I’m joking with the meme, but it’s an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people’s lives in fiction.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there’s something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you’d like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
if you’re interested in the discussion of whose lives matter in fiction and what measure is a non human listen to a more civilized age, which is constantly getting into this over droids and clones and aliens
my pet issue is i would like to see trans characters who are both chill (neither transphobic stereotypes nor suffering for cis people to feel bad about) and not just cis people with different genitals (this one’s less mainstream, but it’s obvious in some books and it bugs me). basically what i want is for trans writers to get more mainstream positions, because there are plenty of characters like that, they’re just only in shit like unjust depths. which i love dearly and i love that it’s free, and it couldn’t be as openly revolutionary and marxist if it was less indie, but i would love to be able to talk to other people who have read it outside the 50 people in the official discord server. basically i want madiha (or another transgender communist, there are others writing good stuff) to be given the reins to a prestige tv show and not have any oversight
Period pieces from the 1940s-1960s USA made decades later where amongst a group of white people, only one of them is actually racist and the rest are fairly enlightened (see The Help, for one example). If you were a white American in 1955 and you weren’t a commie, there is a high likelihood you were hella racist. Michael Moore told the story on Chapo where they announced that MLK had been shot at his all-white church and the whole congregation started fucking cheering and celebrating. Most white people back then were very racist and this trope really whitewashes it.
That said, I really like the DS9 episode Far Beyond the Stars for this reason. Shimmerman is the only white character that is explicitly not racist but he’s also implied to be a leftist if not a commie. The others are either a bit racist or at best indifferent to Avery Brooks’ racial struggles. The cops beat him up, too. Pretty accurate. And maybe this was a throwaway line, but I love how Sisko doesn’t want to go to the 1960s Vegas holodeck program because, as he explains, that time and place wasn’t great for black folks. Don’t know if that was the intention of the writers but it’s kinda true, all the white characters are just loving Vic Fontaine and who atmosphere, completely oblivious to the broader society going on around them.
“Secret cabal controlling the world from behind the shadows” traffics in anti-Semitism. The trope doesn’t predate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It validates the fascist idea of an enemy being both weak and strong. If the cabal actually control the world, they obviously don’t need to hide behind the shadows.
The trope doesn’t predate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
yes it does, the illuminati & freemasons are from the 18th century
now modern interpretations of it definitely have interwoven secret society tropes with antisemitic ones. and the original panics about masons and illuminati were kind of colored with antisemitic tropes it’s all kind of a mess so i guess i’m saying you’re broadly correct just too late in your chronology
There are two classes of tropes for me: the ones which serve as actual building blocks of worldbuilding and storytelling, and the ones which are cultural biases.
The former are just the usual patterns retold throughout history, like the hero’s journey. They can seem boring, but it’s because they are generic and need to be localized to the fictional world or a culture’s mythology. Arguably, the way we identify these involves bias, eg. the hero’s journey is mostly based on Indo-European mythology. But I hope my point can still be made.
The latter category are the tropes informed by biases. Or to put it another way, when you can create any possible world or write whatever story, why is it just medieval Anglo shit over and over? Ever notice how most fantasy maps are left-justified? Even hard worldbuilders who do all that meteorological calculation shit can’t perceive a linguistic reality beyond the European sprachbund.
It’s like learning the etymology of a word. Sometimes you find out the way we use words today is very weird, and we shouldn’t assume it applies across all time and traditions (“man” used to be gender neutral, for example). Except some core words eg. “to be,” “to go,” “to come” are relatively very stable.
Omg I thought I was the one going crazy telling people of the implicit racism in LotR or other fantasy works!
I mean “horde” comes from the Turkish word “ordu” meaning army and was used to describe the ottoman ordu/horde. Is it then a coincidence that the orcish horde are often depicted wielding scimitars and the elves straightswords?
Why is mordor placed in the exact position as anatolia on the map? Rectangular in shape with near insurmountable geological features as its borders???
edit: I just took a look at the map for the first time in years and omg, minas morgul (once a gondor city) is so clearly gallipoli/troy coded, the black gates guarding the “main entrance” (who fell to mordor because of a plague in gondor) for Istanbul, the misty mountains the alps and the shire being obviously england doesn’t even need to be mentioned
The sword thing really gets me but I am usually quiet and self-conscious that it sounds like whining.
I really like swords, all swords! But growing up, I was taught that straight swords are the good and elegant ones, while all other designs are for evil henchmen who die immediately. The exception being the katana because weebs caught onto it as a glorified exoticized object.
In general, it confused me how knight, samurai, and ninjas become categories in themselves, but no other historical warrior figure gets to have the same.
The geography is specifically based on earth’s, because it’s meant to be set in the distant past of our irl earth when there was still magic.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like I should point out that he does kill humans in season 5, and the show more or less says that not only is he still cool and heroic for doing it, he’s actually even more awesome now that it can be shown with blood and everything.
Yeah that’s wild from a creative perspective. The morals didn’t change, the censorship level did because it was on adult swim.
And even then there was still this level of acceptable violence when you’re not considered human enough.
They were considered evil enough to kill even if they were born human and made evil against the will.
Yeah that’s wild from a creative perspective. The morals didn’t change, the censorship level did because it was on adult swim.
I mean, I think that was completely the correct decision, artistically. Samurai Jack was openly influenced by chanbara movies and samurai anime and manga, and particularly by Lone Wolf and Cub. The samurai characters in those stories are cool and heroic precisely because they kill people in stylish and gruesome ways. Shying away from that or rejecting it would have been hypocritical weak. I also think “cinematic violence is incredibly cool and our hero is incredibly cool for killing people in cool ways” is FAR less problematic than “it’s cool to kill robots because they’re not ‘real’ people, even when we show them as fully sentient, but killing humans is a big no no.”
