site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."

Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.

Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.

Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.

Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.

Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.

A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.

The Jar Jar one always got me. I kept hearing people say Jar Jar was a racist caricature, but I couldn't figure out what race he was supposed to represent. Not a very good caricature if I can't even tell what it's caricaturing. (I think he's supposed to be quasi-Jamaican? But he really doesn't seem Jamaican to me.)

Off the top of my head there was a prominent trans character in Orange Is The New Black, and there was a boy with Downs Syndrome (I think?) in Ozarks.

Fair counterexamples!

Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.

It's been more than a decade since my primary way of entertaining myself was watching TV shows, but when it was, I got the sense that there's obesity all over the TV. Is obesity really not depicted in shows nowadays?

Mostly the examples that come to mind, for me, come in two categories:

(1) Schlubby Guy Hot Wife dom-coms, which haven't been in vogue for years

(2) Reality TV, where writers aren't creating the characters (and so aren't accountable for the way in which the "characters" behave or look.)

it's possible I just don't watch TV or movies where there are obese characters! But I also haven't heard any specific media called out in this thread as counterexamples for obesity specifically, so.

Ugly Betty, back in the late 2000s, had a transwoman main character, albeit played by a cis woman.

or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.

I have the weirdest counterexample: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Jack Black plays Bethany Walker, a high-school girl trapped in the body of a fat man.

You know, I have to wonder if such things count. That is, people do not seem particularly keen or insistent on treating all cases of "X in Y body" as transgenderism. I'm not aware of people calling Tanya from Youjo Senki a trans woman.

The qualification to be considered trans seems about as stringent as you could reasonably expect - it's not transgenderism unless your character actually had those feelings naturally.

How much of that is not wanting to touch a World War German analog IP starring a prepubescent girl with a ten-foot pole beyond condemning it? Most people can't even tell that it's a later industrial WWI with a German Empire analog rather than histories designated bad guy faction. On top of that the main character is worse than a Nazi, Tanya is -may the Cathedral forgive me for saying this- a right libertarian capitalist.

It was the first one to come to mind. You can find other such cases easily. 1, 2. Admittedly, there are some people who will argue that someone like Ranma Saotome can be read as trans, but even this is more about how you can interpret the story as opposed to arguing that yes, the character is actually trans. Also, it's a story about a guy who can turn into a girl, which means it naturally picks up such discussion.

Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.

umm... there have been tons of shows featuring obese people

Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.

Isn't this what reality TV sorta is? Not retarded mentally but emotionally retarded or anti social.

umm... there have been tons of shows featuring obese people

any tv shows you're thinking of specifically?

shows featuring obese people

https://old.reddit.com/r/My600lbLife/comments/ujyxzd/master_list_of_realitybased_shows_about/

Not a lot outside of reality tv which is about their weight but This is Us comes to mind (just to give an example because you didn't, not disagreeing).

Here's a Patton Oswalt stand-up bit from 2011 (NSFW!) where he talks about being asked to audition for the role of "Gay best friend" in a romcom and him saying that he would only do it if he was allowed to play the character as really, really dumb, because he was tired of seeing all gay characters in media being portrayed as impossibly awesome and flawless.

The flip side of this is Weak Men are Superweapons. I've definitely started noticing recently that, at least in the media I consume, fundamentalist Christians (or deeply religious people in general) are never depicted as anything other than evil. Examples: the "Crackstone" character in Wednesday, the antagonists in Devil in Ohio (well, those were actually Satanists, but they sure looked like a standin for Puritans or Amish people). Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?

This is a total aside but I find it curious what does and does not get labeled NSFW. I'm not criticizing you or anything, you're following standard norms, but I find it weird that a stand-up bit without swears is "SFW", and a stand-up bit with swears is "NSFW", even though the actual thing I'd get in trouble for at work isn't the swearing, but the fact that I'm watching stand-up while I'm supposed to be working.

Or, like, pictures of women in bikinis is "SFW", but pictures of topless women are "NSFW", even though I'd be ~75% as embarrassed to be caught at work looking at women in bikinis as at topless women.

The counterpoint would be the Hollywood Atheist, though, ie. explicit identification with atheism as a creed being associated with cynicism and bitterness (at best) and villainousness at worst. Of course many/most examples are from a while ago, I'm not sure how prevalent this stereotype is now.

The “hot priest” from Fleabag? Though of course he:

Fleabag seduces him out of his vow of chastity but he doesn't actually stop being a priest iirc.

Thanks /u/butlerian

Fleabag seduces him out of his vow of chastity but he doesn't actually stop being a priest iirc.

Fifty Hail Mary's and he'll be fine.

Oh right. True.

Anyway he seems to be portrayed well, object of desire, nice guy etc

Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?

In the otherwise uneven and overlong Don't Look Up the best scenes center around Timothee Chalamet's very sweet and earnestly Christian character.

Not main character tho

Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?

IDK about fundamentalist, but the main characters in Kim's Convenience (Mr. and Mrs. Kim) are Christians. They are active in their church and take their faith seriously, and are depicted as good people doing good things.

depicted as good people doing good things

I wonder how much of that is because they're Korean. White Christians seem to be the ones depicted as fanatics, hypocrites or nice but dim. Unless they're liberal Christians who are on board with reproductive justice, LGBT rights, and racism is the only sin, of course. "Jesus would be out marching with BLM" type Christians.

I question whether obscure Canadian sitcom counts as mainstream (although I enjoy it).

Some of that comes from a very strong (and reasonably grounded) stereotype associating Korean immigrants with Christianity. To the point of it being a joke in Asian American circles that while other Asians come over and open restaurants and nail salons (if they're feeling especially broadminded, they might add motels to the list), Koreans comes over to start a churches. Still a good example and probably comes from the original source material being written by a Korean immigrant (who true to stereotype is the son of a pastor).

One thing I find interesting about Kim's Convenience is how heavily it can deal in stereotypes sometimes. For example, Mr. Kim is pretty damn close to being a racist caricature of Korean immigrants. But they pull it off really well: the show sometimes shows his mannerisms in a humorous light, but the writers aren't just picking on him. He feels like a real person, with good and bad things and who I found incredibly relatable (despite not being Korean or an immigrant). I feel like the way they deftly handle such characters shows the skill of the writers.

I think part of it is that writers- being secular hollywood types- mostly have trouble writing fundamentalist/deeply religious characters in ways that are both deeply religious and interesting to watch, so they show up in orbital roles or as antagonists(who don’t need to be fleshed out).

Bernadette’s parents and Sheldon’s mother from big bang theory were convincingly characterized as (different kinds of)fundamentalist Christians who were essentially good people, but they weren’t exactly main characters.

Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?

"Bible" Boyd is pretty much the only reliably "good" person in "Fury".

I'm not quite certain what your definition of fundamentalist / deeply religious is here, but here are some positively portrayed Christians off the top of my head:

  • Harriet Hayes from Studio 60 (2006-2007). She's shown to have pre-marital sex and considers posing nude at one point so she is admittedly a bit of a stretch.

  • Detective Almond from Backstrom (2015) is a born-again Christian who works as a volunteer pastor in a local community church.

  • Matt Murdock in Daredevil(2015). A flawed but ultimately good man. He's Catholic and often seeks counsel from his parish priest.

  • Shepherd Book from Firefly (2002) is a pastor, though it's also implied he found religion after a life of dirty deeds, so your mileage may vary here.

  • Michael Carpenter from The Dresden Files book series.

  • Graham Hess in Signs (2002) though we meet him in the middle of a crisis of faith.

  • Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge, but it's a biopic, so that may not count.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot Shirley from Community (2009-2015). She's got her flaws (prone to gossip) but she's depicted as a genuinely good person who does her best to do the right thing.

The Good Doctor introduced a doctor last year that is heavily religious (Christian) and it's honestly her most positive trait and they introduced a love interest for her that is also deeply religious. Maybe this is an import storyline from the Korean version, I don't know. But the two characters are almost universally supposed to be portrayed as positive (the girl is also as woke as one can be and still be a Christian). Though every character in the show is, I suppose, presented in a positive light. One of the last few episodes the female christian talks about how she's waiting to have sex for marriage. This is (2021-2023).

The Good Fight, probably in the running for the wokest show to ever exist had Andre Braugher come in after Delroy Lindo left and his character was extremely Christian, kind, and entertaining but because of those things all the other characters didn't believe that he was genuine at all and thought he was a phoney who was scheming but he really wasn't, exposing their own bias and this was (2021-2022). Though he and the female character above are both black they are genuinely presented as good people and good Christians. But there's also Jamie from Outlander at least up until the latest season in 2022 who you could say it doesn't count because of the era he lives in but considering his life and circumstances it wouldn't be strange for them to make him not Christian but he remains that way (though the most recent antagonist was a more devout Christian so maybe that's a wash).

There's also the Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2020) and even through all the characters foibles in it, almost everyone, even the scheming ones, are still fundamentally good people. At least the people portrayed as religious.

It made me think of how much of a kind of tropey character Shepherd Book actually was at the time because I remember so many shows that would have a solidly sound and humanistic moral center of the show be a pastor or extremely religious character. The Simpsons (which ended in season 11), Oz, The X-Files, and (going back to Andre Braugher) Homicide: Life on the Street. Recently that trope has kind of gone away and I feel like the amount of characters who are good and almost solely as a shorthand for that are made religious is still pretty high but the amount of people that are evil and also religious has probably skyrocketed, I blame horror.

An interesting note to the OP is a trans character played by a trans actor in Big Sky that was part of the main cast was just silently written out. Maybe that is an adjustment for the audience or maybe it's just coincidence.

I was pleasantly surprised by how wholesome the Young Pope is. The latter half of the season has some of the most genuinely heartfelt and beautiful moments I've ever seen on TV.

Over 15 years ago shouldn't count. And Daredevil is a version of a character who was a Christian over 15 years ago.

Over 15 years ago shouldn't count.

Why?

Daredevil is a version of a character who was a Christian over 15 years ago.

True, but the writers of the modern incarnation of the character could have just as easily chose gloss over or downplay his Catholicism.

Why?

Because the political factors that would lead the media to not include any good Christians were considerably different 15 years ago.

Your arguement is that media has become more hostile to Christianity in particular over the last 15 years? I'm not debating you, I just want to understand your position on this.

Uh, yes.

There was certainly some hostility 15 years ago, but by no means as much.

Michael Carpenter from The Dresden Files book series.

Michael is the single best representation of what a Christian should be like I've ever seen in pop culture, bar none. He's just a genuinely good man, but he doesn't ever throw that in anyone's face or judge them. I unironically would love to be able to say I'm like Michael, though I'm a hell of a long way off from that.

I'm genuinely surprised at both Michael and Father Fortes as written in the books. Butcher's treatment of Christianity is possibly one of the most respectful I've come across in modern secular media in my entirely life.

It goes further. Having a sex vampire quote Corinthians at length is quite the novelty.

Greys Anatomy had a really interesting Christian doctor for years and it led to really interesting story lines regarding sex, marriage, crises of faith and ultimately abortion. Pity she was removed to free up her love interest for an unpopular character that the writers wanted to center.

Shepard Book's past life shouldn't be a problem, total depravity is fairly common to most Christian doctrines (an assassin and a vegetarian who never raised her voice are both equally deserving of hell absent Jesus).

Yet many heroes of the bible have very checkered lives. David covets his neghbor's wife, commits adultery with her, murders her husband but is contrite and is called a man after my own heart by God. Paul murders every Christian he can find before before meeting Jesus, getting saved himself, and authoring most of the New Testament.

The questionable thing about him is whether his faith is Christianity. The show does a great job of pulling tropes from the 20th century but attaching them to an alien culture, his faith could just as well be Islam, Christianity or some mix of either with an Eastern faith. The show did this well enough that someone who has almost every trope of unrepentant Confederate yet is lionized by the culture that hates the source of those tropes.

There are enough references to Book reading & studying the Bible that I assumed he's a Christian of some stripe.

I get that you're nodding to general perceptions regarding who "counts" as Christian but the caveats bug me.

She's shown to have pre-marital sex and considers posing nude at one point so she is admittedly a bit of a stretch.

You don't have to be personally / socially conservative to be Christian! If we use the Nicene Creed as an orthodox litmus test, being a Christian is defined by what you believe, not how you conduct yourself. (This is not to say that I don't personally think Christians, including myself, should strive to meet certain behavioral standards. But there is a lot of disagreement about what those standards should be precisely. And pretty widespread acknowledgement that most of us aren't going to live up to the ideal all or even most of the time.)

implied he found religion after a life of dirty deeds, so your mileage may vary here.

So did St. Paul!

You don't have to be personally / socially conservative to be Christian!

This is where we get into the weeds. Portrayals of liberal Christians aren't what we're talking about here; they tend to be regarded favourably precisely because they will fit into the Zeitgeist, and the "praying to God" stuff is just private personal quirks which is how it should be. They'll be your escort to the abortion clinic to support you against the bad Christians out front protesting. I think we could all imagine an episode of a mainstream TV series presenting such a view.

"Yeah I really believe all the Bible stuff" either literally or conservatively (small 'o' orthodox) on the other hand - zealots, baddies, or just nice people but shackled by the blinders of their repressive faith unless/until they get liberalised. Something along the lines of "I used to be one of the bigots protesting outside abortion clinics but then my daughter was raped and needed an abortion to save her life otherwise the pregnancy would have killed her, so now I've seen the light and done a 180 on all my old views". Again, episode on a mainstream TV drama.

being a Christian is defined by what you believe

I'm 100% with that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of "Well modern people in the modern age can't believe those old stories anymore, so we'll junk all that, and besides now we have science and women can vote, so we scrap this theology and change our disciplines" around "what should Christians believe?" that fits in with the Zeitgeist (see above). Is society now for gay rights? Then let's redefine our understanding of what St. Paul meant in this epistle so we can say he condemned 'bad' homosexuality but didn't mean 'good' homosexuality. Let's go all the way to say that the centurion and his servant were gay lovers, so clearly Jesus approves of gay rights! Let's say that witchcraft and demonic possession are spiritual gifts and silly old Paul just couldn't broaden his notions to accept that! (Seriously a sermon preached by the then-head of The Episcopal Church, that should be non-socially conservative enough for anyone).

Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does — maybe more so!

So you're a slave, possessed by a demon (or suffering from mental problems, if we take the modern approach). Your owners are making money out of having you tell fortunes. Along comes a guy who heals you. This is A Bad Thing because he should have recognised that being ill and exploited by people who regard you as a thing, not a person, was in fact a beautiful, holy thing.

Yeah, somehow I'm not a liberal Christian.

Thank you for writing this. This is the response I couldn't figure out how to properly phrase.

Ned Flanders is a great example of the cultural shift, actually, because where he was once a genuinely nice guy who wanted to be good to everyone (even Homer), likely at least in part due to his religion, he eventually mutated into a punching bag for the writers to use against evangelists, where "Christian (bad)" became his personality. No more was the kindhearted neighbor; he became oppressive, bigoted, hateful, and judgmental, with his kindly demeanor seemingly being a facade.

The Trope Namer for “Flanderization,” even.

Some of the (very left/progressive) authors I follow do talk about how sufficient representation is necessary for them to have more complex diverse characters, as opposed to aggressively averting tropes/stereotypes. To the point of one author saying they definitely were never going consider killing off $SPECIFIC_REPRESENTATION (in a book where the majority of the named characters died) because meeting those representation points was so rare. Having characters match stereotypes too closely is a lot less problematic if there's enough characters around in those categories that there's some around that don't match those same stereotypes.

This is part of why "token" representation is considered problematic, although calling representation "token" usually also implies that no real though has been put into the representation past sticking a label on a character that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a character without that label.

Are you talking about Wildbow? I remember him saying something along these lines a little while ago, specifically his breakdown of the backlash he received for the "Avery is dead" arc in Pale.

Also, if there's sufficient interest in it, I have a jumbled mess of thoughts I might be able to kludge together into a top level post describing why I think he peaked with Twig, from the angle of someone who is very much in the visible1 minority (not trans, not a furry, not squeeing over various characters, not socially liberal) of his fans.

1Based purely off of a cursory examination of the online communities that bother discussing his writings in the first place.

That was sad. On the one hand he has a great attitude (in some ways) towards representation, believing that characters need to be real characters etc. and not perfect cookie-cutter superheroes.

On the other, despite what he said I knew that none of the characters were in real danger. Even knowing that Wildbow has killed viewpoint characters in the past, Pale has just gone a bit too far for that. The main characters (14 year old girls) are always talking to each other like you'd expect characters in a modern therapy textbook to talk, including frequent discussion of boundaries by name. Maybe to him this seems like good communication, but to me they seem like aliens born from Milquetoast Modern Progressivism vats rather than from mothers, who will continue gargling the detritus of their own afterbirth for the rest of their lives in order to train themselves to never have any opinions not exactly 100% conforming to the party line.

I have many other objections, but what it boils down to is that Wildbow is a fantastic author, but chooses to make his story a vehicle for progressive ideology without meaningfully challenging even its smallest detail.

Some examples:

  • They live in a universe where all gods exist and are quite powerful and genuine faith is a strong protection, but there are no Christians to be found anywhere. I get that this can be a tough issue (you are essentially "fictionalizing" God by lumping him in with greek gods etc) but you'd expect at least one Christian character given all the much more fringe types of people being represented.

  • The universe in general seems perfectly fine with sexual progressivism where I would expect it to be extremely strict. For instance, the universe is quite traditional in interpreting a sword as "masculine" and a chalice as "feminine" and will partially define your role in the universe according to which of these you choose, and the corresponding gender, but then has no issue with anything else you'd expect. A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.

  • There are no caricatures of any kind--for instance, no native american shaman practitioners--even though I'd expect that sort of archetype to have a lot of power in this universe.

  • Going back to point #1, no paladins or priests even though they should be quite powerful.

  • No extremely traditional / homophobic / transphobic / etc. Others, except for perhaps some misogyny, though I'd expect the other categories to be much more rooted in tradition

  • Lots of hand-wringing about pedophiles going after 16 year olds, but also celebration of a 14 year old's sexual awakening, as well as countless references to extreme sex acts around a character who is mentally ~10 years old.

  • No in-universe attention, no matter what, given to the possibility that someone could use Practice to change their mind rather than their behavior, even though things like "spirit surgery" are major plot points so it's clearly possible. Zed sacrifices a lot to be a man rather than a woman rather than just snipping that desire in the bud. Given the book's internal logic I don't think that doing so would be a good idea, but I do think the possibility should at least be mentioned even if rejected immediately.

If I'd kept a list while reading through the book I'm sure I'd have dozens to hundreds of better examples, but for now this will have to suffice.

The universe in general seems perfectly fine with sexual progressivism where I would expect it to be extremely strict. For instance, the universe is quite traditional in interpreting a sword as "masculine" and a chalice as "feminine" and will partially define your role in the universe according to which of these you choose, and the corresponding gender, but then has no issue with anything else you'd expect. A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.

I'd say this is consistent with other established themes. Do you expect the group of entities literally named "Others" to care about tradition and fitting in in the way human society and human establishment does? Being -phobic is the bread-and-butter of the old Practitioner families. Don't confuse sticking to tradition and sticking to symbolism.

What I dislike about Pale is that the way Wildbow explicitly minds the audience diminishes 2/3 of the protagonists' personal struggles in my eyes. Verona's pet issue is her detachment and lack of trust between her and adulthood. Lucy's is being a racial minority. Avery's is being a sexual orientation minority. All of those are hammered over the reader's head quite a bit.

But while Verona's issues are repeatedly and blatantly justified, Lucy and Avery mostly have to resort to wondering and imagining if their issues are even real. The worst Avery actually got about her being a lesbian is her Finder family ally (briefly) flipping out on her because she kinda sorta led them to believe they have a chance of arranged marriage. I don't recall Lucy actually encountering an explicit racism moment. I'm quite confident that given Wildbow's current main audience, and perhaps his own shifts in political opinion, he will not choose to write the word "nigger" again even inside the head of the most racist character in the novel.

I do not have to see the word nigger in a novel to like it. But I do wish Wildbow was writing for a wider audience than people who "don't want the story to be about that" (referring to explicit examples of minority struggles and -isms as opposed to vague Institutional -Isms).

I'd say this is consistent with other established themes. Do you expect the group of entities literally named "Others" to care about tradition and fitting in in the way human society and human establishment does? Being -phobic is the bread-and-butter of the old Practitioner families. Don't confuse sticking to tradition and sticking to symbolism.

The Others don't come up with the rules though, it's the spirits (mostly) that do that. And in many ways they seem willing to change--they're adapting OK to new technology--but in matters of morality, they seem utterly set in stone except in whatever ways are most important to "modern audiences". Whoever is coming up with this morality (whether spirits or Others) I think it's silly for them to be totally inflexible on swords being male, but totally flexible on whether a person is male or female. These spirits should be totally racist as well, trying to stick people into well-defined roles based on the type of magic their practitioner ancestors did.

To be clear, I'd be fine with them not being like that if they were not portrayed as so inflexible in pretty much everything else.

But while Verona's issues are repeatedly and blatantly justified, Lucy and Avery mostly have to resort to wondering and imagining if their issues are even real.

I somewhat disagree with this, I think that the intended takeaway is that the issues are definitely real, but so insidious that even their victims are fooled into thinking that maybe they're overreacting. If anything I am a bit annoyed that their issues are so ubiquitous. For Lucy: Paul definitely left the family due to racism, her love interest also stopped trying due to his mom's racism, there was a racist teacher at the magic school, even the primary antagonist (Charles) has done some racist stuff unintentionally; I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. Avery has similarly had plenty of issues, though thankfully her magic stuff is so interesting that those issues get less attention.

I think Wildbow is trying to walk a tightrope because he wants those minority struggles to be a big part of the book, but doesn't want to include anything too cringey or unrealistic, so rather than having a few scenes with deplorable antagonists he litters the entire book with more subtly racist and homophobic characters. I get what he's trying to do but it kind of turns into the worst of both worlds, where you both get tired of all the attention given to these issues, but also don't have any exciting struggles or grave injustices you can watch the characters deal with.

The Others don't come up with the rules though, it's the spirits (mostly) that do that.

That's... pretty much just isn't true. The spirits don't come up with the rules, they observe patterns and do their part in passing them along.

That's... pretty much just isn't true. The spirits don't come up with the rules, they observe patterns and do their part in passing them along.

You're contradicting yourself now. I originally said

A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.

To which you responded

I'd say this is consistent with other established themes. Do you expect the group of entities literally named "Others" to care about tradition and fitting in..?

I'll grant that spirits "pass rules along" if you'll grant that spirits care a lot about tradition, which was my original point anyways.

I'm saying that what humans call tradition is only a fraction of patterns in reality. The existence of deviations from traditions is just as much a pattern. And Others, aside from those who explicitly represent human tradition, represent deviation.

So yes, spirits do care about tradition, but not exclusively like a human ultra-conservative would.

More comments

Whoever is coming up with this morality (whether spirits or Others) I think it's silly for them to be totally inflexible on swords being male, but totally flexible on whether a person is male or female. These spirits should be totally racist as well, trying to stick people into well-defined roles based on the type of magic their practitioner ancestors did.

First, there is absolutely an effect on how Others see you based on who your ancestors were. Second, you're making a mistake of assuming the spirits are 100% on "sword means dick, no arguments" based on the Implementum book, which is written by Practitioner society who love their rigid categories. Having a bias towards "sword is male" does not mean "totally inflexible".

Having a bias towards "sword is male" does not mean "totally inflexible".

I disagree, I think they are totally inflexible towards having that bias. It's not like some famous female warrior or even a god will ever convince the spirits that "sword means female". Similarly I would expect them to always say "penis means male" and "XY chromosomes means male" which would always be a handicap towards any trans practitioner attempting to adopt a female role. Not saying it would be impossible, but it would be impossible to lose that handicap entirely.

If anything I think that strategy would also make for a better story because it would mean more needs to be sacrificed to pursue your convictions.

It's not like some famous female warrior or even a god will ever convince the spirits that "sword means female".

Enough female warriors will. If anything, the fact that it's a bias and not a mandatory requirement even after thousands of years of precedent and symbolism speaks against it being "total". Your "penis means male" example is much more inflexible.

More comments

There's an entire team of kids from a Christian school, as well as I think a Witch Hunter who scolded someone for taking the name of God in vain. I suppose you'd be correct if you meant "no identifiably hardline Christians".

entire team of kids from a Christian school

Exactly, and not one of them is Christian at all, or IIRC even references Christianity in any way a single time.

as well as I think a Witch Hunter who scolded someone for taking the name of God in vain.

IIRC they all explicitly had a weird view of God that was not Christianity, I'm not sure though, that was a while ago. I put in a few minutes and couldn't find the chapter--if you know where it is, I'd love to see it.

Anyways though, it's pretty clear that those are both pretty big stretches, right? One fifth of Canadians are young earth creationists so you should have many more characters like that in your Canadian story than all LGBTQ(4%), polyamorous/in open relationships (4%), and black (3.5%) characters combined, especially since this is set in a rural town.

I mean, it's pretty par for the course at this point, and I get why he's mostly avoiding the question. The bigger issue I have is that everyone in the story is essentially in total agreement about all things that normal people consider political. The single counterexample I can think of is Grumble, a mostly-paralyzed elderly widower recovering from a stroke who is nevertheless victimizing his granddaughter by watching hateful TV. I think probably 5-10x as many words at this point have been devoted to just how hateful his TV watching is as have actually been devoted to him onscreen.

What's funny is, in the loose pantheon of supplemental writing and even a brief mention in one of his interludes, there are actually "paladins" or Christian style priests who hunt down and bind and/or exorcize literal demons in the name of God. It's just never been brought up again or made relevant to his Pactverse stories.

Yeah, there has been some mention of that, but do they exorcize demons in the name of God? My recollection was basically that they have all the trappings of Christianity but mostly believe in Christian virtues and traditions rather than the actual Christian theology. Like, they will gain holy power by remaining celibate, but without any admission or belief that the Christian god actually exists.

I think generally part of the issue is that modern priests do not jive well at all with the setting. Every other type of priest can literally channel divine power, but we expect modern-day normal religious priests to lack similar power? Nah, if it were consistent, normal Christian (and other religions, but there's a Christian church in Kennet) priests would literally have divine power, and more of it than they could use.

The problem with representing monotheistic religions is that they're, well, by default not quite true in a universe where there are gods, plural. Also, you can argue that a God that encompasses everything is so bound by that definition that he might as well not be defined. When everything is super God, nothing is.

That's why we have Architects/Angels latching on the Judeo-Christian aesthetic, but no big G.

Also, normal people don't get magic in Pactverse, that's established. Sometimes normal people go through weird and/or intense shit and walk the line between mundane and Other, but that's it. Not something every small town pastor is going to get. Melissa had to suffer a grievous injury that detached her from mundane life to an extent in order for her repeated attempts at replicating the spellcards to have any effect.

normal people don't get magic in Pactverse, that's established

See that's kind of what I'm complaining about though. Anyone who falls too deeply into a rut of any kind will become Aware. I forget the name but a good example is that Aware who was so skeptical that she had an anti-magic field. People who get too depraved (probably) become vulnerable to imps, people who become too separated from reality become Other, people who get too lost get Lost. Totally separate from the existence of gods, you would expect the same kind of effect with faith--people should be made stronger by sincere religious conviction even if the target god doesn't exist at all.

Not something every small town pastor is going to get.

Well obviously not in this story, but honestly I would expect every small town pastor to get some divine assistance. Just consider how many, many Others there are. There's like one for every person. There seems to be at least one Aware per 100 or so people as well. Separately from that, just given the nature of the universe, I'd honestly expect more pastors to have magic than practitioners.

"Faith" in the Pactverse clashes somewhat with the Biblical definition, at least as laid out in Hebrews 11:1. When you can perform a given ritual, utter the right words, and invoke the might of a higher power it can be difficult to frame that as "belief". One doesn't need to believe when you can know, a problem inherent to the setting and as such one I'm willing to forgive.

The POV of that particular chapter is also one belonging to a literal apostate, so I can accept there being no deference paid to the Supreme Creator, whether he thought there was one or not.

One doesn't need to believe when you can know, a problem inherent to the setting and as such one I'm willing to forgive.

Agreed, but this does make you wonder why gods work at all in-setting. What does belief in a god mean? Everyone in Pact knew that Dionysius existed but I don't think he gained any power from that. Seems like it's something closer to "love and obedience" than it is to "confidence level that this deity is real". If we redefine faith like that then we're back to the issue of "why does nobody love and obey the Christian god?"

I would prefer some kind of in-universe explanation like, obviously he's real, but he hasn't visited in ages and people need to have faith that his reasons are good. This would neatly allow the story to continue without interference from the actual God, but still allow for many different types of belief and genuine religious people, just like real life.

Was it mentioned in Pact/Pale at all that gods need belief? Sounds like they gain power from acts of worship, particularly ones that sacrifice something or give them claim over something (a mark on the body, for example).

Based on the knowledge on Pactverse gods and the divine practices shared in the story, I'm led to believe that the vastness of Abrahamic religions works against their God(s). "I am what I am", what kind of definition is that? Here on this forum, when that kind of definition is applied to the concept of a woman, people laugh it out of the room.

More comments

The relationship Jeremy Meath has with Dionysus, where you don't know exactly how much Relationship Points you've got with your patron and how much would be demanded for the next miracle you ask for (and of course a shrewd god would not give specific promises easily) - that's something closer to belief than to knowledge in my books.

I had the impression that was due more to Dionysus' status as a deity of, in part, madness (introducing a degree of unpredictability) and because his power was vastly diminished due to his now-miniscule base of worshippers. Other god-believer relationships are portrayed somewhat differently, though this is primarily in Pale and are arguably non-central examples. Point taken though.

you are essentially "fictionalizing" God by lumping him in with greek gods etc

I see that a lot in modern fantasy/urban fantasy genre, every faith or religious tradition is true except Christianity. Makes it a bit awkward if you're including any Jewish/Muslim characters, since the idea of the One God is shared in all those traditions, but they get treated more for exoticism points than rigorous theology (Jewish kabbalah for the equivalent of magic-using and so forth).

So everyone from animists to Zoroastrianists can have functional, working divine rituals and miracles but Christianity is only a made-up story. Depending on the particular writer, this can be done reasonably well (if stretching credulity - I'm thinking of a series in which demons and Hell are very real, but the Devil is absent and nobody has any clue if God is real, not real, or what is going on there) to the laugh-out-loud (Bryan Singer's Fuller's, I mixed up my gay Hollywood Bryans, version of "American Gods" and the Easter episode, where we must take Eostre/Ostara as the real, original goddess and the Christians just stole that. Moreover, there are multiple versions of Jesus, but only One Original Version of all the other gods - so it's not "believers create the gods in their own image, so we can have various versions of any god, the god is not pre-existent" except for Christianity).

Why I say that's laugh-out-loud is because it's not the real story, but it's a commonly accepted new myth of our times. Ah, well!

EDIT: I think it's because the writers all accept that the gods don't really exist, so it's easy to use them in their works and treat them as though they do exist, in the terms of their various myths and cultures. Christianity isn't that simple, though, because for Western writers it was recently, and still is in areas, the dominant religion and treated as real. So treating the Christian God as real in your fiction is equivalent to saying "I believe this is real". Which is a problem, if you're non-Christian or an atheist.

To take the Chesterton quote from "Heretics":

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.

I could write about Thor or Sekhmet or Nuwa and treat them seriously within-universe, because I don't believe in them. It would be like inventing my own pantheon and writing about them. But if I write about the Blessed Trinity or Jesus, I'm writing about a living belief. If I share that belief, I'm going to treat God differently than the gods. If I don't share that belief, then writing in tune with how Christians generally express beliefs will leave me open to "but do you believe/support this? don't you realise that it's all homophobic [tick off bingo card of bad things]?" If I don't write in tune (Jesus is the hippy peacenik commie revolutionary who is against The Man but doesn't claim to be any more divine than the rest of us who all have God within us) then I'm still doing something that is going to be perceived as a challenge to orthodoxy and will be treated by some as "yeah, stick it to those bigots!" or celebrated by some as "now this is the kind of Christianity I can accept/I believe in" or criticised by some as "this is all hogwash". This is likely to get me dragged into arguments I'm not intending to have (unless I'm Philip Pullman, writing my Why Yes I Am An Atheist, Take That C.S. Lewis! anti-Narnia novels).

Frankly, it'll be a lot less hassle for me to write about Thor. Nobody is going to get bent out of shape about that, except maybe a few revivalist Norse pagans, and how many of them are sensitivity readers?

Your comment made me think: there's an essay here, somewhere, about how grand scope secondary world fantasy is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It allows one to imagine things that are facially inconsistent with Christianity but elucidate it. I think that it's no accident that Tolkien was a Catholic.

Whereas most fantasy (I except traditional faerie-stories, slightly[*]) stories set in the real world are at best uncomfortable from a Christian perspective, because Christianity itself is a thing in the real world and you have to fit that in somehow. Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.

[*] Obviously many faerie-stories have a pre-Christian origin and skate by on that. But people tried to wrestle with these things in ways that would make moderns very uncomfortable; IIRC there are some stories about Irish saints converting faeries to Christianity...

Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.

You're not thinking of this, are you? It's satire. Read the last chapter if you want to be sure. Pretty hilarious premise though.

Nope, not that one. I was thinking of this one which was posted on /r/rational some years back.

I see that a lot in modern fantasy/urban fantasy genre, every faith or religious tradition is true except Christianity. Makes it a bit awkward if you're including any Jewish/Muslim characters, since the idea of the One God is shared in all those traditions, but they get treated more for exoticism points than rigorous theology (Jewish kabbalah for the equivalent of magic-using and so forth).

Well, if you have a religion that explicitly claims only their God is real, and all other gods are fake or demons, then someone writing an urban fantasy where "gods" are real pretty much has to decide whether or not the Christians (and Muslims and Jews) are right in this universe. I've seen some fiction and RPGs that kind of tried to handwave this, but Christians will inevitably be offended at Jesus being treated as just another source of exorcism points, while pagans will be offended at any implication that their gods aren't real. And the best reaction you can hope for from Muslims is that they don't read it.

someone writing an urban fantasy where "gods" are real pretty much has to decide whether or not the Christians (and Muslims and Jews) are right in this universe

I mean, yeah, this is kind of a central premise of fantasy in general. It's simply set in a world that's not accurate to real life. I don't care about that, I just care that the world follow its own internal rules rather than break them in order to make certain groups even more wrong. In a world where people's belief creates gods, you have to justify why the largest group on earth somehow hasn't created a god. In a world where gods are powerful beings that people believe in, you have to justify why (at the very least) no god has filled in for the (for some reason) nonexistent Christian god in order to gain more influence.

EDIT:

I think the big thing is that if you are trying to set something in the modern world, ideally your magic system explains to an extent why the world exists as it currently does. If Jesus is just another source of exorcism points, why is Christianity by far the biggest religion with a strong tradition of exorcism? Why is Christianity so much bigger in general, with such different beliefs? Presumably if gods were real then religions which believe that multiple gods exist are going to outcompete religions that assert that there's only one god; adherents to the latter are going to be getting smitten left and right.

I don't attribute malice to these authors at all, I think they just have stories that they want to write that aren't 100% internally consistent, which is fine. The issue is when they build these worlds which aren't accurate to reality, then use them to make points about things which are accurate to reality. In a world where all gods are real, Christianity would be vastly different than it is in real life. But take your world where all gods are real, then plop Christianity down in the middle of it unaltered, and of course it will look silly because that belief system wouldn't have grown in that world organically.

In a world where people's belief creates gods, you have to justify why the largest group on earth somehow hasn't created a god.

Well, it's more than that. If you use the popular trope that "gods are powerful in proportion to how many believers they have" then yeah, you would expect a world with Christianity to have made Yahweh into a really powerful god.

Except - you are implying that the Christian God is really just another god among many, and not qualitatively different from Zeus or Astarte or some ancient forgotten Slavic bog-demon, He just happened to go viral at the right time and now He's got really good ratings. Christians (and Muslims) believe in the One True God who is Alpha and Omega. The idea that if Christianity as a religion became fringe, God would become just another wispy little godlet competing with the likes of Quetzalcoatl and Tiw is literal heresy.

Of course the sort of Christian (or Muslim) who reads urban fantasy or plays RPGs could probably handle this in a fictional world. But mainstream fantasy series or games that demote Jesus to Just Another Demigod are often accused of mocking Christianity. (And nowadays I wonder if anyone would dare giving Mohamed a stat block.)

Sure, but the alternative is to deny God's existence, which may be even more heretical. Authors tend to skirt around this question, and that's fine, but if they don't address it then I'd prefer they not address adjacent issues either. If your world is "All gods exist except for the Christian God, but people still believe in him and follow the Bible anyways" then that's fine so long as you mostly ignore that side of things. But if your story has strong themes revolving around homosexuality and homophobia, and all your in-story homophobes are Christians, that feels to me like you're cheating. Essentially you're obliquely asking "Assume your religion and its teachings are false. Are your religion's teachings false? Let's explore that question!"

Even that would be OK if this hypothetical universe's new rules were consistent, but they're not; they seem to go out of their way to also directly contradict Christian beliefs even when it wouldn't be internally consistent. So all I'm asking is that if you decide to cripple your magic system in order to support your ideology, you don't go way further out of your way to also center your book's themes around the part of your magic system you just crippled.

Solomon divided the Other and the Innocent worlds, like, several thousand years before Christianity appeared and spread (mostly among the Innocent).

Iirc, the reasoning was explicitly Doylist. Wildbow mentioned at some point that it seemed likely to turn into giant flaming culture wars and so he decided to just kind of ignore the entire glaring topic.

I figured, and he's done a pretty good job with that aspect of it altogether, but he's still very much fighting against Christian morality without really addressing the source of that morality. As one example, how about marriage? Marriage is literally a vow, generally to love and protect your spouse, but I haven't heard of a single practitioner getting forsworn due to a divorce. So maybe practitioners don't make the same vows? It raises all sorts of questions because you really would expect marriage to be just as if not more significant than a familiar. People should get forsworn for cheating on each other all the time.

As another example, hospitality is a big thing in-story, and to break hospitality is to invite loads of bad karma if not worse. How about responsibility to your family? This should be just as important but the universe seems to care very little for it, not penalizing parents for mistreating their children or children for rebelling against their parents.

So, totally separate from the whole god question, the nature of the universe should be inclined towards very traditional morality but isn't, and my assertion is that this is simply because Wildbow created an internally consistent magic system and then slanted it slightly to be more progressive. There's no way that a magic system that wants people to fit into clearly defined roles would like people being genderfluid or polyamorous.

btw I edited my previous comment just as you added that one, if you want to respond to the edit.

More comments

Are you talking about Wildbow?

No, but I'm not surprised there's more than one example.

Heck. I haven’t read much of Pale because it felt too humanly depressing. The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me. Whichever protagonist has the narcissistic but useless dad, I did not want to deal with that.

That said…I ended up thinking Twig was his best work, too. But I’d be more interested in seeing a post about all the reasons it works rather than the reasons Ward and/or Pale didn’t, if that makes sense. Partly so I can read it avoiding spoilers, partly because I think it will invite more interesting discussion and less bashing.

The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me. Whichever protagonist has the narcissistic but useless dad, I did not want to deal with that.

Interesting. I agree to an extent but then after a certain point I just write those characters off. Verona's dad became less of a character to me and more of an obstacle, so it was easy to mostly ignore all of his terrible behavior. Much worse to me is when the main characters make bad decisions.

But I’d be more interested in seeing a post about all the reasons it works rather than the reasons Ward and/or Pale didn’t

I think the biggest reason is simply that the characters and dialogue got a LOT of attention. Pale seems to have better worldbuilding in many ways, and more interesting ideas, and a more coherent and interesting plot, as well as a more fleshed-out setting, so for those reasons I prefer it to Twig. Twig, though, did have an absolutely fantastic main character, with extremely engaging dialogue, motivations, and character growth throughout the story. I think it was simply the better-written story, it's just that it had less of what I want from a story (compelling ideas competently explored).

A book review of Twig sounds kind of fun and might even be within my capabilities (I might have to reread it, so if I were to work on this it'd be a while before posting). And I agree more or less with

I think it will invite more interesting discussion and less bashing.

though my intention with critiquing his recent works would be to have something constructive, coming from a place of love, and most importantly IMO from a perspective I'm pretty sure he doesn't have in his life (could be totally wrong about that, don't know him personally and it is better to not assume stuff like that) that could be shared with him in a digestible, non-wordpress-comment format.

The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me.

Agree, I think that accounts for approx. 40% of the problems I have with his recent stuff.

Yeah, i'm thinking primarily of types of representation where the protected characteristics are, themselves, the problematic attributes causing the characteristic to be totally absent. Mentally handicapped folks, the obese, and visibly trans women (in non-very special episodes) are the main examples i can think of for this.

There are certainly trans characters in left-coded media. You just have a normal looking woman, have them say “oh btw I’m trans”, and then move on. Very easy way to score representation points without having to deal with questions of passing or other thorny trans issues.

FTM representation is even easier, as they tend to pass quite well in real life.

The rebooted reality tv show, "The Mole," has a trans contestant (MTF) who they don't even mention being trans.

EDIT - the HBO reality tv show "The Climb" also has a trans contestant (FTM). He 100% passes and I didn't know he was trans until he brought it up.

Reality TV definitely gets a pass from these dynamics since there are no writers who can get flak for representation decisions; as a result, you not only see trans people on reality tv, you also see obese and extremely dim people.

EDIT: Additionally, "he's actually trans and we just didn't mention it" is entirely legitimate if you're talking about a real-life person but considered cheap and shallow to do offscreen for a fictional character. See also when JK Rowling claimed that Dumbledore is actually gay.

Got any examples? None spring to mind for me. Though you are right, "trans as informed attribute" would be a (ham handed) way around this.

In the movie Wendell and Wild, which was a semi-recent Henry Sellick (James and the Giant Peach, Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline) animated film, one of the characters is definitely trans, but the movie doesn't even reference it as far as I can remember, but it kind of hints at it, and if you check Wikipedia it definitely claims that "Raul" is a trans boy. The animation is interesting in hindsight - they kind of the made them look like, well, how a trans person kind of looks but with some of the edges sanded off. I guess that's one advantage of animation is that you can make things look however you want.

It's not really "left-coded media", but Alice in Borderland on Netflix has an example of this. One of the main female characters is played by a woman, presents as a woman throughout the whole show, and then near the end of the last season has a "btw I'm actually trans" moment.

End of the first season. My headcanon is she become a woman in fact when she got pulled into Borderland, with the flashbacks showing otherwise being wishful thinking.

For a pretty central example of progressive philosophy on it: Super Lesbian Animal RPG is exactly what you'd expect given the name, and the two trans characters have that matter a little less than their purely-aesthetic 'animal'. I don't think this is popular as a decision, yet, but a number of CRPGs have gone with it (sodiummuffin mentions Baldur's Gate, but there's a wide variety of RPGMaker clones that have taken that approach). Dragon Age: Inquisition kinda Special Episodes it, but more in the sense that everybody with a backstory in that game has a ton of angst thrown in.

This doesn't have to be quite so ham-handed as Super Lesbian Animal. The extreme case is just a character with the trans flag somewhere; this sometimes gets criticism as either purely-informed trait (could just be an ally!), but it's not going to get you cancelled.

I think it's lazy, but I can get why writers sometimes do it. (And it's better than eg. The Broken Earth's attempt.) I think there's more clever things you can do with either environmental storytelling, or by actually exploring and considering what having seen the other gender's norms in close detail, but I can understand if not agree with why those are more controversial.

There are also some times where the theme overlaps with a short Very Special Episode: Night In The Woods is about depression and has villains that are trying to cut out the disliked from their community to sacrifice in hopes of bringing back prosperity, so having a thrown-in comment saying one of the background characters/targets is trans is... well, at least no more preachy than the rest of the story. Damning with faint praise, admittedly.

Alternatively, you can make it relevant to the plot for other reasons. El Goonish Shive is a gender transformation magic comic, so questions like "is this person female" (which means they can summon hammers with magic because animu) or "did this person grow a dick" (and thus was probably exposed to magic somehow) end up having physically verifiable results in a variety of ways completely orthogonal to real-world questions (which... uh, admittedly do also separately get brought up, because it's ultimately a drama piece). You might be able to clock the FTM trans guy before it becomes plot relevant if you're really familiar with some stereotypes, but he gets a short arc that's neither a Very Special Episode for him nor something that could be not-passing for anyone except a magic alien squirrel.

Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a 2016 Baldur's Gate expansion from Beamdog, the publisher for the Baldur's Gate remasters.

It's particularly out of place in the high-magic medieval-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, since not only is the idea of having an inborn gender identity that makes you "truly a woman" all along a very specific recent concept, but it's hard to square it with a setting where a mid-level character (and healing-spells seller) like Mizhera could buy actual transformation magic like a Hat of Disguise, a casting of Polymorph Other, the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity which you can find in the original game, etc. Other highlights include five different ways to say the same thing and having Minsc make a Gamergate reference. This attracted controversy, and some of the remarks by the writer didn't help:

http://archive.is/Lwu6p

If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.

https://archive.is/4HIow#selection-4337.0-4337.268

I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.

I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.

Pure cancer.

Low effort. Please comment more substantively than "I don't like this."

Huh! Guess i underestimated the willingness of authors to go with the solely informed-characteristic "hi i am trans btw" method of representation.

On reflection, yeah, the "spiritually trans" thing is pretty weird for the transmutation-heavy Baldur's Gate universe, which should probably be used to a more transhumanist school of thought: "i decided i wanted to be a dragon so i bought this scroll of permanent polymorph for my life savings. If anyone makes fun i eat them. Wanna see my sweet hoard? Look, don't touch."

In summary: "I identify as an attack helicopter" lands different if the identified can in fact fly and launch hellfire missiles at their detractors.

Bridget from the video game series Guilty Gear is a recent high-profile example.

In earlier entries in the series from the 00s, he was a femboy whose androgyny was played for laughs. For the newest sequel, I surmise that the developers decided that his character was too politically fraught to be left as is, so they threw in a brief scene where he comes out as trans.

Don't know the games but that's butchering their own lore, given that Bridget was named that in homage to Brigitte Lin, an actress who has played breeches roles (e.g. in the Swordsman II movie, and the movie regarded as a sequel to that, The East is Red which I only saw in a poorly-translated, hacked-to-pieces edit but whoo boy - playing a man who transforms himself into a woman in order to attain martial arts skills but who still has 'male' thinking and behaviours, including a female lover, and being totally kickass while she/he is doing so, as well as having the male lead confusedly attracted because he's not sure if she's a boy or a girl):

It was common for women to cross dress as male characters in Chinese movies and operas. And Lin is particularly well known for her androgynous roles, her earliest being Jia Baoyu, the male protagonist of the 1977 film adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber. In Peking Opera Blues (1986), she was a guerrilla revolutionary and in Royal Tramp II (1992), she was the leader of the Heavenly Dragon Sect, both of whom were women characters dressed as men. And in Ashes of Time (1994), she played twin brother/sister duo Yin and Yang. However, she is perhaps most well known for her role as Dongfang Bubai in Swordsman II (1992). Swordsman II marked the peak of her career in terms of box office earnings for which she was listed among the 10 greatest performances in cinema of all time, by Time magazine."

Gotta agree with Time there.

Swordsman II:

Dongfang Bubai had castrated himself in order to master the skills in the Sunflower Manual, and his appearance has become more feminine, even though he is now a formidable martial artist.

Linghu Chong meets Dongfang Bubai by chance without knowing his true identity, mistakes him for a beautiful young woman, and falls in love with "her".

Swordsman III/The East is Red:

At Black Woods Cliff, Gu Changfeng discovers that Dongfang Bubai is still alive in disguise as an elderly woman, and manages to convince him to return to the jianghu.

Dongfang Bubai unleashes his fury and starts a bloodbath in eliminating all those who impersonate him. He discovers that Xue Qianxun has been pretending to be him, and seriously injures her in anger. Consumed by his desire for power, Dongfang Bubai decides to continue his ambitious plan to unite the jianghu under his rule and dominate China.

Gu Changfeng realises that Dongfang Bubai has gone out of control so he leads the Ming imperial navy to fight Dongfang and his Spanish and Japanese allies. In the ensuing naval battle, all the warships are destroyed and Dongfang Bubai emerges victorious after defeating and killing Gu Changfeng. However, Xue Qianxun loses her life in the process. Dongfang Bubai realises his mistake and embraces his dead lover as he retires from the jianghu again.

The interesting thing about Bridget is that under the logic of gender being a social construct I think you could argue he was already trans, and when he adopted a female gender identity in the latest game, that was actually him detransitioning. In the backstory, although he was always male, he had also been raised as a girl pretty much since birth. So his sex was male, but the gender he was assigned at birth was female.

The fact he identified as a man in earlier games meant that he was rejecting the gender he was assigned at birth, making him a transman. By going back on that and identifying as a woman again, he's detransitioning in order to embrace the gender he was assigned at birth. Sure he's biologically male, but if gender is purely a social construct then that shouldn't make a difference, right? He's returning to his original gender identity, so he's detransitioning. Trans people largely didn't seem to see it that way though and accepted him as mtf.

Some people who didn't like the change also pointed out that by adopting a female gender identity, rather than bravely going against the grain he was conforming to the expectations of his parents, who raised him as a girl, and society at large which frequently perceived and gendered him as female due to his name and appearance even when he was identifying as male. If it was supposed to be positive trans representation then I think perhaps it wasn't thought out all that well.

I think the most interesting interpretation is that Bridget has been groomed into being trans, personally. His parents can be considered a stand-in for the kind of hyper-progressive parents that desire a trans child as a progressive trophy. The reasoning given is different, but the actions and effects are the same. Goldlewis then doubles down on this grooming, resulting in what happens in the newest game; he gives in to the conditioning to please the adults around him, who are encouraging it.

Another interesting thing about this all is that gender is evidently a fundamental ontological category in the progressive worldview. In the same sense that the immanentized progressive egregore thinks killing black people is worse than saying the N-word, it also thinks that belonging to a gender is more enduring, significant and definitional than being a human/Gear/intelligent beast/vampire/spiritual entity/ascended demon/robot/AI/shadow clone/hivemind/talking sword/whatever. You can move through several of those transient categories, but Gender is the stable inner Gnostic truth revealed to the soul, the underpinning of the self – as discussed by @IGI-111 and others.

Regarding Testament mentioned downthread:

Arc System Works marketing rep Riku Ozawa has stated that Testament is specifically agender (無性, musei?), neither male nor female, and that the character was previously portrayed as androgynous/bigender (両性, ryōsei?), but that the team chose to change that in the new game.[38][39] Both musei and ryōsei are categories of X-gender, the Japanese equivalent of the word 'non-binary'.

In an interview, Daisuke Ishiwatari reportedly said that "They're androgynous. In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me."[39][40]

Baka creator! Can't have that transhumanist crap in our not-Christian fighting game about posthuman beings. Every character should pick a flag, a hormone stack, and a side that could be conceivably covered by the selection of bathrooms in an American school.

…Androgyny is, within certain diagnostic methods at least, not some queer notion made obsolete by the modern gender theory, but the psychological opposite of agenderism, or perhaps simply orthogonal as far as nomenclature goes.

In psychology, androgyny refers to individuals with strong personality traits associated with both sexes, combining toughness and gentleness, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour, as called for by the situation. Androgynous individuals are more likely to engage in cross-sexual behaviour than those who maintain traditional sex roles. The rise of feminism and the influence of the women’s rights movement made certain aspects of androgynous behaviour more socially attractive than in the past. Androgynous figures occurred frequently in Greek mythology, often embodying a blend of desirable male and female characteristics. The blind seer Tiresias, a figure of great wisdom, was sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite.

Laaame. Who cares about attractive sides and personality traits? Tells us your pronouns and what kind of sterilization you need.

Is transhumanism being downplayed against transgenderism among progressives? That seems to be what you imply here.

I think transhumanism is a progressive (in the classical non-partisan, capabilities-increasing sense) ideology/sensibility, and there can be transhumanist-friendly transgenderism, but as it stands those are incompatible paradigms, with the latter having been absorbed into political leftism that's basically a zero-sum game to redistribute finite and indeed actively diminished resources, in the same camp as degrowth ecologists and race baiters. More to the point, transhumanism has another, also somewhat Gnostic notion of the self, e.g. see me here:

I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.

For now, the question to check is «would you be okay with a pill that magically restores sex-typical gender perception and orientation and other phenotypic aspects, or would you vehemently reject it and indeed try to prohibit it».

I'll hopefully expound on that at some point or we'll talk with @self_made_human and @TheDag and others and figure it out together.

Right after heavily feminizing the presentation of the now nonbinary Testament?

Testament

Testament has always been just eyecandy for women, the stereotypical bishonen protagonist, "feminizing" him is all kinds of sus.

Yep.

They said they wanted to start catering to the west, and they sure do seem to know what the west wants.

Japanese culture was sometimes viewed as a safe haven from western culture war issues, but, increasingly that’s no longer the case.

This sort of reminds me of an article I read on Cracked years ago. It argued that male writers are terrified of writing a female character with meaningful flaws for fear of being accused of sexism or misogyny. So instead, they write female characters who are perfect in every way that matters. The end result is that the male characters are fully fleshed-out rounded characters (whom the audience actually likes and cares about, because they seem like real people), while the female characters are one-dimensional Mary Sues who can do no wrong (whom the audience despises, because perfect people are boring).

Furthermore, I'd say that many people want to avoid the accusations of Mary Sue, and they want to write female characters who are not perfect. So the only way they end up writing these characters is that the female character is bad or flawed, but only because she's been put down by the patriarchy and men her whole life.

Gillian Flynn was attacked for sexism for writing "Gone Girl," where the antagonist is evil in a distinctly feminine manner, and Flynn, an old school feminist, argued that true equality means being able to portray both men and women as complex evil psychopaths.

Gone Girl is amazing, both the book and the movie. It is strange that she hasn't written a novel in ten years.

Except that female writers also write female characters as one-dimensional Mary sues, because yaaas queen slay.

The dynamic I notice in media today is that there's lots of Representation, but none of the minorities being represented are allowed to have negative character traits or be unsympathetic antagonists (for the same reasons as above), so straight white male characters wind up as sinks for all the narrative negativity.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats