ‘why does this character have to be black/female/gay?’ instead of asking ‘why does this character have to be white/male/straight?’ In most cases, nothing would change about the actual plot, if those aspects of a character change (romance plots are an exception there, unless you change things about several characters to make it work again, but how many stories are that focused on romance?).
I think what he means is that when people go to see an adaptation of something they like, they wouldn’t want to see a new cast of completely different characters; they want to see what they liked on the big screen (or small).
On an “unrelated” note, I want to know what Oren thinks of the Discworld City Watch tv series that’s coming out soon.
Additional note: the example mentioned in the article about The Hobbit wouldn’t be an adaptation. It would basically be a modern reimagining. Now, that’s perfectly fine, but it would probably be false advertising to claim it was an adaptation.
(Much like The Watch, which, instead of adapting any of Terry Pratchett’s near-perfect books, chose to… reimagine the entire setting and characters, while still claiming it was an adaptation and that the choices they had to make were ‘essential’.
I cannot say that having read this article, I would really agree with much, if anything stated or proposed. It seems that the “problematic” in the headline is not so much directed towards quality issues in writing, but exclusively centered around placing the perspective of real life social politics into fiction, and specifically encouraging to make narratives more towards one particular sort of sociopolitical thinking. It isn’t as though progressive would exist only in reality, but I believe that we shouldn’t go so far as to make the entire narrative and setting, which exists in its own realm independent of reality beyond the author’s imagination, to be more of an extension of personal beliefs or desires.
So far in my still-young life, I have found little reason to be convinced that fictional entertainment “reinforces” any sort of attitude in real life. I believe there may be an exception in works specifically created for the purpose of manipulating real life attitudes themselves, but ironically this is more present in modern works created by those who intend to be as “unproblematic” or progressive as possible through their creations and writing. The irony becomes even stronger once it is acknowledged that we’ve had periods before, and even now, that certain entertainment was considered to be explicit promotions of actual violence, sexual deviancy, paganism, secularism, warped moralities, substance abuse, etc. As it appears, it is little more than this decade’s version of such a concept, albeit its proponents being of a different type, as to be frank, we went from cliche Bible-thumping fathers and fundamentalist lawyers shouting “We need to think of the children” to cliche social activists and wishy-washy sex-positive/sex-negative feminists shouting “We need to think of the marginalized”.
The section about Whataboutism is probably the most valid section of the entire article, though I believe that only for the sake of maintaining a political stance did you bring up the real life usage and origins of of Whataboutism. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t even consider “Whataboutism” to be a cliche or a trope, so much as it is a thing that occurs, but given the nature of this thing, it’d be better off to cover specific works in which the writers did officially use that whataboutism as justification for anything within their stories.
In the case of the “Innocent Patriarch”, how often have you come across stories wherein the author genuinely believes that women are their own enemies, and explicitly expresses so through their stories, and in this form? How often do people read a novel only to then react to such a scenario with “This is the ideal behavior which we should emulate.”? The suggestions to rectify the stated problem seem to be little more than establish a lazily-painted over variant of the cliche White vs Black narrative, specifically making it more of battle between the sexes. There is no inherent wrongness for a story concerning family issues to feature a male patriarchal antagonist, but the solution written in this article gives me a different impression, that as opposed to “feature a male patriarchal antagonist”, that is to “feature the antagonist’s being male and being patriarchal”.
Typically, audiences are intelligent enough to infer that the Patriarch in stories about troubled families is ineffectual, complicit, and/or joining in on the torment and abuse of a younger family member. The only instances where I see that sex is a factor into such a matter is when articles like these are written, and equally as often as they are written, the suggestions given amount to little more than twist a cliche into a new cliche while socially soft-banning further instances of the original cliche from ever being attempted again. Otherwise, everyone sees it and reacts to it as a sexless or unisex matter.
The suggestion to fix “empty progressivism” appears to be just “More empty progressivism, with a hint of petty spite”. Certainly, as someone who does lean to the right wing of politics, I can imagine why I would be quickly dismissed for criticizing a statement like “These are the enemies you want to have!”, I think I have good reason to be brief about myself. The majority of conservatives who live today in the first world are such that would be considered very left-leaning to countless generations before them. A good number of conservatives are not even as you have described them or implied them to be or behave throughout this article. In fact, I for one, except for being right wing, am a member of a demographic who is often attempted to be appealed to, in genuine and shallow effort, for the sake of progressivism itself. I must say, Oren, I am inclined to avoid your own creative works as a result of this article.
Making a character gay or female or brown doesn’t make things more progressive. Making the story about their being any of those demographics, especially for the purpose of progressive influence, only serves to make the audience feel as though the story is more about who they aren’t rather than who they are in the setting, what they do in the setting, etc., ironically enough. For instance, if you have a story in which many characters are female, brown, or gay, wouldn’t it be strange then to highlight it to the audience as a creator, or through marketing or any form other than the product itself? Do you expect the audience react in horror? If so, you’re underestimating the average human. Do you expect the audience to react in glee and enchanted grins? If so, that’s actually rather unsettling.
Here’s my take on how to make a more, truthfully progressive story: Try not to be as progressive as possible with your creative works. That sounds oxymoronic, but I would say that you are actually more successful the less you try to make your content a medium for any sort of real life change, though I believe that there is a level of self-delusion at play if one assumes he’s talking about changing society with his works in present or future tense.
To Cay Reet in particular, “Why does the character have to be black” and “Why does the character have to be white” is nothing more than a cycle or spiral of arguments, to why my general response is to say “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”. Typically, when people ask “Why does a character have to be black/female/gay”, it’s in response to people trying to change characters. “Why…White/male/straight?” however tends to be more of a passive-aggressive expression whose question-maker has no real interest in even hearing any answer to begin with. This is also a question that in reality is asked as often, if not even more than “Why…Black/female/gay?”. From those who ask such a question, they tend to demand that characters who are straight, white, or male require sufficient and in-depth reasoning to be such, while characters should be LGBT, brown, and female by default if not enough profound reasons are given.
Often this site prescribes a solution to an existing problem without caution. Writers must do their due diligence, which means if they don’t know something they must do their research. To recommend a writer to simply include a marginalized group, without also recommending them to gain insight into them, is not progressive – it’s borderline exploitative. The inclusion of other groups are not and should not be treated as benchmarks of a work’s supposed progressiveness, which is the vibe I’m getting from this site. While it’s valuable to be aware of these issues, there shouldn’t need to be a gauge for this, as that is not the goal of art.
The reason why many media portray a certain type of character, and in most cases, a cis white male, is because the writer is likely that type of character, and/or they are very familiar with that type. They won’t write about other groups they’re not familiar with, and we can’t fault them for taking caution against writing what they don’t know. They could solve that by doing research, but when it comes to matters of personal identity most writers prefer to default to themselves. In many cases a ‘progressive’ swap simply won’t work, because it would have been inauthentic to the artist.
It’s why people ask why is the black woman taking a white man’s role, because the black woman should’ve been taking a black woman’s role. The show How to Get Away With Murder is authentic because the role was precisely written for a black woman. Audiences can see through a superficial swap. Gender swapped adaptations cause ire: the women should have their own story that was originally crafted with them in mind, and Ghostbusters clearly didn’t.
This should answer Cay Reet’s ‘Why nots’: the answer is simply that, it’s inauthentic.
Sorry, but that’s precisely the kind of answer which keeps people from expanding their cast and gives us all those stereotyped characters.
It is not exploitative to have people of different ethnicities, genders, and sexual inclinations in your story, even if their ethnicities, genders, and sexual inclinations don’t play a role in the plot. It’s realistic. There are very few areas today where only one ethnicity lives and there are very few places where always only one ethnicity lived, due to the history of our planet. Generally speaking, there’s more than one gender in one area of our world, too. Sexual inclination has always differed between people as well.
Am I, as a white woman, able to write a story about the everyday racism a black person encounters? No. But that doesn’t mean I’m forbidden from making one of the characters in my story black when it’s not about everyday racism.
Since the beginning of romance novels, there have been men writing those novels under a female pen name, as there have been women who wrote ‘non-female’ novels under a male pen name. Luckily, we’re getting to a point where you don’t have to pretend to be someone else to be ‘allowed’ to write about a topic that doesn’t seem to be ‘yours.’
Part of the skill of an author is to be able to write from a point of view that isn’t theirs. The ability to communicate with people who have that point of view, learn from them, and put that knowledge to work when they write a person they are not.
There are articles here about exploitative writing, which I suggest you might want to look at to understand the difference between ‘have a diverse cast’ and ‘exploit an underprivileged group for fun and profit.’
Wait; you’re a woman? I didn’t know that… guess I’ll have to change the voice I read your comments in.
“So far in my still-young life, I have found little reason to be convinced that fictional entertainment “reinforces” any sort of attitude in real life”
Autistic person here. It definitely does. A lot of media portrays us as either savants, or nonverbal people who have trouble communicating. (Which does a disservice to nonverbal autistics, because they are intelligent and capable of communicating too. And just because someone can’t communicate in the normal way doesn’t mean that they are any lesser.)
I have had people act surprised that I can communicate, with one person saying that I “speak well despite…” That was a vertebrim quote, complete with the trailing off.
I agree with you, Julia. Not only have I and people with the same neurodivergence as me faced stigma from people who quoted media (“Oh you have dissociative identity disorder? Like in Split? Are you dangerous?!”) but I have also struggled to communicate my experiences to my closest friends because I have never seen someone talk about it in a helpful way. Had I seen fictional characters in similar situations who found constructive ways to talk about it, it would have been immensely helpful! As it is, I’m still tongue-tied even though my friends know that I have DID and some of them have it too. But interrupting the flow of a conversation or starting a new one to bring up a DID-specific experience that just happened – even when it is relevant in the moment, like “Hey I just switched and don’t remember what you just said” – still feels “alien” because I never see people doing it, not even fictional characters.
And similar things are true for being asexual and nonbinary, although to a lesser extent.
On the other hand, I have also taken inspiration and reassurance from fictional stories that helped me talk about other difficult issues. I’d seen characters talk about it and that made it easier for me to, for example, come out as queer. It was still difficult and I was still scared of rejection, but I had some idea about how this conversation could work.
So, yes, fictional representation does impact the real world in many ways. It can influence (to a degree – I’m not claiming it’s the only factor) people’s attitudes, both for people who aren’t in that marginalised group and for people who are in it. It can soften or reinforce stigma AND internalised stigma.
Hey, your link for “The American right in particular loves it” doesn’t work anymore. That account was deleted or something.
Good catch, thanks!
What about Tu quoque (you too)? Is that also Whataboutism?
After WWII the german Admiral Dönitz was accused of giving the order of Unrestricted submarine warfare USW. He produced a letter by USN Admiral Nimitz that said that Unrestricted submarine warfare USW was the first order Nimitz gave to the Pacific Fleet upon taking command after Pearl Harbour. Dönitz was found guilty but not punished in this specific point (there were other accusations against him, where he was found guilty and punished but not for USW).
I have to admit that I don’t know what this is about.
About the question: I googled Tu quoque and the first entry was wikipedia which make it clear in one of the first sentences that, yes, this is an instance of Whataboutism – a personal one instead of naming some other inequality that weights more heavily in someone’s eyes than what is mentioned.
About the rest: what’s that supposed to be about?
Tu quoque is a latin law principle and is about equality, that all people are treated equally by the law.
It is a direct opposite to :
Quod licet iovi, non licet bovi.
(Free translation: What is allowed to Jupiter (the highest roman god), is not allowed to the ox.)
So, whataboutism can be seen as Quod licet iovi, non licet bovi.
‘Whataboutism’ is listing other inequalities when someone argues about one. If a woman argues that she is not paid the same as a man in a western country, a ‘whataboutism’ argument to shut her up might be ‘what about women in Saudi Arabia who aren’t even allowed to leave the house alone.’ It’s used to suggest that the woman complaining about inequal pay still has a better life and more equal rights than those women and thus no reason to complain about it.
That has nothing to do with ‘Quod licet etc’. It’s actually the opposite, because there’s no argument for why ‘Jupiter’ has more rights than ‘the ox’ – that would be like people around the time when women were fighting for voting rights saying ‘women can’t have voting rights because they’re not clever enough to make the right decision.’ In that example, men are ‘Jupiter’ with the right to vote and women are ‘the ox’ who rightfully has no voting rights.
This article mentions portrayals of politicians hamstrung by being beholden to voters, but I feel like the problematic portrayal I see far more often is the stereotypical corrupt and/or craven politician solely concerned with poll numbers and reelection.
This frequently crops up in shows which want to retain an apolitical veneer, such as children’s shows, meaning the show won’t identify the politician with a political party, if they address the existence of political parties at all. Often, these characters will be the only politician on the show, which together leads to the character acting as a stand in for the concept of politicians as a whole.
In doing so, this trope both erodes standards and raises distrust for elected officials. By creating/perpetuating a view that politicians as a whole are unprincipled shills who will turn any way the wind blows to preserve their own hides, this trope provides a shield to politicians who genuinely behave that way (“oh, they’re all like that”) while casting doubt on those making good faith efforts to be principled (“they’re just saying that to get the ____ vote”).
If there ever is a second politician character in such shows, it usually takes the form of an established non-politician character standing up to run against the useless incumbent, with one of two results. Either they lose despite being the clearly better choice (typical if the challenger is part of the main cast, as them winning would upset the show’s status quo too much), and the show makes commentary on the process being rigged, or else they win (this is usually only on the table if the challenger comes from the supporting cast) and no one but the deposed loser ever expresses any displeasure with the job they’re doing going forward. If the shows cares enough to bother showing them dealing with a crisis as an official, they will be highly effective with no pushback from anyone.
Both results further the erosion of faith in different ways. The former erodes faith in the electoral process itself, and discourages political engagement by perpetuating a sense of futility at change. The latter does so by portraying political leadership as straightforward and easy, suggesting that all shortcomings by established politicians are due to laziness and insincerity, rather than the reality that politics is really friggin’ complicated and making everyone happy all the time is impossible.
There’s something I don’t understand in this piece. You mention, as an example of a *good* way to write a sympathetic character:
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If your sympathetic vampires kidnap humans to suck their blood, don’t justify it by explaining how humans also kidnap each other. Instead, make it clear this is something the vampires must do to survive, and then show how they’re very careful to only kidnap domestic abusers and corrupt politicians.
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But also, in the part about authoritarian apologism:
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Apologism often manifests in plots that deride traditional checks on power like news organizations, the rights of the criminally accused, and democratic institutions.
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I’m confused here, because isn’t the good example of a sympathetic character *also* an example of “deriding … the rights of the criminally accused”?. If you have vampires that are going around kidnapping people, and saying “it’s okay because the people we’re kidnapping have committed crimes” (in this case, domestic abuse and political corruption), isn’t that basically saying it’s okay to punish people for perceived crimes without giving them rights? (Unless, of course, the vampires *are* in fact setting up a court system where they are giving their targets the presumption of innocence, right to defend themselves, and so on, there are laws that prescribe kidnapping by vampires as punishment for particular crimes, and then the vampires are only kidnapping people who the courts find guilty of those crimes. Is that what you had in mind?)
In the real world yes, it would be bad for vampires to go around handing out vigilante justice. But we’re assuming an urban fantasy with a number of conceits, like vampires needing to drink human blood and not being able to get it from blood banks or willing donors. So long as the vampires aren’t going on about how they’re getting justice where the legal system couldn’t, that won’t send the same message that it does when Batman makes a big deal about being able to do things police aren’t allowed to.