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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire). In the Disney case it's probably more complicated given that lots of people like the villains as characters, identify with them (often bundled up in reading Queer coding into many villains) and the whole genre of essentially fanfiction retellings of villains weren't the bad guy books/plays/movies (Grendel, Wicked, Maleficent) from very simple classic stories with black and white morality.

A fundamentalist Christian film is unlikely to portray a lot of casual sex and drug use.

If nothing else, pretending to be unwoke/sinful is bad for the actors' moral fibre.

Fundamentalist Christian works are not always well written, but they don’t generally shy away from portraying villains as or heavily implying them to be LGBT. Not portraying casual sex or drug use is more because it’s foreign to the writers. Probably the better example is the fundamentalist Christian reluctance to portray blasphemy or (certain kinds of)profanity even from villains, because they believe portraying it to be sinful.

Not portraying casual sex or drug use is more because it’s foreign to the writers.

Not sure what you mean here.

Fundamentalist Writers don’t have casual sex, don’t do drugs, so they don’t write about it because it doesn’t occur to them as things people do. Just like how few sitcoms portray characters going to the range for male bonding, even with red coded protagonists, that’s because it doesn’t occur to the writers to portray.

If they read the Bible, they'll be aware of casual sex as things that sinners do.

Yes, they’re aware that some people do those things. But they’re sufficiently far outside their own realm of experience as to be rarely portrayed.

MPAA R ratings are not going to be a winning move for that target demo. Very heavily implied alcohol abuse is not uncommon for certain stock character types.

True, it's interesting how some sins (excessive alcohol use, violence as long as it's not too graphic) are more acceptable to many people than sex or drug use.

To many people, drug use and certain categories of sex are unacceptable at all. Alcohol and violence are unacceptable in excess.

Makes sense.

It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire).

I don’t think that’s difficult to understand. Putting it out there and arguing against it (implicitly by associating with villainy) shows that the perspective can be contested. Better to remove the logical syntax from the zeitgeist so that it can’t even be thought.

Of course, I don’t think it’s particularly effective in this case…

Precisely. If you try to associate an idea with villainy, you run the risk that the audience keeps the idea and rejects the attempted association. If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedWrongness

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RootingForTheEmpire

If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

This has a lot of the same energy as the stereotype (rooted in truth? Everyone says it is, but I have my doubts) about sheltered Catholic schoolgirls discovering sex in the outside world and becoming absolute freaks, presumably due in large part due to their lack of exposure to it in their upbringing. If you can count on having absolute totalitarian control over a child's life, the sheltered approach can work, but you have to be just about perfect, and the lack of preparation makes a single miscue potentially disastrous. In the context of these disapproved ideas, one would need close to totalitarian control over things people say to each other in public discourse which certainly seems to be the goal, though the odds of it actually succeeding seems rather low at this point.

Yes, it has to be near-hegemonic to work. It can, though, I think. All the stories I’ve heard indicate that people really were much more sexually sheltered in the 30s, or even the 60s, compared to now. It wasn’t until the Sexual Revolution spread through society in the late 60s that knowing a lot about sex became the default rather than the exception.

I am reminded of Stormfront from The Boys. In a show that revels in trashy awfulness, and really wishes to impress on you the irredeemable bigotry of her character, its remarkable which areas the creators refuse to go. When we have the flashback to her horrific murder of an innocent black man, they can't even muster the bravery to have the N word (or anything similar) leave her mouth. Instead you get childlike utterances like "you black piece of shit" and whatnot. As if her lines were written by a teenager that really really wants an uber-racist villainess, but is mindful to not cross the line and get scolded by his teachers.

I suddenly realized that this show - despite all its outward appearances - does not have any balls.

Well, murder may be a little excessive, but profane language? Never in this house shall such utterance cross our lips! 🤣

I'm sure Amazon wouldn't let them use the N-word or anything similar.

My default assumption, but I can also see current-day writers avoiding it because "I feel icky just even writing the word". Part and parcel of modern writing being unble to write anything outside of its own perspective, and coming up with ridiculous (yet strangely gimped) caricatures when it attempts to.

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